GoKawiil
Tech News
Presentation software company Gamma has acquired Lica, an Accel-backed startup that turned screenshots and recordings into branded marketing videos for e-commerce clients. Lica's co-founders, Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, will now lead a new design research division inside Gamma focused on visual communication and AI.
In a new essay, Paul Graham says Y Combinator's decades of experience selecting founders show that the best preparation for startup success is deep technical or creative skill, not a formal entrepreneurship curriculum. He argues universities should keep teaching subjects like computer science, engineering and molecular biology, since founders succeed by building products customers want, not by studying management or finance.
TechCrunch is selling Expo Hall exhibit tables for Disrupt 2026, taking place October 13-15 at San Francisco's Moscone West. Tables start at $12,500 and include a 6'x30" setup with furnishings, 10 event passes, lead-generation tools via the event app, press list access, and sponsor branding. The offer closes September 25 or once tables sell out, whichever happens first.
General Intuition, a New York startup building foundation models for AI agents that navigate space and time, is reportedly negotiating a new funding round at a $6 billion pre-money valuation. New backers reportedly include Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures and Seven Seven Six, alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, just weeks after the company raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation.
South Korea's government-backed startup support platform, Modu-ui Changup, suffered a data breach that exposed personal information and startup idea summaries of roughly 5,000 successful applicants. Investigators from the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, National Intelligence Service, Cyber Security Center and National Police Agency traced the root cause to an encryption key that had been embedded in an API response, allowing an outside party to harvest it via web crawling and decrypt supposedly protected data.