Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM, the afternoon equivalent to our daily newsletter bringing you all the startup, venture capital and Big Tech news. Today, we just so happen to have a lot of Big Tech. We cover Mistral AI, a startup taking on some of the biggest LLM companies; a big M&A deal; and a news reader. And we catch up on what the TechCrunch team is covering at Mobile World Congress.

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TechCrunch PM Top 3

A large language model to rival OpenAI: Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is launching Mistral Large, a new flagship large language model that is designed to rival OpenAI and Anthropic. There’s also an alternative to ChatGPT called Le Chat. How has the company been able to do this? For starters, the founders are from the likes of Google’s DeepMind and Meta. It also raised an extreme amount of seed capital.

KKR to acquire VMware unit: Among the multibillion-dollar M&A pool of deals we are seeing lately, KKR is jumping in with the acquisition of VMware’s end user computing business. It is expected to pay Broadcom $4 billion for it.

Ransomware attack blamed for Change Healthcare outage: We have an update for you on the ongoing cyberattack affecting U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare. We’ve learned it was caused by ransomware and is being attributed to the BlackCat ransomware group. It’s still not known if patient data was stolen.

More top reads

FlowGPT is the Wild West of GenAI apps: OpenAI’s GPT Store is great; however, not everyone wants to only use OpenAI’s models. FlowGPT decided to create its own app store for generative AI models where users can build their own apps, make them public and earn tips for their contributions.

Meet Particle, a new AI news reader: Some former Twitter engineers are out to use AI to help people process news and information. Called Particle.news, the startup entered into private beta with a personalized “multi-perspective” news reading experience where AI will summarize the news for you. It also claims to do so in a way that fairly compensates authors and publishers.

BLKFAM launches kids’ programming: BLKFAM, which considers its platform “the first and only Black-owned and Black-focused family streaming service,” launched with over 1,000 hours of kid-friendly animation titles. The free, ad-supported family streaming service is backed by Whoopi Goldberg, who is also BLKFAM’s creative director. More original live-action and animated series are set to debut throughout 2024.

Meta drops lawsuit against Bright Data: Meta has decided not to move forward with a lawsuit against Israeli web-scraping company Bright Data, which was accused of scraping Meta’s own data when Meta was a customer. It may be that Meta also didn’t like that the court recently ruled in favor of Bright Data on a breach of contract claim, saying that Meta hadn’t presented sufficient evidence that proved the firm had scraped anything other than public data.

UiPath pivots: After Rob Enslin joined the enterprise SaaS company as co-CEO in 2022, he went to work reorganizing the company’s structure, sales motion and product focus. Today, its growth rates have not only bounced back to double digits, but have also posted consecutive quarters of accelerating growth.

Things are not going well for ConnectWise: Two of the popular remote-access tool’s easy-to-exploit flaws are now “being mass exploited, with hackers abusing the vulnerabilities to deploy ransomware and steal sensitive data.” We still don’t know the extent of the damage, but given the number of devices, it could be in the millions.

Speaking of hacks: Days after the notorious Russia-based LockBit ransomware group was knocked offline by a sweeping, years-in-the-making law enforcement operation, it has returned to the dark web with a new leak site and new victims. I think LockBit rather enjoys a good cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement, don’t you?

Instagram and its Friend Map feature: Want to know where your friends are? Instagram is working on a feature for that. Should the feature go public, it would be copying from Snapchat, but also appealing to people who want to tell their friends about a swinging hotspot.

Before you go

Mobile World Congress is taking place this week in Barcelona, and we have a team bringing you all the products, announcements and startup news from the conference. Some of the highlights include Xiaomi’s first electric car, Microsoft’s new AI access principles designed to offset any OpenAI competition concerns and Samsung’s first smart ring.

On the pods

Today on Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines, Alex Wilhelm looked back at the weekend and what’s ahead for this week. Here’s what we got into:

• We have a big earnings week, with Workday, Zoom, Unity, Coupang, Klaviyo, Salesforce, Snowflake, Okta and Duolingo, among other names, sharing their quarterly data.
• Google, and its work to bring Gemini to a host of hardware endpoints.
• Why U.S.-based venture capitalists face a host of troubles in conquering Europe.
• Interview Kickstart is the latest startup to self-fund for a long time before taking on venture capital. In its case, that patience has led to a $10 million round.
• And to close, who is the CEO of Byju’s?

Listen here.

• Product Manager at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Senior Cloud Engineer at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Engineering Manager at Murmuration (USA)
• Consultant - Workday Implementation Project Manager at Central Park Conservancy (non-profit organization) (New York, NY, USA)
• Enterprise Software & Service Manager at Valley Water (San Jose, CA, USA)

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