Hello and welcome to Week in Review (WiR). TechCrunch’s newsletter covering notable happenings in technology.
This week, investment firm KKR announced it would acquire VMware’s end-user computing business from Broadcom for $4 billion. As Ron explains, that business included VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon. Here are his two remote desktop apps that were part of VMware’s family of products.
French AI startup Mistral also announced a new model to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 and its own chatbot, cheekily named Le Chat. These releases coincided with a Microsoft partnership to bring his Mistral model to Microsoft’s Azure customers, and a small investment in Mistral from Microsoft ($16 million).
Many other things happened. In this edition of His WiR, we’ll summarize everything, but before we do that, let us remind you to sign up to receive her WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
news
Apple car canceled: Apple has halted a long-running, secretive effort to develop an autonomous electric car. The company likely cut hundreds of employees from its team and all work on the project stopped. This joins a list of other projects that Apple has canceled at various stages, including AirPower and TV (not to be confused with Apple TV).
Bumble stumbles: Bumble’s fourth-quarter results fell short of Wall Street expectations, with a net loss of $32 million and revenue of $273.6 million. To right the ship, CEO Lydiaan Jones laid off 30% of Bumble’s workforce, or about 350 employees, and Bumble embarked on an overhaul of the app aimed at restoring growth. Then he announced.
Google’s AI goes crazy: Google apologized this week for an embarrassing AI failure. The image generation model injects diversity into photography with a farcical disregard for historical context. While the underlying problem is completely understandable, Google is accusing the model of being “over-sensitive.”
Looks bad: Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, is taking a leave of absence. Instead, he got into an argument with a Tumblr user this week over content moderation decisions that led to accusations of transphobia, Amanda reports.
Founder was evicted: Byju’s investor group last Friday voted to remove Byju Raveendran, the Edtech Group’s founder and chief executive officer, and separately decided to remove the company’s management from the company’s management to stop the recently initiated rights issue. filed a suppression and management lawsuit against
funding
GenAI eBook: Inkitt, a self-publishing platform that uses AI to develop bestsellers, has raised $37 million. The startup’s app allows users to self-publish their stories, use AI and data science to select and refine the ones they find most compelling, and then distribute and sell them. Masu.
Keep it old school: Lapse raised $30 million for a smartphone app that requires you to wait for your photos to be “developed.” The app does not give you the opportunity to edit or retake your photos before sharing them with your selected group of friends if you choose.
analysis
Techstars calculation: Mary Ann interviews Maëlle Gavet, CEO of startup accelerator program Techstars, following operational changes that drew harsh criticism.
podcast
upon capitalthe crew talked about startup news from Microsoft, Mistral AI, Thrasio, and Glean, as well as what was happening at COTU Ventures and Zacua Ventures.
meanwhile, found caught the spotlight Ariel Kay, founder of Parachute, a direct selling bedding and home products company.
And for Chain reactionTC pulled from its archives to air a previous conversation with Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden, a “community-focused” NFT marketplace.
bonus round
Big price reduction for Mirai: Toyota is offering a $40,000 discount on the 2023 Toyota Mirai Limited, a fuel cell vehicle with a retail price of $66,000, plus $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years. As Tim writes, the problem is he only has one. The key is to find the hydrogen that powers it.
