Friday, June 28, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM, and a Happy Friday to you all. This morning, we have hot news on TeamViewer getting compromised by a Russian hacking group, more money (and jobs) for robots, and fresh capital for a grocery delivery startup that bakes its own bread. We've also got a roundup of the hottest tech gadgets of 2024 so far, a new insurance product for expats, and how AI is already adding to the disinformation around the U.S. presidential debate. Let's dive in! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Andreas Arnold / Getty Images

1. Hackers backed by Russian intelligence are attacking TeamViewer, the company that makes the widely used remote access tools of the same name. TeamViewer attributed the cyberattack on its corporate network to hackers known as APT 29 (and Midnight Blizzard). TC's Zack Whittaker says this is the world's most sophisticated hacking group so far, meaning TeamViewer may take a long time to recover. Read More

2. There's still money in grocery delivery startups: Many grocery delivery startups have died out, but the few that survived are starting to see gains and seek more growth. Czech startup Rohlik just raised $170 million in fresh capital. Rohlik's model seems to be working: it runs smaller warehouses and fills them with goods from local producers and sellers, rather than trying to reproduce what large supermarkets do. It also bakes its own bread at its distribution centers. Read More

3. Gadgets and gizmos: It's only June and we already have scores of hot new tech products in the market from Apple, Google, Microsoft and other players. Don't have time to sort through them all? That's okay, we've done it for you: Here's our pick of the most important and most interesting products released this year. Read More

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Morning Must Reads

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Robotics investments are ramping up: Investors seem to be in love with robots. The first half of 2024 has already seen robotics startups rake in $4.2 billion, and per Crunchbase, the second half of 2024 is on track to beat last year's numbers. If things keep up, and it looks like they will, it's going to be a great recovery from the one-two punch of economic headwinds and post-pandemic reopenings of the past couple years. Read More

We all gotta start somewhere: It's a humble start, but Agility's humanoid robot, Digit, has landed a gig moving totes around a Georgia Spanx factory. The system is being leased as part of a RaaS (Robots-as-a-Service) model, so the client can defer the massive upfront costs to Agility while still getting access to support and software updates. Read More

AI to transform tedium into insights: Sifting through dense regulatory and legal filings is not only boring and tedious, but also unnecessary in the age of AI. Hebbia, a startup using generative AI to search large documents and return answers, agrees. The startup says its AI can look over billions of documents at once and answer specific questions about them. Hebbia just raised nearly $100 million in a round led by Andreesen Horowitz. Read More

Insurance for expats: Navigating health insurance can be difficult for tourists and expats. German startup Feather understands that and has raised €6 million to help expats working and living in Europe get access to private health insurance that meets their individual needs, with the option to add things like life, pet, automotive and personal liability insurance. Read More

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Around the Web

Amazon investigates Perplexity: AWS has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI to determine whether the AI startup violated the tech giant's rules by scraping websites that didn't want their content crawled, reports Wired. Forbes has accused the AI startup of plagiarism, and Wired found that Perplexity appears to rely on content from scraped websites that had wanted some parts of their sites to be excluded from being crawled. Read More

ChatGPT adds to the cacophony: The presidential debate, for those who could stand to watch it, was a horror show. And OpenAI and Microsoft are making it worse, reports NBC News. Both of their chatbots – ChatGPT and Copilot – spat out false information about the debate just hours after it first appeared online. The worst part is, they both included links to back up their false claims. There's enough misinformation going around on social media. We don't need AI adding to the noise. Read More

How AI revolutionized protein science: Scientists have long been stumped by the protein folding problem, which is: How does a one-dimensional string of molecules fold correctly into its three-dimensional shape? Three years ago, Google's AlphaFold solved that problem, pulling off one of the biggest AI breakthroughs in science. As Quanta Magazine reports, that breakthrough has not replaced biological experiments, but rather emphasized the need for them, pointing to a path to more breakthroughs. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Leon Neal / Getty Images

Everything you need to know about ChatGPT: OpenAI's ChatGPT has turned the world upside down since its launch in November 2022. What started as a productivity tool has morphed into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. And it's still growing, as OpenAI releases new foundational models and products, and embroils itself in more drama. It's hard to keep track of it all, but that's why we're here with a rundown of all the product updates and releases to date. Read More