Snap is launching new Lens Studio tools that AR creators and developers can use to build Bitmoji games, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The company is also releasing a Bitmoji Suite as well as new assets for games.
With Lens Studio 5.10, the new games assets offer developers new ways to build dynamic games Lenses, the company said. We’re getting a turn-based system to enable back-and-forth gameplay, as well as the ability to Snap and respond to a challenge or turn in the same game.
There’s also a new customizable Character Controller that supports different gameplay styles, including third-person, first-person, side-scroller, and top-down perspectives. The leaderboard has also been updated with new templates for start and end screens, a standardized and hybrid view of friends and global scores, and new friend-related metrics, like “friends who have played.”
The Bitmoji Suite brings new tools for personalizing and animating Bitmoji. Users can now design custom outfits for Bitmoji, generate stylized props, and animate them using Snap’s library.
The company is also launching a new collection of single-player and turn-based Bitmoji Game Lenses that users can play and challenge friends in. The new Lenses include Bitmoji Bistro, Bitmoji Buckets, and Beatmoji Blast.
Users can already play a number of game Lenses built by AR developers, but this is the first time Snap has introduced a collection of Bitmoji Game Lenses designed around challenging your friends.
“Lens Studio empowers our vibrant community of over 375,000 AR creators, developers, and teams to seamlessly build and publish Lenses, so we’re excited to give them even more tools to create,” the company said in an email to TechCrunch.
Snapchat also said that developers can register for a chance to win cash prizes for using Bitmoji Suite and Games assets with its Bitmojiverse Challenge.
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Indian grocery delivery startup KiranaPro has been hacked and all its data has been wiped, the company’s founder confirmed to TechCrunch.
The destroyed data included the company’s app code and its servers containing banks of sensitive customer information, including their names, mailing addresses, and payment details, KiranaPro co-founder and CEO Deepak Ravindran told TechCrunch.
The company’s app is online but cannot process orders, TechCrunch has found.
Launched in December 2024, KiranaPro operates as a buyer app on the Indian government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce, allowing customers to purchase groceries from their local shops and nearby supermarkets.
KiranaPro has 55,000 customers, with 30,000-35,000 active buyers across 50 cities, who collectively place 2,000 orders daily, according to the company. Unlike a typical grocery delivery app, KiranaPro offers a voice-based interface that allows users to place orders from local shops using voice commands in languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and English.
The startup planned to expand to 100 cities in the next 100 days before the incident happened, Ravindran said.
On May 26, KiranaPro executives became aware of the incident while logging into their Amazon Web Services account. Hackers had gained access to KiranaPro’s root accounts on AWS and GitHub, Ravindran told TechCrunch.
Ravindran shared a couple of screenshots of the GitHub security logs and a file containing a sample of activity logs around the time of the incident, suggesting that the hacking happened after someone gained access to their systems via a former employee’s account.
KiranaPro’s chief technology officer Saurav Kumar told TechCrunch that the hack happened around May 24-25.
The startup said it used Google Authenticator for multi-factor authentication on its AWS account. Kumar told TechCrunch that the multi-factor code had changed when they tried to log into their AWS account last week, and all their Electric Compute Cloud (EC2) services, which let clients access virtual computers to run their applications, were deleted.
“We can only log in through the IAM [Identity and Access Management] account, through which we can see that the EC2 instances don’t exist anymore, but we are not able to get any logs or anything because we don’t have the root account,” he said.
KiranaPro has reached out to GitHub’s support team to help identify the hacker’s IP addresses and other traces of the incident, said Ravindran.
Similarly, Ravindran told TechCrunch that the startup is filing cases against its former employees, who he said had not submitted their credentials for accessing their GitHub accounts to check their logs.
It is unclear how the attack happened. Some of the biggest cyberattacks in recent years, such as LastPass, Change Healthcare, and Snowflake, were caused by credential theft, such as through password-stealing malware installed on an employee’s laptop, and missing or unenforced multi-factor authentication.
The companies were ultimately responsible for enforcing the security of their own systems, including whether their employees must use multi-factor authentication, and terminating accounts of former employees who no longer work at their company.
KiranaPro counts Blume Ventures, Unpopular Ventures, and Turbostart among its institutional venture backers, as well as Olympic medalist PV Sindhu and BCG MD Vikas Taneja among its angel investors. The company has a team of 15 employees located in Bengaluru and Kerala.
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Compliance company Vanta has confirmed that a bug exposed the private data of some of its customers to other Vanta customers. The company told TechCrunch that the data exposure was a result of a product code change and not caused by an intrusion.
Vanta, which helps corporate customers automate their security and compliance processes, said it identified an issue on May 26 and that remediation will complete June 4.
The incident resulted in “a subset of data from fewer than 20% of our third-party integrations being exposed to other Vanta customers,” according to the statement attributed to Vanta’s chief product officer Jeremy Epling.
Epling said fewer than 4% of Vanta customers were affected, and have all been notified. Vanta has more than 10,000 customers, according to its website, suggesting the data exposure likely affects hundreds of Vanta customers.
One customer affected by the incident told TechCrunch that Vanta had notified them of the data exposure. The customer said Vanta told them that “employee account data was erroneously pulled into your Vanta instance, as well as out of your Vanta instance into other customers’ instances.”
The customer told TechCrunch that Vanta’s notice said this type of data “generally includes” information like employee names, roles, and information about configurations of some tools, such as the use of multi-factor authentication.
When asked by TechCrunch, Vanta spokesperson Erin Cheng would not say what types of customers’ data were involved during the incident or comment on whether Vanta employee data was exposed.
Founded in 2018, Vanta has raised more than $350 million to date, including $150 million in its most recent Series C funding round in July 2024.
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