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UNESCO calls water pollution one of the main challenges facing societies, with 2 million tonnes of sewage entering the world’s water each day. Oxyle wants to help solve the crisis with a new wastewater treatment that removes micropollutants. The Zurich-based startup announced today $3 million in pre-seed funding that it will use to bring its tech to market. The round was led by Wingman Ventures with participation from SOSV, Better Ventures and another.vc.

The new capital brings Oxyle’s total raised so far to $7.4 million since it was founded in 2020. The startup’s customers include companies in the pesticide, chemical, textile pigments, electronics and pharmaceutical sectors that are regulated by strict discharge limits.

Oxyle’s wastewater treatment was developed five years ago by co-founder and CEO Dr. Fajer Mushtaq during her doctoral research at ETH Zurich. While earning her masters, Dr. Mushtaq worked with synthetic chemicals to develop new nanomaterials for biomedical applications. That resulted in wastewater containing toxic chemicals that needed special handling and disposal methods. Since there wasn’t an effective way to remove the chemicals, the wastewater had to be incinerated.

“For me, this way of handling water was not only costly, unsafe and very unsustainable, but it also completely got rid of one of our most precious resources,” Dr. Mushtaq said. “The more I researched this topic, the more I learnt about the immense scale at which incineration was practiced by small and large international companies.”

She decided to focus her doctoral research on developing novel catalysts to remove micropollutants. Dr. Mushtaq then worked with co-founder and CTO Dr. Silvan Staufert to integrate Oxyle’s water treatment solution into a scalable technology platform. Since then, Oxyle has completed paid pilots with industrial and municipal customers and increased its team to 17 people.

Oxyle’s wastewater treatment removes micropollutants including PFAS (chemicals found in products like cleaning solutions, water-resistant fabrics and nonstick cookware), pharmaceuticals, hormones and pesticides. It involves a nanoporous catalyst (a material with high surface area that takes energy) developed by Dr. Mushtaq. When the nanoporous catalyst is activated by water movements like bubbling or vibrations, it creates a chemical reaction. The chemical reaction generates oxidative radicals that break down organic pollutants into carbon, fluorides and other harmless minerals.

Oxyle uses modular reactors to deploy its tech. For companies that need to comply with discharge regulations, Oxyle also offers an analytics platform for real-time monitoring of micropollutants connected through its reactors.

The startup is continuing to perform on-site paid pilots with customers to get feedback on its technology. It has worked on projects with agrochemical companies whose production processes result in high levels of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides. That wastewater is usually sent for incineration, but Dr. Mushtaq said they were able to remove more than 95% of compounds by using Oxyle’s tech. The startup has also done environmental remediation projects with industrial customers to bring pollutants, including PFAS, in groundwater down to below detection limit.

Other wastewater solutions include activated carbon technology (to absorb pollutants) and membrane filtration (to filter out pollutants) technology, which are in wide use around the world to treat wastewater. But Dr. Mushtaq said that pollutants still remain on the used activated carbon or in concentrated water left over from the filtration process. These technologies also result in high operating costs, since the activated carbon or membranes need to be replaced.

Oxyle’s advantage is that it degrades micropollutants without resulting in secondary waste. Its nanoporous catalyst lasts for a long time, and is fully recyclable, Dr. Mushtaq added. But Oxyle sees filtration technologies as partners instead of competitors, since the highly concentrated wastewater they leave behind can be treated using Oxyle’s methods.

The startup is expanding its tech platform to cover more use cases, including flow-through systems (or artificial water channels), ultra-compact systems like those used in labs, large scale use cases like municipal wastewater and low-cost solutions for developing economies. Oxyle is also working with companies and R&D institutes to improve the speed and cost effectiveness of its pollutant analytics system.

In a statement, Wingman Ventures founding partner Alex Stöckl said, “Our freshwater resources are depleting at alarming rates and toxic micropollutants in water lead to severe damages in our health and environment. New regulations will demand companies to act. But additionally, we need to use sustainable technology to protect our precious water resources for us, and our future generations. We are proud to support Oxyle on their journey to address our global water problem in order to give everyone access to clean water.”

Oxyle’s tech uses water movement to remove pollutants by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Toxic and hateful comments on YouTube have been a constant headache for the company, creators and users. The company has previously attempted to curtail this by introducing features such as showing an alert to individuals at the time of posting so that they could be more considerate. Now, the streaming service is introducing a new feature that will more aggressively nudge such individuals of their abusive comments and take broader actions.

YouTube says it will send a notification to people whose abusive comments have been removed for violating the platform’s rules. If despite receiving the notification a user continues to post abusive comments, the service will ban them from posting any more comments for 24 hours. The company said it tested the feature before the rollout today and found that notifications and timeouts proved materially successful.

At the moment, the hateful comment detection is available only for English-language comments, but the streaming service aims to include more languages in the future. Notably, the pre-posting warning is available for English and Spanish.

“Our goal is to both protect creators from users trying to negatively impact the community via comments, as well as offer more transparency to users who may have had comments removed to policy violations and hopefully help them understand our Community Guidelines,” the company said.

If a user thinks that their comment has been wrongfully removed, they can share their feedback. The company, however, didn’t say if it will restore the comments after looking at the feedback.

Additionally, in a forum post, YouTube said that it has been working on improving its AI-powered detection systems. It has removed 1.1 billion “spammy” comments in the first half of 2022, the company claimed. YouTube has also enhanced its system to better detect and remove bots in live chat videos, it said.

YouTube and other social networks have been able to reduce spam and abusive content in part by relying on automated detection. However, abusers often use different slang or misspell words to trick the system. What’s more, it’s harder to catch people posting hateful comments in non-English languages.

The streaming company has tested a wide-range of tools in recent quarters to reduce hateful comments on the platform. These tests included hiding comments by default and showing a user’s comment history on their profile cards.

Last month, Youtube rolled out a feature that let creators hide a particular user from comments. This control applies to the whole channel, so even if the user posts hateful comments on another video, it won’t show up.

Platforms globally are grappling with the issue of curtailing the spread of hateful comments.

Instagram was a breeding ground for them when England footballers Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, and Jadon Sancho were harassed for missing penalty kicks in last year’s Euro finals. A new report from GLAAD and Media Matters noted that Anti-LGBTQ slurs have skyrocketed after Elon Musk took over Twitter. While all these platforms have rolled out tools to mute or hide comments and restrict comments to certain folks, the amount of hateful and abusive comments remain a massive scale problem.

YouTube will send a notification to users if their comment is abusive by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Arcimoto, the maker of the three-wheeled electric Fun Utility Vehicles (FUVs), is teaming up with Faction to develop EVs that can be delivered to a customer’s hotel through a combination of low-level autonomy and tele-assist technology. The tie-up is part of an upcoming pilot in Las Vegas with GoCar Tours that will allow tourists to go sightseeing with Faction-powered FUVs.

Here’s how it’ll work: Arcimoto’s FUVs will be kitted out with Faction’s sensor suite of cameras and radar and its Level 2+ advanced driver assistance system, which handles tasks like lane assist and collision avoidance. The vehicles will also have a tablet that features GoCar’s GPS-guided tour of the Vegas strip (GoCar wants to eventually expand this tour to include Red Rock Canyon and the Hoover Dam). The vehicles will go from GoCar’s depot in the Arts District to various hotels along the strip — a straight, five-mile stretch of road with a 30 mile-per-hour speed limit. Tourists will then collect the FUVs and drive them along the tour route at their own pace before dropping themselves and the vehicles back at their hotels, whereupon the FUVs will “drive themselves” back to the GoCar depot.

I use quotations around “drive themselves” for a reason. Faction’s system can drive itself from A to B on a predetermined route and knows to stop itself if it encounters an anomaly or a task it’s not able to complete, like an object en route or an unprotected lefthand turn. But for judgement calls, it relies on the teleoperator. The teleoperator will remotely adjust the trajectory line that the vehicle is following to go around an object or into a parking lot and give the order to execute.

Arcimoto’s partnership with Faction and GoCar will originally involve about 20 vehicles starting in mid-2023, but the companies hope to expand the offering to an additional 290 vehicles across Vegas and other cities where GoCar operates, including San Francisco, San Diego and Barcelona.

Faction is a company that sees Level 5 autonomy as a research project that’s at least a decade out from actually commercializing, and teleoperation as a necessary component to scaling autonomous fleets today. The startup is building its business by focusing on doing “a right-sized tech stack with right-sized vehicles,” meaning Faction relies on a range of cameras, including a thermal camera, and radar to reach basic levels of autonomy, rather than fitting out a vehicle with expensive lidar and the latest compute systems.

“Right now our current vehicle systems are under $35,000,” Ain McKendrick, Faction’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch. “We take about a $17,000 Arcimoto vehicle platform and we put on about $12,000 to $13,000 worth of tech. We’ve announced our partnership with Nvidia, but I don’t want their latest and greatest liquid-cooled Omniverse thing that’s going to take a trunk and a minivan to run. I want two generations back in their automotive-grade package that we can scale with.”

McKendrick said the benefit of being a “second wave autonomy company” is that Faction isn’t trying to solve for all of the edge cases just now. As it relates to its partnership with Arcimoto and GoCar, Faction is just trying to solve for replacing the human that would otherwise deliver those vehicles to customers’ hotels.

“Our goal is to be profitable at the $2 per mile price point out the gate, not to have the promise that it’ll be cost-reduced 10 years from now,” said McKendrick.

Aside from the gimmicky aspect of having a tour car drive itself to a customer’s hotel, GoCar is here for the potential cost-savings to its business.

“We’ve thought about the self-serve model where people can come and help themselves to a vehicle and drive off, and we used to have multiple locations, but the economies of having these multiple locations is challenging because you don’t know where the customer is going to be,” Nathan Withrington, GoCar founder, told TechCrunch. “We might have 10 cars available at one location and the other has a waitlist of 30 people. Then moving cars across town and everything is a nightmare.”

If customers can just summon a vehicle to them, where GoCar stores them becomes a lot less important. The company will get visibility from its cars just being on the road, and it’ll be easier to clean and prep them when they’re all accounted for.

GoCar has already been working with Arcimoto to offer FUVs to tourists. Withrington says FUVs are the first type of EV the company has put in its fleet that can actually handle the range it needs, can cross bridges and is highway legal. Plus, tourists love driving them.

For Arcimoto, the partnership is a chance to expand its reach as a tourist offering for vehicles, while also building on its current partnership with Faction. The two began working together last year to build the D1, a semi-autonomous delivery vehicle based on the FUV, and have been running pilots in the Bay Area since July, according to McKendrick.

Vegas visitors can take semi-autonomous EVs for a tour starting in 2023 by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

A new report from GLAAD and Media Matters shows how anti-LGBTQ hate has increased on Twitter since Elon Musk acquired the company. This data coincides with controversial content moderation decisions Musk has taken as the head of Twitter, like disbanding its Trust and Safety Council and reinstating accounts like James Lindsay, Jordan Peterson and the Babylon Bee, which were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules on hateful content.

The researchers looked at nine popular right-wing accounts to chart their use of the anti-LGBTQ slur “groomer.” Overall, these accounts saw a 1,200% uptick in tweets or retweets that used the slur, an increase of 3,600 instances to 48,000. In July, before Musk had taken ownership of the social media platform, the term “groomer” was considered a violation of Twitter’s hateful conduct policy when used in the context of discussion of gender identity.

In more traditional use, “groomer” refers to adults who seek to form connections with minors in order to sexually abuse them; but among certain right-wing influencers, the term is used as a slur to make unfounded, hateful accusations against LGBTQ people.

This rhetoric escalated as Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in March, which bans kindergarten through third grade teachers from teaching about gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as teachers in all grades from addressing topics that might not be “age-appropriate.” Critics have pointed out that the vague language of this bill could be interpreted very broadly, sparking concern and confusion among Florida school districts. As the law went into affect in July, some teachers said that their school districts barred them from wearing a rainbow flag pin or having a photo on their desk of their family if they were in a same-sex relationship. Now, House Republicans have introduced a bill similar to “Don’t Say Gay” on a national level, called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.”

According to an August report from the Human Rights Campaign, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric about “grooming” increased by 400% on social media following the passage of “Don’t Say Gay.”

Image Credits: Media Matters (opens in a new window)

This online rhetoric has real-world impact, as anti-LGBTQ violence is on the rise in the U.S.

In the days after Musk’s Twitter acquisition, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO met with representatives from a number of civil rights groups to talk about the future of the platform. According tostatementsfrom leaders whoattended the meeting, Musk said he would not reinstate previously banned Twitter users until there is a transparent process for doing so. Musk also committed to including representatives from groups that suffer from hate-fueled violence in his proposed content moderation council.

But over a month later, Musk’s process for reinstating banned accounts remains as opaque as ever. He appears to be making content moderation decisions by running impromptu, day-long Twitter polls, which he used to justify reinstating former President Donald Trump’s account. Another poll inspired Musk to offer “amnesty” to suspended account holders, so long as they have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”

This proposed content moderation council, which would include representatives from marginalized groups, has not yet materialized.

Musk himself has engaged in anti-LGBTQ dialogue on Twitter. Just this weekend, he tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” somehow managing to mock both trans people and one of the nation’s most well-known public health officials in just five words. Before Musk’s ownership, Twitter enforced a policy to mitigate the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, but as of November 23, Twitter is no longer enforcing that policy. Throughout 2020, he promoted vaccine skepticism and misinformation about COVID-19, while also targeting LGBTQ people with declarations like “pronouns suck.”

Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly quote tweeted Musk’s “Prosecute/Fauci” tweet, writing, “Elon, please don’t mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at-risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community.”

Musk replied, “I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.”

Musk’s tweets have also inspired direct harm to Twitter’s former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth. Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, stuck it out at Twitter for a few weeks after Musk’s takeover before ultimately stepping down.

As Musk works with former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and former Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi to post a series of so-far-underwhelming exposes called “The Twitter Files,” he has gone digging into Roth’s academic research — his doctoral dissertation, “Gay Data,” examined the role of dating app Grindr in gay culture. Musk posted out-of-context snippets from the paper in an attempt to smear Roth with unfounded claims of supporting child sexualization, exemplifying the same anti-LGBTQ “groomer” rhetoric that has proliferated under his watch.

On Monday night, CNN reported that Roth was forced to flee his home due to increasing physical threats.

Anti-LGBTQ slur takes off on Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Security researchers say they have evidence that threat actors affiliated with the Cuba ransomware gang used malicious hardware drivers certified by Microsoft during a recent attempted ransomware attack.

Drivers — the software that allows operating systems and apps to access and communicate with hardware devices — require highly privileged access to the operating system and its data, which is why Windows requires drivers to bear an approved cryptographic signature before it will allow the driver to load.

These drivers have long been abused by cybercriminals, often taking a “bring your own vulnerable driver” approach, in which hackers exploit vulnerabilities found within an existing Windows driver from a legitimate software publisher. Researchers at Sophos say they have observed hackers making a concerted effort to progressively move toward using more widely trusted digital certificates.

While investigating suspicious activity on a customer network, Sophos discovered evidence that the Russia-linked Cuba ransomware gang are making efforts to move up the trust chain. During their investigation, Sophos found that the gang’s oldest malicious drivers dating back to July were signed by certificates from Chinese companies, then began signing their malicious driver with a leaked, since-revoked Nvidia certificate found in the data dumped by the Lapsus$ ransomware gang when it hacked the chipmaker in March.

The attackers have now managed to obtain “signage” from Microsoft’s official Windows Hardware Developer Program, which means the malware is inherently trusted by any Windows system.

“Threat actors are moving up the trust pyramid, attempting to use increasingly more well-trusted cryptographic keys to digitally sign their drivers,” wrote Sophos researchers Andreas Klopsch and Andrew Brandt in a blog post. “Signatures from a large, trustworthy software publisher make it more likely the driver will load into Windows without hindrance, improving the chances that Cuba ransomware attackers can terminate the security processes protecting their targets’ computers.”

Sophos found that the Cuba gang planted the malicious signed driver onto a targeted system using a variant of the so-called BurntCigar loader, a known piece of malware affiliated with the ransomware group that was first observed by Mandiant. The two are used in tandem in an attempt to disable endpoint detection security tools on the targeted machines.

If successful — which, in this case, they were not — the attackers could deploy the ransomware on the compromised systems.

Sophos, along with researchers from Mandiant and SentinelOne, informed Microsoft in October that drivers certified by legitimate certificates were used maliciously in post-exploitation activity. Microsoft’s own investigation revealed that several developer accounts for the Microsoft Partner Center were engaged in submitting malicious drivers to obtain a Microsoft signature.

“Ongoing Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center analysis indicates the signed malicious drivers were likely used to facilitate post-exploitation intrusion activity such as the deployment of ransomware,” Microsoft said in an advisory published as part of its monthly scheduled release of security patches, known as Patch Tuesday. Microsoft said it has released Windows security updates revoking the certificate for affected files and has suspended the partners’ seller accounts.

Earlier this month, a U.S. government advisory revealed that the Cuba ransomware gang has brought in an additional $60 million from attacks against 100 organizations globally. The advisory warned that the ransomware group, which has been active since 2019, continues to target U.S. entities in critical infrastructure, including financial services, government facilities, healthcare and public health, and critical manufacturing and information technology.

Ransomware gang caught using Microsoft-approved drivers to hack targets by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Honda is pulling away from a design practice that’s (literally) shaped auto making since the ’30s.

The $43 billion company still depends on life-size clay models to evaluate its designs, a tried and true method pioneered by GM designer Harley Earl. But Honda is gradually relying less on the practice, ever since the Coronavirus tore across the globe and resulting lockdowns divided its teams in Los Angeles, Ohio and Japan. The way Honda tells it, those early 2020 travel rules “threatened” its designers’ ability to work with engineers on the ’24 Prologue, creating a window for a deeper dive into virtual reality.

By July 2020, Honda had opened two studios dedicated to VR — one in Torrance, California and another in Tokyo — so its teams could provide feedback on iterations of interiors and exteriors, sans air travel. Around two and a half years later, the automaker said designs that it evaluated via VR are now rolling off assembly lines.

“You can mature a design in a much shorter time frame” in VR, the company said last week when it invited press into its SoCal site. Roughly half the size of an NBA court, the studio comfortably fit several reporters and more than a dozen Honda staffers, many in branded button-ups.

Around the space I saw dozens of Varjo headsets, monitors mounted on box trusses and three demo stations for peering into or “sitting” in virtual cars, like the ’23 Pilot and ’24 Prologue EV. One station was entirely virtual, and two others featured real-life steering wheels and gas pedals and doors, in a buck setup that looked to me like this Hyundai press image from 2019. Plenty of other automakers, including Ford and Bugatti, have also turned to VR to visualize their work.

Honda’s gear was fun to try out, and thankfully it didn’t leave me dizzy enough to delay my trek home. Rather than focus on my proclivity for motion sickness, I wanted to understand whether VR-aided design had any impact on the final results. How did it influence the Pilot? Can car-buyers expect anything new, now that some of Honda’s teams spend more time in virtual rooms?

Yet as far as I can tell, Honda hasn’t offered a precise explanation of what, if anything, is different about cars refined in VR. Instead, the automaker talked up efficiency. In a statement, it said “one of the many tests performed included color evaluation in a VR environment, which is valuable for the color, materials, and finishes team to visualize all trims holistically, enabling instant feedback between the design studios in LA and Japan.” Uh, nice!

During Honda’s demos, staffers explained how VR saved them time on model development, letting them rapidly change designs so they could be reviewed later that same day. At least for now, it seems the impact of VR on the design of Honda cars will be invisible to shoppers. Virtual or not, Hondas will be Hondas.

Honda also did not share exactly how many clay models it develops before mass producing a car or SUV. During the event, one staffer told TechCrunch that the firm has “a few touch points” where it checks designs via physical models, “and we’re removing them one by one,” he explained.

The same staffer added that over time the firm is “building up the trust, and decision-makers being able to say, ‘yes, it’s good’” without checking a physical model. I wish I could remember who said this, but when you’ve had a headset strapped to your face (pictured above), it’s hard to keep track of who’s saying what.

As I struggled to balance the virtual and physical worlds, Honda made its case that VR was actually making things speedier and easier. Yet, the automaker wouldn’t say if it would pass the time saved by its designers on to shoppers in the form of lower prices. Honda was also quick to emphasize that it would not “pursue a purely digital approach,” as Bugatti said it has done. Honda’s VR head Mathieu Geslin credited physical models for ensuring it didn’t “lose emotion and the human touch” of its cars.

Honda designers apparently prefer a hybrid approach. After I stripped off a headset and returned to the room, I asked if anyone at the company struggled to adapt to VR. A staffer told me some designers, especially in interiors, “love touching things. They like feeling things, so it’s a bit of a departure for them,” they explained, adding that virtual evaluations are “hard to accept sometimes.”

It’s possible that Honda’s shift toward VR is also making its design team more sustainable, by eliminating some executive air travel as well as iterations of models that would ultimately wind up in a landfill. Still, VR is unlikely to seriously move the needle, emissions-wise, given the enormity of mass production and the staying power of combustion engines. Fully electrifying cars would go way further in reducing emissions, but Honda’s deadline for doing so is still years away.

Honda says VR is changing how it designs cars. You might not notice. by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

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Why, hello there, Crunchianistas!

Today, Haje is waltzing around the house, candle in hand, celebrating Saint Lucia. Honestly, not because he’s that excited about the traditional Scandinavian celebration or the excitement about candlelight and saffron buns, but because he’s visiting his parents and there’s a power cut. Which means all manner of excitement in the cold, frozen European, –7°C December. Christine, meanwhile, is chillin’ like a villain in 80-degree heat. Luckily, that’s in Fahrenheit, or we’d be looking at pretty severe discomfort.

Okay, that’s enough about the weather outside. Let’s take a look at which way the wind is blowing elsewhere, such as in the world of tech. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Trading suits for stripes: After much fodder all over the place of why Sam Bankman-Fried was not behind bars sooner for his involvement in the collapse of FTX, Darrell reports that SBF was arrested in the Bahamas amid fraud charges brought by several U.S. government entities. We’re sure this is just the beginning.
Don’t let them get away: If it’s not easy, customers are going to move on. That’s why TheyDo wants companies to own their customers’ journeys and helps large companies get organized with the customer in mind, Mike reports.
Blue and gray and gold, oh my!: You’ve probably noticed that Twitter has gotten more colorful lately. That’s on purpose. We can’t keep up with it either, so thankfully we have Ivan to break down what all those check marks and badges mean. More check mark news in the Big Tech section.

Startups and VC

After being bootstrapped for seven years, Ngrok today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Coatue. Shreve tells Kyle that with the fresh capital, Ngrok will grow operations and “make continued investments” to improve its core product offering.

The trillion-dollar construction industry isn’t known for its efficiency, accused of failing to move with the times and ignoring digitization in favor of legacy tools, Paul reports. There is plenty of evidence that things are changing, with countless startups raising large sums of cash to help the construction industry modernize. It’s against that backdrop that German VC firm Foundamental today unveiled its new fund, targeting $85 million at early-stage construction tech startups globally and building on the early success it has seen from its inaugural $65 million fund, which closed back in 2019.

And we have five more for you:

Push button for preloved: Beni is creating an “easy button” for secondhand shopping, writes Christine.
There’s no accounting for AI: Kyle reports that Vic.ai raises $52 million, showing that automating accounting processes can be profitable.
Swooping in with your medicines: Swoop Aero’s drones hit a million items delivered as the company raises for expansion, reports Devin.
It’s part car, part party, part website: Rebecca reports that an ex–Rocket Lab engineer raised $21 million for Partly to make buying car parts easier.
This drink makes you feel things: Poppi raises a can to fresh capital to support its functional beverage growth, Christine reports.

3 methods for valuing pre-revenue novel AI startups

The Berkus method, scorecard valuation and venture capital are the most-commonly used frameworks for costing pre-revenue startups, but when it comes to AI, are traditional yardsticks still useful?

“AI can scale much faster than other technologies, so what works at the beta or minimum viable product stage may not work when an AI product scales to millions of users,” says Ryan E. Long, principal attorney of Long & Associates.

Long identifies some of the limitations of using traditional means to value premoney “prototype or novel AI startups” in an article that identifies regulatory issues and shares tactics designed to “minimize the number of uncertain variables.”

Now three more from the TC+ team:

Here to dispel the con-fusion: Tim breaks down why it’s exciting that the world-record fusion experiment produced even more energy than expected.
Meet ouroboros: Becca writes that we’re going to see more startups acquire other startups.
With 1.3 billion of investments and 1,000 portfolio companies: Gener8tor is the biggest startup accelerator you’ve never heard of, by Haje.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Apple’s iOS 16.2 update is now available for all users, along with iPadOS 16.2 and macOS Ventura 13.1, Ivan writes. He has a look at all of the top features of the update, including improved encryption for iCloud data, Live Activities on the home screen, a karaoke feature for Apple Music and the new collaborative whiteboard app Freeform.

Speaking of Apple, Zack spent some time tracking down information from the consumer tech giant, writing that it confirmed “that an iPhone software update it released two weeks ago fixed a zero-day security vulnerability that it now says was actively exploited.”

And we have five more for you:

Bye bye, check mark: Christine just got the coveted blue Twitter check last year after trying for 10 years, and now it’s going away. Rebecca writes that Twitter will remove all legacy verifications “in a few months.” Christine took a photo of her profile for posterity, just to show she was at one time notable.
Bye bye, virtual reality world: “Westworld” fans need to set up a binge watch party soon because the show, along with others, may soon be removed from HBO Max, writes Lauren.
Hello, new valuation: It’s hard to know what private companies are worth, so it can be a treat when one company tells us. And while a big valuation was the goal for 2021, companies were being more realistic in 2022. In this case, Romain writes about why Checkout‏‎.com lowered its internal valuation.
Hello to compensation: Uber’s food delivery business settled with over 4,000 dismissed couriers in Spain and agreed to pay severance to those let go ahead of the country’s labor reform law, Natasha L reports.
Bye bye and hello: Paul writes that Microsoft will sunset the Soundscape 3D audio app, but it will release the code in an open source format for developers.

Daily Crunch: US law enforcement charges SBF with fraud as he awaits extradition after Bahamas arrest by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch