The future of the space industry may look a lot like its past, or so believes Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco, he’ll be explaining how full-service, vertically integrated space companies will (again) be the big winners of this evolving space economy.
Rocket Lab was started as a launch services company, and in June launched its 50th Electron rocket, making it the fastest company ever to reach 50 launches. But Beck — Sir Peter, in fact — decided early on that the company would have to expand beyond this difficult and competitive side of the industry.
Constantly growing and redefining the company has been complex and costly, but now they are approaching their ambition of being able to handle just about every aspect of space operations, from satellite design to manufacturing to launch and operational support. Just don’t call it a Prime.
Sir Peter has been a guest at Disrupt and other TechCrunch events over the years and has always shared his thoughts candidly — including sharing his journey from being a cash-strapped, soot-stained rocket monkey to becoming a space magnate. He is full of lessons any startup, space-bound or otherwise, can learn from.
You’ll want to show up early to find a spot and catch him on the Space Stage, Monday, October 28, when he is interviewed by yours truly about how the next five years will be both familiar and totally different from the last decade or two.
About TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
TechCrunch Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey. Whether you’re a budding founder with a revolutionary idea, a seasoned startup looking to scale or an investor seeking the next big thing, TechCrunch Disrupt offers unparalleled resources, connections and expert insights to propel your venture forward. Over 10,000 startup leaders will be attending this year’s event on October 28-30 in San Francisco.
We can’t wait to hear from more space leaders at this year’s show. Purchase your tickets here.
General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital group, is expanding its presence in India by joining forces with local venture firm Venture Highway and earmarking $500 million to $1 billion for investments in the country.
Venture Highway’s investments include social commerce startup Meesho and B2B industrial marketplace Moglix. TechCrunch reported in January that the two venture firms were discussing a tie-up.
The deal will see the combined entity plot a multistage investment strategy for General Catalyst in India, spanning early- and growth-stage startups across industries, Venture Highway’s founder Neeraj Arora and General Catalyst’s Priya Mohan told TechCrunch in an interview.
Venture Highway, which raised $78.6 million for its second fund in 2020, has traditionally focused on early-stage investments. As part of the General Catalyst team, it will expand its remit to incubating startups. “Our vision is to be part of building a number of companies that will not only go public but also be needle-moving for the economy,” said Mohan.
General Catalyst, which manages more than $25 billion in assets, plans to invest between $500 million to $1 billion in India over the next three years, said Arora, who previously served as chief business officer at WhatsApp and played an instrumental role in the instant messaging app’s sale to Meta.
The deal positions General Catalyst as one of the largest venture capital firms in India, alongside the likes of Lightspeed, Accel, Elevation and Nexus, which have each raised between $500 million and $700 million for their recent funds. Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) leads the pack, with a $2 billion fund earmarked for investments in the country.
General Catalyst isn’t acquiring Venture Highway’s portfolio, but will consider it “very much part of the GC portfolio going forward,” Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
“We want to support [these portfolio companies] the same way we support any of our companies in India or anywhere else in the world,” he said.
The two firms began exploring ways to collaborate several years ago, but the timing was right at the moment, said Arora. “We could have gone out and raised more capital. That was one of the options on the table. But thinking from first principles, when we think about the opportunity that is in India today, and what our ambitions are, it made sense for us to join hands with General Catalyst,” he said.
India has become one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies over the past decade, with its GDP rate touching 8.2% in the latest financial year. Favorable policy changes have spurred growth across industries, attracting some of the world’s largest investors.
SoftBank, Tiger Global, Peak XV, Lightspeed, Accel and others have deployed about $100 billion in Indian tech startups in the past five years alone and are beginning to see some returns as many of those firms go public. But “returns on capital in India have sucked historically,” Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer said at a virtual gathering with Indian entrepreneurs last year.
India is not new territory for General Catalyst, which has been investing in the country for over a decade. Its portfolio includes fintech unicorn CRED, used car marketplace Spinny and health tech startup Orange Health. The firm recently co-led a funding round with Indian conglomerate Tata that was raised by Alsym Energy, a company developing non-flammable rechargeable batteries.
Taneja anticipates more partnerships with Indian conglomerates going forward. “I believe that many of the conglomerates in India are very entrepreneurial and will play a significant role in the growth opportunity of India,” he said. “Some of the opportunities we want to invest in or help build in India, it might make sense to radically collaborate with them.”
“When you’re transforming industries, no matter where you are in the world, you have to team up with the industry leaders,” Taneja added. “We do that in healthcare here [in the U.S.] with a lot of healthcare systems; we are actively working with various governments when it comes to policy and issues and things like AI.”
Thursday’s announcement follows a similar move by General Catalyst in Europe last year, when the firm unveiled plans to merge with Berlin-based venture firm La Famiglia. Taneja declined to comment on whether his firm will seek to replicate the model in other markets. General Catalyst is in advanced stages to close a $6 billion fund, FT reported in April.
Lightspeed Ventures-backed audio platform Pocket FM announced it has partnered with voice-cloning company ElevenLabs to quickly convert text content, such as script, into audio series using AI.
Pocket FM, which raised $103 million in Series D funding in March, told TechCrunch at the time that it was already experimenting with the ability to convert text content into audio using ElevenLabs‘ tech. Now, the India-based company has expanded the partnership to make the conversion tool available to all creators over the next few weeks.
In the test phase, Pocket FM already produced 30,000 hours of audio series using ElevenLab’s AI tech. With the new roll-out, the startup expects to triple its content library of over 100,000 hours of audio content this year. Pocket FM also said that during the experimental phase, the AI-powered tools helped it cut the cost of producing audio by 90%.
Image Credits: Pocket FM
Pocket FM’s co-founder and CTO Prateek Dixit told TechCrunch over a call that with this partnership, the company wants to make it easier for writers to convert their writings into audio series.
“We have over 250,000 writers (including the ones on the company’s Pocket Novel writing plaform) and this partnership decreases the cost of setting up and recording audio for them,” he said.
“Even with a good set up of recording tools and equipment, writers can produce roughly 30 minutes of high-quality audio content per day. With the AI tools, this output can be 10 times more,” he added.
Pocket FM has built a tool integrating ElevenLabs tech, through which it is offering 50 voices for writers who want to convert their content. ElevenLabs’ co-founder Mati Staniszewski said that his company’s tool understands the context of the writing and infers emotions through the voice automatically.
“Working with Pocket FM, we are deploying our newer models that understand the genre of writing and are emotionality better,” Staniszewski said.
Dixit noted that based on data from users’ engagement with this kind of content, the platform also plans to suggest voices that work well for writers in a particular genre.
Pocket FM is not the only audio series platform experimenting with AI-powered tools. Google-backed Kuku FM is using GPT-4, Claude, BandLab and even ElevenLabs to help its writers with different stages of creation, including refining script, generating thumbnails, adding sound effects and converting text into audio.
Kuku FM told TechCrunch that it is also experimenting with using visual generation tools such as Midjourney and Runway to create ads related to content.
Quality of content and impact on artists
The promise of AI-powered tools is to generate more content faster, but that doesn’t mean the content is good. Pocket FM’s answer to aiding discovery and surfacing quality content is making its discovery algorithm sophisticated and experimenting with user engagement.
“If a writer publishes an audio series, we surface that content to a select number of users and observe engagement metrics. If these metrics are positive, we further propagate that,” Dixit said.
Kuku FM said it is working with its quality control team to ensure only high-quality content is promoted on its app, even if creators have used AI in the process.
“We realized the importance of having a human Quality Control team at the center of our decision-making when it comes to audio content production. We have developed a core team of Content Producers who have high ownership & authority on the artistic standards,” the company’s co-foudner and CEO Lal Chand Bisu said.
Utilizing AI could lead to quicker results and a bigger content library for these platforms, but it will also reduce the roles of voiceover artists working with them. India’s Association of Voiceover Artists (AVA) has expressed its concerns about AI taking over.
“If AI takes over, we are finished. As voice artists, we need to get some regulation in place so that our livelihood is protected,” Amarinder Singh Sodhi, the association’s general secretary, told Indian publication Scroll.
Sodi also told Scroll about incidents where voiceover artists were called into the studio to record samples to train AI without obtaining their consent or informing them.
“On an emotional level, it scares me. By using AI, you are essentially diluting the human experience of storytelling. You lose out on an emotional connection,” Delhi-based voiceover artist Aditya Mattoo told TechCrunch.
He added that giving access to premium voices to people who don’t have the taste and skill to produce quality content will lead to the market getting flooded by bad content.
Voice artists in other parts of the world have also raised concerns about AI impacting their jobs. And despite working with some of the AI companies, they feel uncomfortable about their voices being altered.
When we asked about the impact of AI-powered voice generation on Pocket FM, the company didn’t directly answer the question. However, Dixit noted that engagement with AI-generated content in its experiments is “as good as human voiceover production.” Notably, the company is also working on technology to incorporate multiple voices in one audio output.
Both Pocket FM and Kuku FM don’t currently label their content to indicate if AI has been used in the creation process.
Pennylane, Qonto, Agicap, Pleo and Mollie have one thing in common. They all use Chift in one way or another to manage integrations with other services. And this relatively young Belgium-based startup just raised a €2.3 million seed round ($2.5 million at today’s exchange rate).
Many fintech startups rely on integrations to make their product work with their customers’ financial stack. They often end up building countless connectors and partner integrations to keep financial information consistent across several products. As their integration ecosystem grows, they sometimes rely on an iPaaS provider (integration platform-as-a-service).
Chift essentially acts as a third-party integration expert. It works a bit like Codat in the U.K. and Merge in the U.S. Instead of building connectors one by one, Chift offers a set of unified APIs that are compatible with the most popular financial tools out there.
For instance, Chift has developed an accounting API that is compatible with French accounting software from Sage, Cegid and Pennylane. The company has also developed integrations around invoicing tools, e-commerce platforms and point-of-sales software.
Chift has decided to focus on financial tools first. “We’re integrating with tools that generate financial data,” co-founder and CEO Gauthier Henroz told TechCrunch.
Unlike other industries, the fintech market is still relatively fragmented — each European country has its own accounting or invoicing platforms. But it can be useful to be able to access financial data from any SaaS product.
As more companies start relying on Chift, the startup can add more connectors. All of Chift’s clients can benefit from these new integrations. As an added benefit for Chift, it creates a barrier to entry to newcomers.
“In Europe, that’s where all the complexity lies. Things are going to be different in every country, particularly for accounting, points of sales and invoicing tools,” Henroz said.
“We help our customers, who then upsell or open up new markets. There’s very little churn because you’re integrated, you’re connected, you connect them to others and you create new opportunities for them,” he added later in the conversation.
Developing an integration isn’t a one-off project either. Companies release updates to their APIs, which can lead to failures. Chift is in charge of maintaining these integrations. SaaS companies can focus on their core product instead of those integrations.
Investors in the seed round include Entourage (Pieterjan Bouten’s fund), Shapers (Philippe Teixeira da Mota’s fund), Seeder Fund and several business angels. “Our goal is to become the European leader,” Henroz said.
Image Credits: EasyTranslate founder Frederik R. Pedersen / EasyTranslate
You might think new generative AI startups like Eleven Labs are the hottest game in town for translation services. But voice translation was long ago preceded by another market, targeted some time ago by startups: content translation. Any company with an international presence needs to have their content translated around the world, so this remains a big market. This was evidenced by the $106 million raised to date by the likes of Unbabel in Portugal (which last raised $60 million).
EasyTranslate, which specializes in content translation, has been around since 2010, using machine learning models to identify which freelance translators were best suited to translate specific types of content. But now it’s headed in a different direction with a new, generative AI-driven platform that it calls “HumanAI.”
“We have pivoted the whole business model from a human service-based business model towards being an AI technology provider, driving down the cost and speeding up the process,” the company’s founder, Frederik R. Pedersen, told TechCrunch.
Most translation services offer machine-translated content, with a small portion edited by humans. However, translators often must assess the entire machine-generated translation to understand the context and make sense of the content. EasyTranslate’s HumanAI platform flips this on its head, absorbing content, blending it with large language models (LLMs) and employing short-term memory in the LLM to translate content more accurately. What’s more, it will only involve humans where it needs to, thus reducing translation times and costs.
To do this, HumanAI uses a mix of LLMs, including the one offered by OpenAI, as well as its own recommendation systems. The platform runs off its own algorithms and customer data to provide customized content translation.
The secret to the pivot, Pedersen said, is using LLMs to generate short-term memory so the platform can read a translation in generic English and turn it into specific English. It “vectors” content into a database, enabling it to do a semantic search and find similarities between content, which is then used to create a short-term memory with an LLM (this is also referred to as retrieval augmented generation).
This means the platform can use any number of LLMs to translate between, for example, the English used in marketing copy or English employed in finance reports, and preserve the meaning in the text all the while.
“We can combine the more traditional, neural machine translation engines with customer-specific data to create a foundation for the localization and translation process. So, moving from generic language towards customer-specific language, for instance,” he said.
Why is that important? Pedersen explained: “You might get a grammatically perfect machine-based translation, but it still may not sound right. So we identify which part of the content has a low confidence score and then use humans to correct it. The combination massively increases our productivity.”
Pederson claimed HumanAI can drive down translation costs by 90% and ends up pricing its services at €0.01 per translated word. Its customers include global businesses such as Wix and Monday.com.
And pricing is an especially crucial puzzle to solve in this space because companies have a great deal of content that needs translating.
“If you look at Adobe, they have a full team just looking at how the terminologies align across markets. And if we look at global brands, there’s a significant amount of effort put into making sure that you are perceived in the right way locally,” Pedersen said.
The question is, though, what will help EasyTranslate compete against pure-play AI-based solutions, which are likely to get better with time?
“Our goal is not to become a pure AI [service]. I think our goal is to create the added value of having humans combined with AI, and provide this service to customers. AI still needs human feedback to be improved,” he said.
“It’s one thing to say you would like to implement all content creation, all translation, and another to make sure that you can actually control the model. You have to have some humans to control the models, because humans are not machines and language changes constantly.”
EasyTranslate has raised a total of €3 million to date and is backed by private equity, debt financing, some angel investors in Copenhagen and the Danish Innovation Fund.
Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images
TikTok is gearing up to challenge Amazon’s Prime Day event in July. The social network announced on Thursday that TikTok Shop is holding a “Deals For You Days” sales event in the U.S. starting on July 9.
The announcement comes a few days after Amazon revealed that its annual Prime Day sales will take place on July 16 and 17.
The success of Prime Day has led to other retailers, both large and small, co-opting the day to run competing sales. Now you can count TikTok among those doing the same.
TikTok says the sales event will offer deals on fashion and beauty products, backyard entertainment essentials, decor, summer reading bestsellers and more. Like Amazon’s Prime Day sales, TikTok Shop will offer exclusive deals on select products. The sales event will offer exclusive sales on products from L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline New York, NYX Professional Makeup, Our Place, Too Faced and Zwilling USA.
During the sales event, brands and merchants will participate in content challenges for short videos and LIVE shopping events, where they can interact with their followers and share their favorite products and bestsellers. The LIVE events will offer discounts on popular products in real time.
TikTok has been betting big on its e-commerce efforts and is aiming to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year. With this upcoming deals event, TikTok is looking to take on one of the largest sales events in the U.S. It’s worth noting that while this specific event appears to be targeting Amazon, TikTok Shop is also looking to take on fellow Chinese-owned companies Temu and Shein, both of which have become popular in the U.S.
Last year, Bloomberg reported that TikTok was expected to amass around $20 billion in global gross merchandise value in 2023 and that the majority of the sales were seen in Southeast Asia. TikTok is now invested in bringing that success to the U.S.
TikTok’s ambitions for its e-commerce product aren’t surprising, as social commerce sales are expected to increase in the next few years. According to eMarketer forecasts, social commerce sales are expected to more than double to $144.5 billion by 2027 from $67 billion in 2023.
After Meta started tagging photos with a “Made with AI” label in May, photographers complained that the social networking company had been applying labels to real photos where they had used some basic editing tools.
Because of the user feedback and general confusion around what level of AI is used in a photo, the company is changing the tag to “AI info” across all of Meta’s apps.
Meta said that the earlier version of the tag wasn’t clear enough for users to indicate that the image with the tag is not necessarily created with AI, but might have used AI-powered tools in the editing process.
“Like others across the industry, we’ve found that our labels based on these indicators weren’t always aligned with people’s expectations and didn’t always provide enough context. For example, some content that included minor modifications using AI, such as retouching tools, included industry standard indicators that were then labeled ‘Made with AI’,” the company said in an updated blog post.
Image Credits: Meta
The company is not changing the underlying technology for detecting use of AI in photos and labeling them. Meta still uses information from technical metadata standards such as C2PA and IPTC that include information about use of AI tools.
That means, if photographers use tools like Adobe’s Generative AI Fill to remove objects, their photos might still be tagged with the new label. However, Meta hopes that the new label will help people understand that the image with the tag is not always created entirely by AI.
“‘AI Info’ can encompass content that was made and/or modified with AI so the hope is that this is more in line with people’s expectations, while we work with companies across the industry to improve the process,” Meta spokesperson Kate McLaughlin told TechCrunch over email.
The new tag will still not solve the problem of completely AI-generated photos going undetected. And it won’t tell users about how much AI-powered editing has been done on an image.
Meta and other social network will need to work to set guidelines without being unfair to photographers who have not made alterations to their editing workflows, but the tools they used to touch up photos have some generative AI element. On the other hand, companies like Adobe should warn photographers that when they use a certain tool, their image might be tagged with a label on other services.
Exciting news for tech enthusiasts and innovators!
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and we have an incredible opportunity for you to elevate your brand’s visibility. How? By hosting your own Side Event at the most anticipated tech gathering of the year!
Why host a Side Event?
Imagine being at the helm of your own event, engaging with over 10,000 of the brightest minds in the tech industry. Hosting a Side Event at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 provides unparalleled exposure for your brand. This is your chance to connect with a vast network of attendees, influencers, and potential collaborators. Showcase your brand, share your expertise, and make lasting connections that can boost your brand awareness to new heights.
What can you host?
The sky’s the limit! Whether it’s an industry meetup, VC office hours, workshops, or a relaxed happy hour, the stage is yours. Design an event that truly reflects your brand’s vision and interests. At TechCrunch Disrupt, innovation has no limits.
Events can be hosted from October 26 through November 1, 2024, with the exception of conference hours on October 28-30. Evening events during these days are highly encouraged!
How to get involved
Ready to put your brand in the spotlight? Hosting a Side Event at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is simpler than you think. Submit your event proposal detailing your vision, objectives, and logistical needs. Once approved, you’ll receive full support from the TechCrunch Disrupt team to bring your event to life. Applications close in September!
The best part? It’s completely free to apply and participate. Don’t miss this chance to raise your brand’s profile at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 — apply now!
Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in April that Threads had more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 130 million reported in February.
Threads launched on July 3, 2023, at a time when users were looking for an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk introduced sweeping changes to the social network.
The updated metric comes as Musk recently claimed that X now reaches 600 million monthly active users, and that half of these users use the platform daily. It’s worth mentioning that Musk didn’t clarify if the number includes automated accounts or spam bots.
As part of today’s announcement, Meta revealed insights into how people are using Threads. Meta says most people are coming to Threads for text rather than images, noting that 63% of all Threads posts are text-only. But, that doesn’t mean images aren’t shared on Threads, as one in four posts include at least one image.
The company says more than 50 million Tags have been created, with the top three being PhotographyThreads, BookThreads and GymThreads.
While the metric of monthly active users alone isn’t enough to fully gauge how well Threads is doing, it does show that the platform has a notable amount of users checking it out. Part of Threads’ success is likely due to the fact that the platform is somewhat integrated and promoted within Instagram.
Since its launch, Threads has been introducing numerous requested features, such as a web app, trending topics and an edit button. Although the platform is looking to somewhat align its experience and features with X, it is staying away from political discourse. While Meta says it won’t amplify news in Threads, X remains the most popular platform for people to discuss live events like last week’s presidential debate.
Amazon has released an all-new version of its Echo Spot ahead of Prime Day, the company announced on Monday. The 2024 version of the Alexa-enabled smart alarm clock costs $79.99, but is currently on sale for $44.99 for Prime members.
The company says the latest iteration of the product comes with better visuals and improved audio quality. The device is available in Black, Glacier White and Ocean Blue.
The Echo Spot is designed to sit on your nightstand and features a display that lets you set and view alarms, and see the time, weather and song titles. It also features a 1.73” front-firing directional speaker that delivers “clear vocals and deep bass.”
Unlike the 2017 Echo Spot, the newest version doesn’t have an integrated camera for video calling. This change could be a welcome one, especially for people who didn’t want to have a device with a camera in their bedroom. And while the previous Echo Spot featured a full, circular screen, the latest version splits the front of the device with a speaker.
Image Credits: Amazon
The device is Alexa-enabled, so you can use your voice to set alarms. You also can ask Alexa to play a certain song, call someone, make household announcements and more.
Like its predecessor, the new Echo Spot can be customized. You can mix and match colors with a variety of clock faces or choose from six different color arrangements: magenta, violet, orange, lime, teal or blue.
Unlike Amazon’s Echo Show products, the Echo Spot’s display is designed to show animations as opposed to video. For instance, when you ask Alexa about the weather, the Echo Spot displays illustrations on the screen to reflect the weather alongside the temperature.
You also can connect Echo Spot to compatible smart home products and set up Alexa Routines to automate daily tasks.
