During last week’s GlowTime event, Apple announced that iOS 18 will include a feature allowing users with mild to moderate hearing loss to use AirPods as hearing aids.
But Apple was still waiting on approval from the FDA — approval that was announced just a couple days later. The FDA describing this as the first “over-the-counter hearing aid software,” and one of its leaders suggested that this could be “another step that advances the availability, accessibility and acceptability of hearing support for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss.”
TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tried out an incomplete version of the feature last week. It won’t be available to folks with standard AirPods like the ones I’m wearing now; you’ll need the company’s latest premium earbuds, the AirPods Pro 2, because the feature takes advantage of the Pro’s passive noise cancellation and the H2 chip.
On today’s TechCrunch Minute, we discuss how Apple’s hearing test works and how the market for hearing aids is changing.
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Earlier this year, former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick launched his AI startup, Lumi. Kaepernick has had thousands of stories written about him, and he knows a thing or two about losing control of his narrative. Now with Lumi, he’s trying to help creators take control of their own narratives, offering AI tools to write and take ownership of their stories.
We’re thrilled to welcome Kaepernick to the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco, where we’ll discuss his run-ins with the media industry, the problems creators face today, and how Lumi is trying to empower its storytellers. We’ll also discuss how Kaepernick’s company is addressing the biases that plague AI models throughout the tech industry.
While many of us know Kaepernick for his Super Bowl XLVII performance or his kneel to protest racial injustice, you may be surprised to know that he’s been quietly angel investing in Silicon Valley startups since 2017. He previously told TechCrunch he has more than 50 investments to date.
He’s also become a well-rounded media executive over the last decade. The former NFL quarterback founded and runs Kaepernick Media and Kaepernick Publishing, where he sees the media industry’s deeply entrenched problems firsthand. He also sits on the board of Medium alongside a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, who Kaepernick calls a mentor in navigating Silicon Valley.
Lumi tries to give creators more tools that were previously only available through big media companies. The startup is starting by focusing on the world of Japanese comic books, also known as manga. Some of Lumi’s tools use AI, helping storytellers with the ideation process, writing, and generating images of characters. Other tools don’t involve AI, such as publishing resources and merchandising assistance. Kaepernick also describes Lumi’s platform as a destination, where viewers can come to browse through content from a diverse group of creators.
It’s a broad and ambitious idea from someone with experience inside and outside the media industry. We’ll ask him all about how these plans are going.
You definitely won’t want to miss it. Join over 10,000 startup, tech, and VC leaders at Disrupt 2024, where you’ll engage in inspiring conversations with industry giants like Kaepernick. Secure your tickets now before prices increase at the door.
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AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the very aptly named OpenSearch Foundation.
AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed its license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors opted for similar changes, largely in an effort to prevent the large cloud providers — and especially AWS — from offering hosted services based on their software.
Somewhat ironically, this move comes only a few weeks after Elastic announced that it would once again offer Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, the AGPL, which requires its users to publish all of their source code if they made any changes. Interestingly, though, Elastic opted to make this an option that will be available in parallel with its own more restrictive license because, as the company said, “we have people that really like ELv2.”
When AWS created OpenSearch, there was quite a bit of skepticism around the project. For the most part, after all, AWS had never managed such a large project. Mukul Karnik, AWS’ general manager for its search services, acknowledged as much.
“When we created OpenSearch at that time, it was new for Amazon and AWS to take over an open source project and grow it,” he told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “From early on, our goal was to be community-driven and see how we can get more community members be part of the project and contribute.”
Karnik noted that AWS has progressively opened up the project, encouraging both contributions and broader governance. “It became more organic, in some ways, where we are doing these organic steps to figure out how to get more people to be part of the project.”
With today’s launch, a number of other large companies, including SAP and Uber are joining the Foundation as premier members, with Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 joining as general members.
Karnik noted that AWS expects to grow its contributions to OpenSearch.
Back in 2021, a foundation wasn’t on the roadmap yet, but bringing the project into its own foundation now feels like the natural next step, Karnik said. He also noted that the OpenSearch ecosystem has added quite a few of its own innovations to the project, including moving it from a cluster-based system to a more cloud-native architecture. He also noted that the project recently introduced updates like the separation of compute and storage, as well as segment replication. With the advent of AI, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also increased, Karnik said.
The new Foundation will follow the usual Linux Foundation governance model, with a governing board and a technical steering committee.
“The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open and collaborative development around open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we all rely on every day, for both business and consumer purposes, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them provide powerful search and analytics tools for organizations and individuals around the world.”
Like with so many similar foundations, one of the reasons why AWS decided to contribute the project now is to gain access to the services and expertise of the Linux Foundation in managing and growing open-source projects. In addition, this move helps OpenSearch shed its perception as primarily an AWS-driven project, a crucial step for continued growth and broader adoption.
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Insight Partners is reportedly on the cusp of on more than $10 billion in capital commitments for its 13th fund, per the FT.
The FT report notes that two of Insight’s portfolio companies were acquired in the last week. One of these, the threat intelligence company Recorded Future, which sold to Mastercard for $2.65 billion, was wholly owned by Insight Partners; it acquired the company in 2019 for $780 million.
The other, Own, a startup specializing in tools for backing up data in cloud-based applications, sold to Salesforce for $1.9 billion, roughly half the $3.5 billion valuation it was assigned by investors in 2021.
Insight, which is headquartered in New York and whose current portfolio includes the buzzy cybersecurity outfit Wiz, may ultimately close its new fund with roughly $12 billion, says the FT. That’s a big number but still far less than the $20 billion that Insight announced for its 12th fund in 2022, when fundraising was in overdrive across the venture industry.
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Platforms to connect apps that wouldn’t normally talk to each other have been around for a minute (see: Zapier). But they have not gotten dramatically simpler to use if you’re nontechnical. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry somewhat. However, getting the most out of these platforms — and fixing things when they break — still requires a bit of programming know-how.
Software developers Sam Brashears and Edward Frazer perceived this to be the case as well. During internships at tech giants like Meta and Stripe, they struggled to get automations working using some of the more popular app-linking tools.
“I’d been dealing with the pain of designing integrations and automations from scratch,” Frazer told TechCrunch in an interview. “And Sam believed that generative AI models would solve the biggest problem in integrations — transforming data between APIs.”
So Brashears and Frazer, longtime friends who’d been building software together since elementary school, decided to try their hands at a streamlined, easy-to-use app-to-app integration platform.
DryMerge is the fruit of their work. A chatbot for building workflows, DryMerge lets you describe an automation you want between apps — for instance, “Whenever I get an email from a new prospect, ping the team on Slack and add them to HubSpot” — and handles the necessary technical scaffolding.
“Currently, IT departments use complicated no-code tools to automate workflows on behalf of non-IT teams,” Frazer said. “A natural language interface opens up automation to nontechnical people.”
It sounded like a neat idea, a chatbot that can string apps together for you — particularly if you, like me, have spent countless hours wrestling with IFTTT. So, I decided to give DryMerge a go, hoping to replace my old and rickety automations once and for all.
DryMerge’s UI is quite clean and minimalist. It reminds me a bit of ChatGPT; there’s not much to look at besides a text bot. Each new request (e.g., “Text me a summary of my calendar meetings every morning”) starts a new chat session, and these sessions can be revisited at any time from a list on the left-side panel.
DryMerge hooks into an expanding library of apps, including Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive, social media platforms (e.g., X), and messaging clients (e.g., Discord). Once the platform creates an automation with these, it plops that automation into a dedicated window showing when the automation last run and whether DryMerge encountered any errors.
I tried setting up a few automations I thought might be useful for a reporter with an overfull schedule, like one to throw Gmail contacts into a spreadsheet and add dates from recent email invitations to a Google Calendar. Things started out promising — DryMerge had me log into the relevant apps and asked whether I’d like to test the automations to ensure everything was working properly.
But then, problems started to crop up.
Several times, DryMerge’s chatbot stopped responding altogether. Other times, it missed key details in a request. I tried repeatedly to get DryMerge to understand that I wanted to copy Gmail contacts to my Google Calendar, but every attempt, it thought I wanted to manually enter contacts into a spreadsheet.
The setbacks didn’t completely ruin my DryMerge experience. Giving credit where it’s due, the platform’s nifty when it works. For example, I successfully got DryMerge to set up an automation that copies posts from my X account to the personal Discord server I use to aggregate various notifications. A niche use case? Perhaps. But it’s going to save this reporter a lot of task switching.
The bugs, Frazer assures me, will be addressed in time. He and Brashears are DryMerge’s only employees, so there’s lots on the to-do list.
“We think we’re well-positioned to iterate quickly and nimbly,” Frazer said.
Assuming Frazer and Brashears can get DryMerge’s platform in good working condition, the bigger challenge the duo will have to face is staying relevant in the fiercely competitive integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) space. According to recent poll released by IDG and TeamDynamix, iPaaS is one of the fastest-growing software markets, projected to reach $2.7 billion this year.
AWS has its own iPaaS called AppFabric. IBM recently acquired iPaaS tech from Software AG. A growing number of startups aside from DryMerge are attempting to break into the segment, while incumbents like Zapier and IFTTT are aggressively deploying generative AI capabilities.
Frazer makes the case that DryMerge’s differentiator is — and will remain — “being 10x easier to use” than drag-and-drop integration builders.
“Our users include online fashion retailers, school administrators, and asset managers — the vast majority of which have never touched a line of code,” he said. “They use us to save hours a day on tasks ranging from customer support automation to customer relationship management data entry.”
Frazer’s not wrong about the opportunity. Per the IDG and TeamDynamix poll, 66% percent of companies said that they’ll invest in iPaaS to address internal automation and data integration challenges.
“We think a gigantic enterprise opportunity is in increasing the simplicity of automation and delivering easy-to-use tooling that empowers nontechnical folks,” Frazer said.
It’s very early days for DryMerge, which only has around 2,000 users at present. But the company was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, and DryMerge this past summer closed a $2.2 million seed round led by Garage Capital with participation from Goodwater Capital, Ritual Capital, and angels whose names Frazer wouldn’t reveal.
Frazer says that the funds are being put toward adding new app integrations and doubling the size of DryMerge’s team in the next few months.
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Lawyers representing Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX CEO and co-founder who was convicted of fraud and money laundering late last year, are seeking a new trial.
Following crypto exchange FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all seven counts, then sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture. He has been serving his sentence in Brooklyn.
Bloomberg reports that Bankman-Fried’s appeal focuses on the behavior of US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, alleging that Kaplan’s rulings were “not just erroneous but unbalanced” and that the judge “continually ridiculed Bankman-Fried during trial, repeatedly criticized his demeanor, and signaled his disbelief of Bankman-Fried’s testimony.”
The appeal also claims that Kaplan “repeatedly mocked defense counsel” while helping the government make its case, and that he “improperly prodded” jurors to reach a quick verdict.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers are seeking a new trial under a new judge. The U.S. attorney’s office that prosecuted the case said it does not plan to comment on the filing.
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