August 2023

Speak, an English language learning platform backed by OpenAI’s startup investment fund, the OpenAI Startup Fund, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series B-2 funding round led by angel investor Lachy Groom. The co-founders of Dropbox, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, also participated in Speak’s tranche, which brings the startup’s total raised […]

The Martian Lawyers Club (MLC) wants to take game personalization to the next level with the help of generative AI. While there are plenty of companies that focus on using AI to generate game assets, MLC is taking a decidedly different approach by focusing less on content and more on the systems that form the […]

One month after China announced its provisional measures to oversee generative artificial intelligence, the country has granted approval to the first batch of large language model-empowered services for public use. Eight generative AI applications have registered with China’s cyberspace authority, including Baidu’s Ernie Bot, ByteDance’s Doubao, Sogou founder’s Baichuan and chatbots built on the lab […]

Amazon‘s march on the Indian market is taking to the rails and the mail. The e-commerce giant today announced new deals with India Post and Indian Railways to boost delivery for small businesses. At its SMB event Amazon Sambhav in New Delhi on Thursday, Amazon also unveiled new efforts to target D2C brands, and a […]

Storied venture firm Y Combinator has terminated its association with Medobed, an Indian startup that promises medicine delivery, in 10 minutes after discovering “irregularities” at the firm, several people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. A YC partner has also warned many investors in recent days about its discovery of “irregularities” at the firm, and […]

As someone who travels a lot and writes about tech for a living, I’m perpetually on the look out for things that can ease electronic burden. Anker’s been a go-to for the past several years, for clever, quality accessories on the (relative) cheap. The firm launched a handful of portable accessories this week at IFA […]

Open banking — where traditional banks open their data up with APIs to build new financial services for their customers — has the potential to be one of the payment world’s big disruptors: get it to work right, and it could supplant giant networks (and network fees) like Visa’s when it comes to taking and […]

Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, is now rolling out a feature for paid users to let them hide their likes. This comes after rival social networks Threads and Bluesky rolled out the ability for users to see their own likes in the past few weeks. Paid users on X now have a setting under profile […]

Garena is relaunching Free Fire in India, a year and a half after the popular mobile title was banned in the South Asian market over national security concerns. The firm, owned by South Asian giant Sea, said it has partnered with Yotta, controlled by local giant Hiranandani, for cloud and storage for local users’ data […]