To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and biggest stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3pm PDT, subscribe here.
Fri-Yay! If you have some free time today, grab your Disrupt tickets: early bird savings end in 7 days!
Also, it seems kind of silly to start a fight against plant-based milks, but this announcement from new CEO Aubrey Plaza (yes, that Aubrey Plaza) in Wood Milk is delightfully strange and confusing. It’s a big fool to wait for the end of the week.
TechCrunch Top 3
- The ABC’s of AI: Kyle reports on how, with DeepFloyd, artificial intelligence finally learns to draw text on images. He writes: “Trained on a dataset of over a billion images and text, DeepFloyd IF, which requires a GPU with at least 16GB of RAM to run, can create an image from a prompt like ‘a bear’ stuffed animal with a T-shirt that says Deep Floyd’, optionally in a variety of styles”.
- it will cost you a quarter: Everyone was very interested in the 20 new games that Apple introduced to Apple Arcade. Ivan has more.
- Less failures: lauren He spoke with the CTO and CPO of Warner Bros. Discovery to find out how they made Max less buggy. She also writes about how her the transmission business will be profitable in 2023.
Startups and VCs
Is the grass greener on the other side? We’re not sure, but the sky is certainly bluer. It’s been over a year since Elon Musk announced his offer to buy Twitter, and those who opposed the sale tried to set up shop on platforms like Mastodon, Substack Notes, T2… but none of these Twitter alternatives really caught on. lightning in a bottle as Blue Sky. amanda and alyssa break down the highlights to everything you need to know about blue sky.
maria anna reports that Peter Ackerson has left his role as general partner at fintech-focused venture firm Fin Capital and started a new company, Audere Capitalwith the rather vague thesis of “championing American innovation through investment in early-stage technology.”
And we have a few more to get you started on the weekend:
Negative rounds are a ‘ticket to try again,’ says founder who went up 3 in a row
Image Credits: fake images
Just as a high tide lifts all boats, a sustained drought is a humbling exercise for yachtsmen and kayakers alike.
According to Carta, “the number of negative rounds almost quadrupled in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year,” writes Rebecca Szkutak.
With falling valuations, founders who accept downside rounds no longer have the stain of failure, said Russ Wilcox, a partner at Pillar VC.
“When you set a valuation of $700 million, it sounds like you’re winning in a way and you’re not diluting yourself, but really, you just raised the bar pretty high,” he said.
Three more from the TC+ team:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps start-up founders and teams get ahead of the rest. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” to get 15% off an annual subscription!
big tech inc
carly received an interesting call this week from an anonymous security researcher who found a treasure trove of data exposed online which belonged to London-based outsourcing giant Capita. We’re talking about 3,000+ files including software files, server images, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and text files. We’re going to leave the good stuff for you to read, but we’ll instruct you to check how long those files were supposedly exposed.”On the line.”
If you like the gains, here are some:
And now here are four more:
—————————————————-
Source link