Category: TECHNOLOGY
German semiconductor giant Semikron says hackers encrypted its network
Semikron, a German manufacturer that produces semiconductors for electric vehicles and industrial automation systems, has confirmed it has fallen victim to a cyberattack that has resulted in data encryption.
“Semikron is already in the process of dealing with the situation so that workflows and all related processes can continue without disruption for both employees and customers as soon as possible,” a Semikron spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Semikron declined to disclose the nature of the cyberattack, but all signs point to ransomware. The semiconductor maker said in a statement that hackers claim to have “exfiltrated data from our system,” adding that the incident has led to a “partial encryption of our IT systems and files.” This suggests the malicious actor behind the attack has used the double extortion ransomware tactic, whereby cybercriminals exfiltrate a victim’s sensitive data in addition to encrypting it.
The Nuremberg-based group company, which claims to power 35% of the wind turbines installed globally each year, declined to say who was behind the attack nor whether it received a ransom demand. However, Bleeping Computer reports that Semikron was the victim of the LV ransomware, with the hackers apparently stealing 2 terabytes of documents.
LV ransomware has been in operation since at least 2020 and uses a modified variant of REvil ransomware, according to cybersecurity company Secureworks. According to the group’s dark web blog, which doesn’t yet list Semikron as a victim, the gang targets companies that allegedly do not meet data protection obligations.
“They rejected to fix their mistakes, they rejected to protect this data in the case when they could and had to protect it,” its dark web blog states. “These companies preferred to sell their private information, their employees’ and customers’ personal data.”
It’s unclear what data was exfiltrated from Semikron’s systems, and the company declined to say how many customers and employees are potentially impacted. Semikron has over 3,000 employees in 24 offices and 8 production sites worldwide across Germany, Brazil, China, France, India, Italy, Slovakia, and the United States.
“With the support of external cyber security and forensic experts, we are investigating the incident,” Semikron added. “At the same time, we are working to restore the ability to work in order to minimize the disruption to our employees, customers and partners and to ensure the security of our IT systems as best as possible.”
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/semikron-hackers-encrypted-electric-vehicles/
Aisera lands $90M to automate customer service requests with AI
“In some ways, Aisera competes with ServiceNow and Zendesk, but it’s also complementary to those solutions as we partner with them as well as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Cisco,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and differentiated with ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry … [We also do] AI learning and training on customer data sets to capture specific intents, phrases, utterances required for
Aisera, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI-driven” support ticketing system, today announced that it raised $90 million in Series D funding led by Goldman Sachs with participation from True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and others. CEO Muddu Sudhakar said the new cash will be put toward market expansion and supporting Aisera’s go-to-market strategy, in addition to investing in the company’s product development, R&D, sales and marketing initiatives.
Sudhakar says he built Aisera after perceiving the need for “predictive AI” solutions that could auto-resolve customer service, IT, sales and operations problems. Leveraging AI, the platform plugs into existing systems of record, including help desk portals, to respond to incoming inquiries and requests.
Sudhakar founded Aisera in 2017 alongside Christos Tryfonas, a longtime colleague. Sudhakar most recently led teams at ServiceNow and EMC, previously founding startups (Caspida, Cetas, Kazeon and Sanera Systems) that were acquired by VMware and Splunk. Tryfonas, a former AT&T Bell Labs researcher, worked with Sudhakar at several of his ventures before joining Aisera.
“We thought [the pandemic] would be a problem, but Aisera’s technology does very well in remote environments. Customers wanted AI and automation to drive user engagement and adoption,” Sudhakar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Now in the current market downturn, we’re seeing the need for cost reduction on licenses and people. This is driving demand for Aisera as we’re able to help organizations reduce costs for IT and business services.”
The way Sudhakar explains it, Aisera’s platform learns to resolve issues through a combination of language-analyzing AI and robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA technology attempts to mimic the way people interact with software to accomplish basic, repeatable tasks at scale. It’s not a particularly novel idea — RPA vendors, including Automation Anywhere and UiPath, claim to be able to do this to some extent. But Sudhakar asserts that Aisera’s brand of RPA is custom-built for customer/employee service use cases.
Image Credits: Aisera
“In some ways, Aisera competes with ServiceNow and Zendesk, but it’s also complementary to those solutions as we partner with them as well as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Cisco,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and differentiated with ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry … [We also do] AI learning and training on customer data sets to capture specific intents, phrases, utterances required for natural language processing and natural language understanding.”
When a request comes in via email, voice, a ticket or a chatroom, Aisera attempts to understand it by analyzing it with an algorithm trained to understand language. The platform then cross-references sources like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Confluence and SharePoint for customer data to personalize its replies to the request. After that step, Aisera creates a list of actions that need to be completed to fulfill the request, which it submits to a “workflow management” engine.
Aisera can return articles or snippets of articles from a company’s knowledge base that most …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/aisera-lands-90m-to-automate-customer-service-requests-with-ai/
Playstudios launches blockchain gaming division and $10M web3-focused fund
Playstudios, a publicly-traded mobile gaming platform and developer, is venturing into the web3 world with a new blockchain division and investment fund.
The gaming entity, which owns popular mobile apps like Tetris, is now launching a new blockchain-focused sector, which will use “rewarded play” to leverage blockchain technology and deliver more rewarding experiences to users across its portfolio of games. It’s also announced a $10 million investment, Future Fund, to back companies building rewarded play options.
In the past, the gaming studio accumulated a massive portfolio of free-to-play games – like MGM Slots Live, myVEGAS Slots, and others – that provide players the ability to earn real-world rewards through its loyalty program. To date, its community has used its in-app loyalty points to purchase over 10 million rewards, the company said.
“As we enter into the web3 space, we’ve kind of been doing play-to-earn for 10 years so I’d argue we’re the pioneers in the world of play,” Andrew Pascal, founder and CEO of Playstudios, said to TechCrunch. “We’ve spent a lot of our energy thinking about how to reward players in our games.
The new division will be built upon the acquisition of blockchain-based loyalty platform for games WonderBlocks, as well as a strategic alliance with blockchain infrastructure gaming developer Forte.
“A lot has been made in the promise of web3 games,” Pascal said. “The fact that people can acquire assets that are no longer specific to one game, it’s really massive that it can enrich over time as that asset can be incorporated and leveraged across games. Interoperability is one of the more exciting dimensions of what web3 gaming can unlock.”
Its fund has already made investments in blockchain gaming technology like Forte and will be used to grow its strategic innovation through blockchain loyalty and reward models, Pascal said.
Last month, industry players said that the web3 gaming industry is one of the few sectors seemingly less affected by current crypto market conditions due to gamers seeking out entertainment regardless of volatility, though overall sales volumes in the sector are still broadly slumping. The blockchain gaming space has continued to court attention over the past year as developers and funds alike continue to bank on the industry through new capital and innovations.
“It’s our intention to continue growing, adopting and diversifying our games and audiences and the things we offer our players,” Pascal said. “With the emergence of blockchain models and web3 space, we certainly have watched how it has evolved in all its different forms. We think we’ll have a unique take in the way we approach tokenizing our loyalty programs to continue to enrich the benefits for players.”
TikTok-style dating app Desti filters matches by date destinations
A new video-focused dating app Desti just launched over the weekend to give users a chance to find potential matches based on a preferred date destination. Users who live in the app’s debut market of Austin, Texas, can scroll through a vertical feed where profiles highlight what destinations (aka “destis”) they want to experience on a first date — whether that’s wake surfing at Lake Travis, trying a new sushi place or even going to a beer garden that allows dogs. The “destis” are discovered by swiping through in-house TikTok-style videos that show off the Austin area.
What also makes Desti different than other dating apps such as Tinder or Bumble is that it doesn’t have a “like” feature, so people are forced to start conversations. Users can send a message to the person, and the receiver can accept or reject the message. They can only see one at a time and must pass or reply to the message to move on to the next.
The app is initially available for iOS device users in the Austin area. It will be available on Android devices in the coming weeks. The startup plans on expanding to other areas down the road, it says.
The example below shows a video of the destination at the forefront, with the profile picture in the bottom left corner.
When setting up a profile, the user must pick three “destis,” selecting from categories like Breweries, Rooftops, Live Music, Food Trucks, Dog Dates, etc. There are also hundreds of prompts to choose from alongside the video such as “Someone teach me … ,” “The CDC recommends … ” or “Tonight we should … ” To complete their profile, the user uploads four photos and creates a bio.
Since so many millennials and Gen Z users turn to TikTok or Instagram to discover restaurants and new things to do in their area, Desti uses the same idea for its destination-based dating app.
“We decided to bet on short-form video being the future,” Nick Dominguez, COO and lead designer/developer of Desti told TechCrunch.
The company isn’t the only dating app to have TikTok-style videos as the focus. Snack, for instance, allows users to post videos to a feed and swipe on videos from potential matches. French app Feels had a similar idea.
When asked if each destination would have the address or descriptions, the company said this was something it was working on. Desti wants to build a more robust Discovery tab to allow users to browse different locations, venues, restaurants, events and local businesses.
Other features in the works include a subscription plan and paid features that will remove limitations such as daily message limits. Currently, users can …read more
Uber plans to sell 7.8% stake in Indian food delivery firm Zomato
Uber plans to sell its 7.8% holding in Indian food delivery firm Zomato as early as Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The ride-hailing giant, which acquired a stake in the Indian firm when it sold its local Uber Eats business to Zomato in early 2021, plans to sell its stake through a block deal of over $350 million, for which it is working with Bank of America Securities, the source said, requesting anonymity as the details are private.
The U.S. firm, which reported a net loss of $2.6 billion for the second quarter, said Tuesday that it assumed an unrealized loss of $707 million on its Zomato investment in the first half of this year and the quarter that ended in June 30, 2022.
Uber sold its food delivery business in India to the local rival Zomato for $206 million, following years of aggressive attempts to compete with local food giants Zomato and Swiggy. As part of the deal, Uber acquired a 9.99% stake in the loss-making Indian food delivery startup. Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shares of Zomato have been performing poorly throughout this year and tumbled to an all-time low last week after the end of the lock-in period of investors who had stakes in the company prior to the initial public offering.
The stock closed at 55.55 Indian rupees (72 cents) apiece Tuesday, giving the company a market cap of $5.5 billion, far below the $13.2 billion valuation it accrued on its debut day a year ago. Zomato said on Tuesday that it aims to reach EBIDTA break-even by the Q4 of next year and it had downgraded its investment in quick commerce Blinkit from $400 million to $320 million.
Spread eyes strawberries and alternative meat following Series A raise
Over the past decade and a half, Spread has become the most recognizable name in Japan’s vertical framing ecosystem. The Kyoto-based firm opened its first farm in 2007 and six years later claimed to be the first company in the space to achieve profitability. That’s no mean feat, given the considerable overhead that goes into launching a fully automated indoor farm and the extremely low ROI per head of lettuce.
Spread has also been pushing to bring down the cost of its produce over the past decade. Vertical farming may be a novelty with its own built-in advantages (less water and land use, no pesticides, etc.), but being truly competitive on the grocery store shelves means — at very least — matching the price of existing produce.
While the company is fairly mature in terms of timeline and indoor farm automation, further accelerating its technology and properly marketing its store brand Vegetus still requires some substantial funding at this stage. This week, Spread announced that it has raise a 4 billion yen (~$30.5 million) Series A aimed and leveling the offerings up.
The company notes,
Since its establishment, Spread has always strived to create a sustainable society where future generations can attain peace of mind. Currently Spread works toward its 2030 goal of 100 tons of lettuce daily production domestically. To answer the world’s growing needs of food supply, Spread is widening its product range by working on fruits and alternative meat, and is looking to expand globally in the future.
Currently Spread specializes in lettuce, but it’s working on joining a handful of fellow indoor farming companies with the release of vertically grown strawberries. It also has alternative meats on the roadmap, though there’s no indication how far off those might be.
As a sector, vertical farming has grown rapidly in Japan. The 2011 tsunami that led to the Fukushima power plant disaster has been viewed by many as a major driver in interest around alternative methods of growing. The country’s aging population has impacted its agricultural industry as well, putting the average age of a Japanese farm at around 67 years old.
Aurora Hydrogen raises $10M, but will its process decarbonize or facilitate tar sand exploitation?
A number of startups have cropped up to tackle the challenge of making hydrogen cheap and accessible for industrial users, including the latest, Aurora Hydrogen.
The startup announced a $10 million Series A yesterday led by Energy Innovation Capital and joined by Williams Companies, Shell Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.
Aurora said its microwave-based approach can make hydrogen using 80% less electricity than the cleanest form of hydrogen production and with less carbon emissions than the cheapest.
Spinach.io wants to help agile engineering teams run better online meetings
During the pandemic as businesses moved online, Spinach.io co-founder and CEO Matan Talmi observed that engineering teams had a specific set of needs for online meetings than other teams. At about the same time, he noted that Zoom was releasing Zoom Apps to help developers build meeting-focused applications on top of the Zoom platform.
He and his co-founders decided to build a meeting tool designed specifically for engineers using agile methodology to run stand-up meetings online. They wanted to bring a level of automation to the stand-up by integrating with Slack, Jira and other tools engineers use to track their projects, and last year they began building the product. Today, the startup announced a $6 million seed, which is a combination of funding it has received since launching in 2021.
“What we were trying to do here is really solve a very specific use case for engineering teams that follow the Scrum Agile development process. They have unique meetings and workflows around those development sprints and require specific experiences to really provide deep value,” Talmi told TechCrunch.
He said that while anyone can benefit from organizing meetings with a specific agenda and shared meeting notes, Spinach is focusing on the standup meeting that agile engineering teams start each day with. “We started with one very specific meeting type, which is the daily stand up, and which is at the core of a good development sprint, the daily check. This is where the teams meet every morning, and so we built it as an experience that specifically facilitates that kind of meeting and helps you run it on autopilot,” he said.
Because it integrates with project management software like Jira, it can pull in the goals from the previous day, the goals for the current day and any blockers the team might have that are preventing them from meeting their goals. It’s also integrated with Slack to move information back and forth in the engineering communications channel.
Image Credits: Spinach.io
While it is integrated natively in Zoom, it can run with other online meeting tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet with the web tool. It also has plans to integrate with other project management tools like ClickUp, Asana and Monday.com and other services engineering teams tend to use like Figma, Notion and GitHub over time.
The company is also publicly announcing the tool today for the first time, but it has been working in private beta for some time and has 100 teams working with the tool including teams at Wix, Fiverr and Rappi.
He said the engineering standup meeting is the first use case, but he envisions expanding the product to incorporate other engineering meetings over time. The company recently completed a stint at Y Combinator as part of the Winter 2022 cohort.
Talmi says that the experience at YC showed he was onto something with this idea. “When we had our early conversation with the Y Combinator founders, they were really excited about what we were doing …read more
Writer’s GPT-powered CoWrite handles content ‘drudgery’ and leaves creativity to humans
I wouldn’t know about the newsletter since I leave that particular drudgery to my colleagues, but it’s true that there’s a lot of rote work in any writing that can be minimized if you’re working from an existing framework. Even a rough outline helps, but the problem is that someone has to make the outline — drudgery again.
CoWrite isn’t meant to just blast out final copy, though GPT-3 with a bit of tuning could probably do that, depending on your expectations. In this case it’s more about producing a plausible blog post or newsletter that a content team can look at and say “something along these lines, but you actually wrote it.”
Animation showing how a blog post might be drafted out using CoWrite. Image Credits: Writer
There are others working in this space — actually, it might be more accurate to say nearly every large company working in large language models is at least looking into it. But Habib said that it’s not just about having the capability, but integrating it with existing workflows at companies where content is a major factor.
“Most people that we talk to have access to the GPT-3 API, so they aren’t hearing about it for the first time. They’ve played with calls to the models themselves,” she said. “The difference for Writer is, this is an application meant for content people; it’s integrated with their style guide, taking their brand guidelines, branding tools, taxonomy. The interface is there already: We’re talking about three clicks from training headlines to generating them. There’s no one doing that right now.”
While this may bring to mind the “shitty dystopian ad-filled future” we all fear from language generators run amok, Habib believes that is closer to the early days of robotic process automation. The most likely outcome, as with automation at large, is that the “dirty, dangerous and dull” jobs will be left behind, which in the content world is stuff like doing a bullet outline for the weekly newsletter — dangerous, no, but certainly dull.
Writer is an AI-powered tool for checking and guiding content creators in organizations where voice and branding are essential. Its new feature CoWrite does that writing itself — but don’t worry, this isn’t quite the content apocalypse we’ve been worried about.
CoWrite is the latest in a new wave of tools that use large language models like GPT-3, but modify them using “fine tuning,” a common phrase but with a special meaning in the machine learning world. Basically it means giving the big, general model a specific set of content to imitate more closely than the rest of the language it understands — a bit like telling an image creation model to make a picture in a certain style by feeding it examples.
Writer’s tools already do this to a certain extent, ingesting style guides and other data to provide a live style-check service: “use this preferred word instead of that,” or “use active voice in headlines,” depending on what your organization likes.
But as founder and CEO May Habib explained, organizations with a strong brand presence are finding themselves underwater.
“The number of channels that they have to be present in continuously is just exploding. No matter how big a team is, they can’t keep up,” she said.
Writer’s solution is to use a fine-tuned GPT-3 model to straight-up generate the content in question, but with the understanding that it’s very much human-in-the-loop. Though Habib prefers the term “content automation” over “generated content,” since the latter has something of a negative connotation.
“The most important stuff is being done by people,” she emphasized. “When you put together a newsletter, half of it is drudgery, right? This is about freeing those people up to do the most creative part of their jobs, the campaigns, the strategy to win eyeballs, by operationalizing the things that work. This is for established, sophisticated content teams trying to do more.”
Image Credits: Writer
I wouldn’t know about the newsletter since I leave that particular drudgery to my colleagues, but it’s true that there’s a lot of rote work in any writing that can be minimized if you’re working from an existing framework. Even a rough outline helps, but the problem is that someone has to make the outline — drudgery again.
CoWrite isn’t meant to just blast out final copy, though GPT-3 with a bit of tuning could probably do that, depending on your expectations. In this case it’s more about producing a plausible blog post or newsletter that a content team can look at and say “something along these lines, but you actually wrote it.”
Animation showing how a blog post might be drafted out using CoWrite. Image Credits: Writer
There are others working in this space — actually, it might be more accurate to say nearly every large company working in large language models is at least …read more
How NFTs fit into the comic book creator economy
Hello and welcome back to Found, the podcast where we share the stories behind the startups.
In this episode, we’re talking about the creator economy and one of the most neglected creator categories — the comic book. Comics are the foundation for so many movies, TV shows and video games however creators still struggle to be fairly compensated for their material. Chris Giliberti founded Zestworld, a creator-centered platform that offers solutions for the artist to publish their work, manage commissioned artwork and own their IP and licensing. In this episode Chris and Darrell nerd out about upcoming projects, the best ways to monetize digital custom art through the blockchain and building a community online that feels like walking through your local comic book store. Jordan is also there, just not nerding out because she has yet to find the comic book for her.
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