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Artificial intelligence is taking over almost every industry. The investment and finance industry is no exception. In Deloitte’s 2019 report, the firm reveals that AI is transforming the financial ecosystem to reduce costs and make operations more efficient by providing automated insights and alternative data, analysis and risk management.

Technology such as AI has digitized the finance sector, ranging from payments and remittances to lending. However, asset management is still in the nascent stage of digitization, according to the chief strategy officer and co-founder of Akros Technologies, Jin Chung.

Akros Technologies wants to disrupt the current asset management industry via its AI-driven asset management software platform that mines market data for stocks. Akros just raised $2.3 million from Z Venture Capital, the corporate venture capital wholly owned by Z Holdings, which also owns the Japanese messaging app Line and internet portal Yahoo Japan.

Akros intends to strengthen strategic ties with Z Holdings via strategic investment, the startup said. The latest funding, which brings Akros’s total amount raised to $6.1 million since its 2021 inception, will help Akros to scale its software platform and asset management products and ramp up its users, including local and global financial institutions and fintech companies.

The outfit is already in discussions with potential partners to expand its AI-powered product called portfolio management as a service, or PMaaS, an all-in-one operating system for portfolio management. Chung explained to TechCrunch that PMaaS “enables B2B clients such as financial institutions, fintech startups and robot-advisors to launch their own exchange-traded funds (ETFs) without having to set up ETF teams and infrastructure.”

He added that it expects to secure more than five B2B clients in the first quarter of 2023.

The startup claims that its AI-powered portfolio management platform can reduce “the overall cost structure [of] the traditional fund development,” including management fees and unnecessary fees involved in the investment process, by more than 80%. The outfit aims to maximize the finance management performance of data-driven ETFs and offer a portfolio management solution via the PMaaS for Akros’s users to help them compete with global ETF institutions like Vanguard or JPMorgan.

In August, Contents Technologies launched Korean pop music, also known as K-pop, and Korea Entertainment ETF, on the NYSE Arca Exchange under the ticker KPOP, using Akros’s PMaaS solution to develop the ETFs. In addition, Akros listed an AI-driven target income ETF, called Akros Monthly Payout ETF (ticker: MPAY), on the NYSE in May with monthly distributions at an annualized target rate of 7%, according to the startup.

To build a slew of investment strategies that lower the cost of portfolio modeling and generate scores of investment portfolios, Akros applies a generative AI model based on a decision transformer, which predicts future actions through the sequencing model, Chung said, adding the company also employs GPT-3 natural language processing (NLP) to analyze unstructured language data.

Akros plans continuously to enhance its engineering technology by bolstering its business to disrupt the asset management market and attract new partners across the globe, including Japan, Singapore and the U.S., co-founder and chief executive officer Kyle Moon said in a statement.

Founded by CEO Moon, CSO Jin and chief marketing officer Justin Gim, Akros employs seven people.

Moon previously worked for Qraft Technologies as head of AI research and CSO and had experience listing four ETFs on NYSE. Before co-founding Akros, Gim had more than nine years of experience in the asset management industry; Chung did research work for Bayesian deep learning in autonomous driving cars at Oxford Robotics Institute.

In March, Akros raised $3.75 million in funding from PeopleFund, a South Korean peer-to-peer lending platform. The company declined to provide its valuation when asked.

Akros Technologies, an AI-powered asset management platform, raises funding from Z Holdings by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

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Hello, Happy Thursday. There is a lot of news today, much of it posting as I write this — for example, the Federal Trade Commission is now suing to block Microsoft from buying Activision. So less chatter, more banter. — Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

Let’s give ’em something to talk about: Given all of the ChatGPT popularity in the news lately, it is no surprise that a related company would be top news today. Instead of taking screen grabs, Ivan writes, ShareGPT creates a link to your ChatGPT conversations that you can grab instead.
Get your Frappuccino with a side of NFTs: Starbucks opened its blockchain-based loyalty program and NFT community to its first set of beta testers, Sarah reports. “Journey Stamps” will unlock new experiences beyond the free drinks and food that frequent drinkers can get from Stars.
Flying the friendly skies of capital: Something’s in the air up there. TripActions secured $400 million in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank in a move that comes less than two months after the travel expense management company announced a $9.2 billion valuation. Mary Ann has more.

Startups and VC

Moving, starting a new job and getting married in a short span of time is the trifecta of stress for anyone (I know from personal experience). In the startup world, that trifecta might be what happened to marketing technology startup Banzai. Ingrid writes that the company acquired Hyros, raised $100 million and went public via SPAC. Congrats?

Meanwhile, France is having a good venture capital run. Mike reports on a few new funds, including IRIS Capital, which had a first close of €110 million as it works to reach a target of €150 million for its new venture fund.

Want more? Here’s five more:

Creating for creators: Lauren writes about Komi, a landing page tool for content creators, which raised $5 million.
Tools for school admins: Kenya-based edtech startup Zeraki is the latest to grab some funding to provide digital tools to help school administrators manage payments and paperwork. Annie has more.
An extra set of “eyes”: WeWalk secured a small raise to develop computer vision for a smart cane used by visually impaired people, Paul writes.
A car that can monitor your health: Renault China is looking at making super-premium EVs that will tell you if your blood pressure is high, Rita reports. No doubt from that person who just cut you off.
Domain name drag: Picking the right domain name can be just as difficult as creating a password no one will guess. Enter Smartynames, which Haje writes uses AI to find you the perfect domain name.

To prepare for a downturn, build a three-case model

Startups that develop case models are better equipped to deal with potential setbacks. Visualizing exactly how potential market shifts can impact your business is a great way to prepare for the unexpected.

A three-case model attempts to predict best-case, down-case and base-case scenarios, writes Matt Barbieri, partner-in-charge at accounting firm Wiss & Co.

“Typically, the base-case scenario falls between the extremes. For example, in financial modeling, you might say that Peloton experienced both its ‘best case’ and ‘down case’ scenarios within a year.”

Four more from the TC+ team:

Energy boost: Haje takes a look at Rootine’s $10 million Series A deck in his latest Pitch Deck Teardown.
Finally some good news in VC: Women are rising through the ranks at VC firms, according to a new survey that caught Dominic-Madori’s eye.
Scooting ahead: Duffl’s David Lin talks to Christine about why his company has been able to buck traditional rapid grocery delivery woes.
What’s in store for the ad market?: Alex pours through some numbers to forecast what the Q1 ad market is shaping up to be.

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.

All of the tech layoffs prompted Airtable to put out a memo earlier this week promoting its tools for job seekers. Now it is Airtable’s own employees who might need to use them. Natasha M reports that the company, which was last valued at $11 billion for its no-code software, laid off over 250. And not only that, but it seems that the move also included some executive departures, including the chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer.

And here’s another five for you:

Know where you’re going: Rebecca writes that Google combines Maps and Waze teams as pressures mount to cut costs.
Know when to fold ’em: Twitter and Apple have not been playing nice, so now it seems if you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription via iOS, get ready to pay $11 to offset App Store fees, Ivan writes.
Know when to put on the brakes: Safety capabilities are the reason for Tesla’s new plans to add radar to its vehicles…again, Rebecca reports.
Know when to bundle: It has arrived… Disney+ now has its ad-supported tier meant to compete with Netflix, Lauren writes.
Know how to move on: Manish writes that Foxconn invested another $500 million into its India business, where Apple plans to have more iPhone production over the next three years.

Daily Crunch: Airtable lays off 250+ as CEO cites importance of ‘being a lean organization’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Virgin Orbit is retargeting a launch that was supposed to take place as soon as next week from Cornwall, England — and that was to be the first spaceflight to depart from British soil — due to additional technical to-dos and remaining regulatory hurdles.

In a statement, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said the company would retarget launch for “the coming weeks.” In addition to remaining technical work and outstanding launch licenses, Hart said the limited two-day launch window also moved Virgin to delay the mission. He did not elaborate on what technical work is needed for flight readiness.

Just a few hours after the announcement broke, the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the regulatory body that licenses launch, released its own statement to rebuke Virgin’s claim that remaining regulatory issues were in part the reason for the mission delay.

“The UK space regulation process is not a barrier to a UK space launch,” Tim Johnson, CAA’s director for space regulation, said. “Virgin Orbit has said in its statement this morning that there are some technical issues that will need to be resolved before launch. These in no way relate to the timing of when a licence will be issued by the Civil Aviation Authority.”

Virgin Orbit was due to launch from Spaceport Cornwall on December 14. LauncherOne, Virgin’s launch system, is composed of a Boeing 747 and a rocket. The aircraft carries the rocket to high altitude before releasing it on its journey to space, so while this isn’t due to be the first vertical launch from U.K. soil, it will be the first spaceflight mission.

The news came as something of a surprise; as late as Tuesday, Virgin representatives were telling the news media that the mission would be a “go” upon regulatory approval.

UK regulator says it’s not to blame for Virgin Orbit mission delay by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

For some reason, Niantic added a feature to Pokémon Go in which sometimes Pokémon can be HUGE and sometimes they’re tiny. This feels like a relatively useless feature that doesn’t really change gameplay at all, but I mean, sure, I will take a tiny Poochyena, please and thank you!

Rolling out now, the Pokémon Poochyena, Mightyena and Mawile can appear in size XXS or XXL. Why those three Pokémon only? I don’t know, ask Professor Willow. In reality, it is probably to create a sense of excitement that they can draw out as they slowly roll out, uh, small Pikachu and big Eevee. Or, as they appear in-game, Pokémon that’s far from camera and Pokémon that’s close to camera.

We’ve already had sizes of Pokémon since the game first came out in 2016 — usually this was used for horrible Reddit jokes in which people would nickname their Pokémon after certain body parts, then screenshot the appraisal screen, in which the Professor would say, “Your [body part] is huge!” if the Pokémon was of a larger size. You know what I mean. You can’t nickname Pokémon with that language anymore, but as a consolation, now there is a feature in the Pokédex that shows you the size ranges of Pokémon that you have caught. When you catch a new smallest or largest Pokémon for each species in your Pokédex, you will get a fun little pop-up congratulating you.

You’ll know if you’ve come across a superbig or supersmall guy in the wild because, uh, their sizes will be different. And there will be little animations that tell you this. Personally, I think these animations are a bit similar to those that appear when you find a shiny Pokémon in the wild, and a large Mawile simply is not as exciting as a shiny one, but hey, I didn’t design the game. If I did, I would have a shiny Mawile.

In Pokémon Go, you can now capture superbig or supersmall friends by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

It’s still a pretty busy time in the wild, wild world of crypto. But it felt somewhat more tame than the whirlwind the industry has experienced in the past few weeks, and for that, I thank the crypto gods (for now.)

If you’re keeping up with the news cycle, then you know FTX’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has gone on quite a bit of a media campaign.

He’s done a number of interviews with organizations, ranging from Good Morning America to The Block, in the past week, and even jumped on a handful of less formal Twitter spaces (with thousands of listeners) for impromptu conversations. While he has rambled his thoughts and circumnavigated questions, he’s caught the attention of regulators — who want to hear from him now, too.

In a back-and-forth tweet exchange, the Chairwoman of the House of Financial Services Committee Maxine Waters invited SBF to join their hearing on December 13, to which, SBF basically replied “not right now.”

That didn’t bode well with the chairwoman and she came back swinging and said, “Based on your role as CEO and your media interviews over the past few weeks, it’s clear to us that the information you have thus far is sufficient for testimony.” In a separate tweet, Waters also said a subpoena is “definitely on the table.”

With a couple days until the hearing, we’ll see if SBF saddles up and testifies, by choice or by order. But the former seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, an excel spreadsheet showed Alameda’s private equity portfolio with some FTX positions included. It was a doozy of a document, which had our team wondering how they had time to do anything other than invest given the massive number of deals recorded across a handful of sectors. More deets below.

If someone forwarded you this message, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page.

this week in web3

Here are some of the biggest crypto stories TechCrunch has covered this week.

FTX and Alameda’s massive investments will take a long time to unwind from crypto industry (TC+)

FTX and its sister company (or parent company, depending on how you look at it) Alameda had their hands in a bunch of different startups. The depth of its roster wasn’t very transparent until now. A spreadsheet with Alameda’s private equity portfolio and some FTX positions includes just shy of 500 investments across 10 holding companies for a total of $5.276 billion. This spreadsheet, dated from early November, raises a number of concerns surrounding the extent to which FTX and Alameda — and their affiliated companies — invested in the crypto industry.

Thoughts on the demise of Circle’s SPAC deal (TC+)

Circle Internet Financial (Circle), the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, called off its merger with a blank check company, ending its SPAC-led run toward going public. Circle’s SPAC deal made news when announced last year and earlier this year when it was repriced. Last we heard, Circle had renegotiated its SPAC transaction, boosting its enterprise value from $4.5 billion to $9 billion. So what happened between then and now to get us from a new, higher deal price to a termination?

Seoul court rejects warrants for former Terraform Labs employees and investors over Luna collapse

A Seoul court rejected a request from prosecutors for warrants to detain eight people related to Terraform Labs, including the co-founder of Terraform Labs, Daniel Shin, early investors and former engineers. The court dismissed the warrants, saying the eight people need to have rights to defend their cases against accusations. Shin is being charged with taking illegal profits worth about $105 million by selling Luna tokens when it was near its all-time high without disclosing this move to investors, prior to the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna earlier this year.

Mastercard director sees FTX collapse as chance for the crypto market to reset

Even though one of the largest crypto exchanges, FTX, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy, some market participants aren’t worried about whether the meltdown will alter institutional interest in crypto. “I feel like once you get the momentum for an institution up and running, it’s hard to get them to turn their head and pivot,” Grace Berkery, director of startup engagement at Mastercard, said at an event on Wednesday. “So if they’re going to enter, they’re going to stay in the space.”

Ledger’s latest crypto wallet taps iPod designer in bid to boost accessibility

Ledger, a security-focused firm that sells crypto hardware wallets, has partnered with the designer behind the iPod, Tony Fadell, in hopes of creating an easier, more accessible way for users to secure their crypto assets. The new credit card-sized crypto wallet can manage NFT collections as well as over 500 coins and digital assets.

the latest pod

As a friendly reminder, Chain Reaction’s first season ended last week and we’ll be bringing new content back in the New Year.

ICYMI: Last week, in Chain Reaction’s Tuesday episode, Alchemy’s CEO Nikil Viswanathan had a lot to say about how the industry and developer’s focus on infrastructure has shifted, what will drive the next wave of consumer interest and which blockchains he’s seeing the most developer activity on.

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

follow the money

Tea, an open source package manager for developers, raises $8.9 million in seed funding
NFT-focused startup Metagood raises $5 million toward “social good” impact
Uniswap-based protocol Panoptic raises $4.5 million for decentralized perpetual options
Crypto accounting-focused Bitwave raises $15 million in a Series A round led by Hack VC and Blockchain Capital
Perennial, a DeFi protocol for derivative trading, raises $12 million in a seed round co-led by Polychain Capital and Variant

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.

Will SBF saddle up for a testimony after his media tour? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

You know what I miss about working in an office? Literally nothing, apart from having access to a fancy coffee machine. It turns out that the magic of the liquid black gold is within reach even for work-from-home keyboard warriors. You don’t even need to spend ridiculous amounts of money for a tasty hot beverage to have you jittering your way through the day.

Got any caffeine-fiends or coffee lovers in your life who might want to up their coffee game? Here’s our top six gift ideas, from super affordable to… not.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

1 – Start with the beans

It’s pretty rare that a great holiday gift comes at a reasonable price, but in the coffee category, you’re in luck. Go to a specialty coffee store near you, and you can get a great, high-end holiday gift in the $12-25 range. High-quality, freshly roasted beans is the first step to making amazing coffee at home, provided that your recipient has a grinder. If they don’t, you can buy pre-ground coffee, but be aware that it goes stale far faster.

I’m a sucker for coffee subscriptions that focus on variety, and most third-wave coffee roasters have a subscription plan you can gift. Atlas Coffee Club is one of my favorites; the bags are only for subscription, so they don’t have to worry about how the bags look on the shelf. The upshot of that is that they always have some fresh and funky designs.

Each pack they ship comes with a postcard with tasting notes. The company charges $109 for six months worth of gift subscriptions, including shipping. If Atlas doesn’t do it for you, Trade has a broader selection of choices, or if that seems too overwhelming and adventurous, the stalwarts of the industry such as Blue Bottle, Peets and Equator all have giftable subscription plans too.

Price:Varies depending on brand and subscription type

2 – Cheap is great: the AeroPress

Launched back in 2005, designed by a guy better known for inventing the Aerobie frisbee, the AeroPress continues to be one of the best devices for coffee making at home. It makes a rich, smooth coffee that tastes somewhere between an espresso, a french press, and a drip coffee. At just $40, it’s It’s by far the cheapest way to make a respectable cup of coffee. It’s almost indestructible (I’ve owned mine for more than 10 years, and it’s still going strong), and can make great coffee wherever you can get water up to a certain temperature. The trick is to use cooler water than you’d expect (175˚ F/80˚ C), which requires a kettle with good temperature control, but overall, it’s hard to screw up a cup of AeroPress. Get some good beans and grind them a tiny bit more coarsely than you would for espresso. If you buy pre-ground beans, espresso grind works just fine.

Price:$40 from AeroPress

3 – From beans to powder: Ode Brew Grinder 2

This might come as a surprise, but for great coffee at home, your first upgrade probably shouldn’t be your machine, but your grinder. Or rather: Make sure you buy fresh, high-quality beans, and then grind them with as much precision as you can: An uniform grind is what you’re looking for. Fellow is perhaps best known for its high-precision EKG electric kettle, which has more or less become the industry standard for high-end baristas making pour-over.

In this guide, however, I wanted to give the Ode Brew Grinder a bit of love. At $345, it is astonishingly expensive, but it is one of the best grinders money can buy.

The original version was well reviewed, and the Gen 2 improves on a winning formula: It has anti-static technology which means less of a mess. It has a cup that goes under the grinder that is held in place magnetically. You grind just enough beans for however much coffee you are going to make, and the grinder stops automatically once your beans are shredded to the appropriate size. The major difference is that the grinding burrs have been completely redesigned; the Gen 2 brew burrs are capable of grinding as fine as 250 microns, while the Standard brew burrs that come stock in the original Ode Brew Grinder can grind as fine as 500 microns. If you love espresso drinks, Fellow warns that this isn’t the grinder for you, but if you’re more of a pour-over person, you can’t go wrong.

Price: $345 from Fellow

4 – Bringing the science: Acaia Pearl coffee scale

Is it sane to pay $150 for Acaia’s specialized set of Pearl digital coffee scales, when Amazon will sell you a just-as-accurate scale for a tenth that? Well, the Acaia scale does more than just measuring the coffee grinds itself; it can also show you the pour rate you are using for your pour-over brews, helping you fine-adjust and make your brews more repeatable.

Accurately measuring the amount of coffee you put into espresso is a crucial part of fine-tuning your coffee recipes: A double shot of espresso, called a doppio, requires 14 to 18 grams of coffee and produces 60 ml (two fluid ounces) of coffee. From there, you esperiment with the pressure your espresso machine is calibrated to, your tamping, the coarseness of your grind, and… Oh dear, my coffee nerdery is showing, isn’t it?

All I’m saying that if your coffee-loving gift recipient doesn’t use scales to make espresso, they either don’t really care about coffee, or they haven’t figured out how important it is for consistency. Whether you pick up the $150 Acaia, the $50 Timemore, or the $17 KitchenTour scale, a precision set of scales is a crucial step toward coffee nirvana.

Price:$150 from Acaia

5 – For the tinkerers: Gaggia Classic

If you love espresso drinks and are an epic coffee nerd, you eventually fall deep enough into the coffee hole that you start learning to make your own espresso drinks from scratch. That means getting a grinder, some scales, and a good machine. The Gaggia Classic wouldn’t stand up to the intense requirements of a busy cafe, but for home use, at under $500, it is a remarkably affordable machine for anyone wanting to make coffee-shop quality espresso.

The machine has the most important features that baristas look for: it cranks out up to 12 bars of pressure, and it’s been around for 30 years. Spare parts are easily and readily available, and YouTube is overflowing with guides for how to take it apart and repair it if something should go wrong with it. The steam wand means that you can steam milk to create more creative espresso drinks; lattes, flat whites, macchiatos; they are all some experimentation and an internet tutorial away.

Price: $425 from Amazon

6 – Just make the coffee for me already: Breville Oracle Touch

If the thought of measuring your grinds to the nearest milligram makes you twitch, and fine-adjusting the coarseness of the grind fills you with a sense of dread, there are luckily fully automatic solutions too. Keurig’s K-cups and Nespresso pods are a good option if you want minimum hassle and don’t care about having some coffee cred. For the lazy aficionado, however, there’s the $2,800 Breville Oracle Touch. Yes, it is eye-wateringly expensive, but it’s capable of making any coffee drink you can imagine. If you’re the kind of person who’s utterly malfunctioning before you have your first cup of coffee, the Oracle Touch makes it as fool proof as it gets: Pour in some beans, water, and milk, then use the touch screen to look for the picture of the drink you want. No hassle, no mess, no skill required. The machine grinds, doses, stamps, heats, pumps, and steams. Sure, there are cheaper bean-to-cup machines out there, but that’s not what we are optimizing for here: This is all about ease of use and a jolt of caffeine while involving as few brain cells as possible.

Price: $2,800 from Breville

6 gifts for coffee lovers looking to up their game by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

GitHub Copilot, GitHub’s service that intelligently suggests lines of code, is now available in a plan for enterprises months after launching for individual users and educators.

Called GitHub Copilot for business, the new plan, which costs $19 per user per month, comes with all the features in the single-license Copilot tier along with corporate licensing and policy controls. That includes a toggle that lets IT admins prevent suggested code that matches public code on GitHub from being shown to developers, a likely response to the intellectual property controversies brewing around Copilot.

Available as a downloadable extension for development environments including Microsoft Visual Studio, Noevim and JetBrains, Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex, developed by OpenAI, that’s trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. Copilot — which had over 400,000 subscribers as of August — can surface a programming approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g., “Say hello world”), drawing on its knowledge base and the current context.

At least a portion of the code on which Codex was trained is copyrighted or under a restrictive license, an issue with which some advocacy groups have taken issue. Users have been able to prompt Copilot to generate code from Quake, code snippets in personal codebases and example code from books like “Mastering JS” and “Think JavaScript”; GitHub itself admits that, about 1% of the time, Copilot suggestions contain code snippets longer than ~150 characters that match the training data.

GitHub claims that fair use, or the doctrine in U.S. law that permits the use of copyrighted material without first having to obtain permission from the rightsholder, protects it in the event that Copilot was knowingly or unknowingly developed against copyrighted code. But not everyone agrees. The Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit to advocate for the free software movement, has called Copilot “unacceptable and unjust.” And Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being suedin a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot to regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit.

GitHub’s liability aside, some legal experts have argued that Copilot could put companies at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted suggestions from the tool into their production software. As Elain Atwell notes in a piece on Kolide’s corporate blog, because Copilot strips code of its licenses, it’s difficult to tell which code is permissible to deploy and which might have incompatible terms of use.

GitHub’s attempt at rectifying this is a filter, first introduced to the Copilot platform in June, that checks code suggestions with their surrounding code of about 150 characters against public GitHub code and hides suggestions if there’s a match or “near match.” But it’s an imperfect measure. Tim Davis, a computer science professor at Texas A&M University, found that enabling the filter caused Copilot to emit large chunks of his copyrighted code including all attribution and license text.

GitHub plans to introduce additional features in 2023 aimed at helping developers make informed decisions about whether to use Copilot’s suggestions, including the ability to identify strings matching public code with a reference to those repositories. And for GitHub Copilot for business customers, GitHub claims it won’t retain code snippets for training or share code, regardless if the data comes from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories or local files.

But it’s unclear whether those steps will be enough to allay companies’ fears over legal challenges.

GitHub launches Copilot for business plan as legal questions remain unresolved by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

After FTX collapsed, a number of crypto entities once tied to the bankrupt crypto exchange are trying to pick up the pieces and move forward. As for Solana — a prominent layer-1 blockchain that was backed by FTX and its outspoken founder, Sam Bankman-Fried — its co-founders see this downturn as an opportunity for its team and developers to build and ignore the noise.

“It’s just a time of immense fear, but there’s immense opportunity,” Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, said to TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of signal and a lot of noise.”

Developers in the space who weathered the last crypto market cycle see Solana’s ability to handle high levels of transaction throughput as an advantage over some other blockchains and remain bullish on the underlying technology more generally, Gokal explained. “They’re not just paying attention to what’s happening in the market. What they’re excited about is what they can build, and they’re still building it.

“A lot of them feel the urgency to be ready with their products [for] the next cycle so when that next market cycle comes, there will be a lot of new users trying to experiment with products in crypto and we expect that to happen in the next year.”

Solana founders see now as a time to bridge the blockchain and the physical world by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

We’ve heard an awful lot over the past couple of weeks about the executives who are leaving Salesforce, but not a heck of a lot about the woman who is taking over for Stewart Butterfield as CEO at Slack when he takes off to spend some time gardening. It’s time we changed that.

Her name is Lidiane Jones, a woman with a deep background in enterprise software. (I requested an interview with Jones for this piece, but the company was not making her available to speak with the press.) Surprisingly, many of the analysts I confer with about Salesforce knew little about her, but that could be because she just hasn’t been made available on analysts’ days.

That will likely change when she takes over at the end of next month.

But she didn’t come out of nowhere. Jones, who lives in the Boston area, has been at Salesforce for three years and quickly rose up the ranks: She started as head of product for Commerce Cloud, then was bumped up to GM of Commerce Cloud before — prior to her promotion this week — holding the title of GM of Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Experience Cloud, which basically encompasses the company’s entire B2C business.

Before that, she spent 13 years at Microsoft working on a variety of products, from Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project to Enterprise Application Virtualization, Office Collaboration and finally Azure Machine Learning.

She also spent almost four years at Sonos as VP of product management. Her unique mix of enterprise and consumer experience should prepare her well for her new job running Slack, where she will have to walk a fine line between user experience and enterprise requirements.

In Butterfield’s farewell Slack announcement, made available to TechCrunch by sources earlier this week (was it only this week?), he effusively praised his replacement. While he could be trying to sell her to a skeptical group used to his decade of steady leadership, it sounds like he also genuinely likes her:

So, about this Lidiane. You’re going to love her. She’s pragmatic and practical, insightful, passionate, creative, kind, and curious. She’s right at that little diamond-shaped heart in the four-circle Venn diagram of Smart, Humble, Hardworking, and Collaborative. Before Salesforce she spent four years leading product at Sonos where she fell in love with Slack. She has a deep respect for our approach to product, our customer obsession, and our unique culture. She’s one of us.

That’s a pretty strong welcome, and Anand Thaker, a marketing technology advisor and the founder of several startups who follows Salesforce closely, also believes that she’s a good fit for Slack.

“She has a solid technical and management background, and the projects and groups she has been working on within Salesforce — experience, marketing, commerce — were all places Slack would fit and drive the best value. Each of these has strong consumer commerce elements where the larger growth (or less churn) will likely come and is in line (reading the tea leaves) with where Beinoff has wanted Salesforce to go,” Thaker told TechCrunch.

Butterfield added that her roles inside Salesforce will make her a strong voice for Slack inside the larger organization, which could come in handy as the leadership handover occurs.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at the firm Deep Analysis, said that in many ways, she is better prepared for this job than some longtime CEOs.

“I don’t know Lidiane personally, but she seems the logical option as she seemed to do a good job running the Marketing, Experience, Commerce Clouds, and running those is not much different from running multiple large businesses, so ironically she has more true CEO experience as a first-time CEO than many experienced CEOs. Plus she was with Microsoft a long time — and might bring some of their rigor to the table,” he said.

Jones certainly has big shoes to fill, taking over for a founder-CEO in the midst of a big transition for the company, but with a couple of decades of tech experience behind her, she seems more than prepared for the challenge.

Slack’s new CEO, Lidiane Jones, brings two decades of product experience to the job by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch