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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Agriculture Department is ending two pandemic-era programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers and producers. About $660 million of that went to schools and childcare centers to buy food for meals through the Local Foods for Schools program. A separate program provided money to food banks. In Maine, the money allowed the coastal RSU 23 school district to buy food directly from fisherman, dairy producers and farmers for school meals, said Caroline Trinder, the district’s food and nutrition services director. “I think everyone can…

Back in 2019, Microsoft open-sourced Dapr, a new runtime for making building distributed microservice-based applications easier. At the time, nobody was talking about AI agents yet, but as it turns out, Dapr had some of the fundamental building blocks for supporting AI agents built-in from the outset. That’s because one of Dapr’s core features is a concept of virtual actors, which can receive and process messages, independently from all the other actors in the system. Today, the Dapr team is launching Dapr Agents, its take on helping developers build AI agents by providing them with a lot of the building…

Identity and risk management startup 360 Privacy this week announced raising $36 million in equity investment from FTV Capital. Founded in 2019, 360 Privacy has built a digital executive protection platform that scrapes the surface, deep, and dark web in real-time to identify leaked personally identifiable information (PII) and remove it. The company focuses on protecting enterprises, their executives, and high net worth individuals from threats across the internet, by removing their personal information from broker sites and continuously scanning the web to mitigate risks. According to 360 Privacy, its platform can reduce the overall attack surface, helps mitigate and…

Japanese AI startup Sakana said that its AI generated one of the first peer-reviewed scientific publications. But while the claim isn’t necessarily untrue, there are caveats to note. The debate swirling around AI and its role in the scientific process grows fiercer by the day. Many researchers don’t think AI is quite ready to serve as a “co-scientist,” while others think that there’s potential — but acknowledge it’s early days. Sakana falls into the latter camp. The company said that it used an AI system called The AI Scientist-v2 to generate a paper that Sakana then submitted to a workshop…

Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley has launched an AI video-generating model it claims is one of the few trained on openly licensed — not copyrighted — data. Named “Marey” after cinema trailblazer Étienne-Jules Marey, the model was built in collaboration with Asteria, a newer AI animation studio. Marey was trained on “owned or fully licensed” source data, according to Moonvalley, and offers customization options including fine-grained camera and motion controls. “Marey enables nuanced control over in-scene movements,” Moonvalley wrote in a press release provided to TechCrunch, “such as controlling the movement of an individual checkers piece, or animating the exact breeze…

Snapchat is introducing its first-ever video generative AI Lenses, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The Lenses are powered by Snap’s in-house-built generative video model. The three new AI Video Lenses are available to users on the app’s premium subscription tier, Snapchat Platinum, which costs $15.99 per month. The launch comes as Snap unveiled an AI video-generation tool at its Partner Summit last September. A spokesperson for Snap said the new AI Video Lenses leverage later versions of this underlying technology. Snap has been seen as a leader in AR, but has also been investing in AI over the past few years…

Chicago-based Ascent Technologies has rebranded as AscentAI, launching a new Regulatory Lifecycle Management (RLM) Platform designed to help financial firms navigate compliance with greater speed and accuracy.The platform transforms regulatory data into actionable insights through AI-driven automation, aiming to streamline compliance processes, reduce costs, and improve risk management.“Today’s risk and compliance organisations are facing a relentless tidal wave of information that they need to capture, assess, and operationalise accurately and efficiently,” said Christopher Junker, CEO of AscentAI. “Our RLM Platform was designed from the ground up by regulatory compliance experts to deliver holistic command and control capabilities.”The platform includes:AscentHorizon, which…

Worth, a FinTech company specialising in onboarding and underwriting workflow automation, has secured $25m in a funding round led by TTV Capital.The investment round saw participation from Silicon Valley Bank, Ingeborg, Florida Funders, Deep Work Capital, and Florida Opportunity Fund.Worth provides enterprises with AI-powered workflow automation, helping them streamline onboarding and underwriting processes. Its platform leverages a proprietary database of over 242 million small businesses and analyses more than 1,100 data points in real time to improve match rates. The technology enables instant verification, automated compliance, and centralised case management, making it a valuable tool for financial institutions, banks, and…

NAC, SDN, SASE, CASB, IDaaS, PAM, IGA, SIEM, TI, EDR, MDR, XDR, CTEM—the list goes on. If this “alphabet soup” sounds familiar, it is because organizations worldwide are deploying an array of security tools, all promising protection against data breaches. Global spending on information security is projected to reach $212 billion in 2025, a 15.1% increase from 2024, according to a recent Gartner forecast. With such significant investments, one might assume we are several steps ahead of cybercriminals. Yet, hardly a week goes by without a new high-profile cyberattack—whether it’s the mass exploitation of a PHP vulnerability, data breaches across…

Norm Ai, a leading company in regulatory AI solutions, has raised $48m in a funding round backed by Coatue, Craft Ventures, Vanguard, Blackstone Innovations Investments, Bain Capital, New York Life Ventures, Citi Ventures, TIAA Ventures, and Marc Benioff.This latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $87m over the past 18 months.The company specialises in legal and compliance automation, helping enterprises seamlessly integrate regulatory checks into their business operations. Norm Ai’s approach, described as “compliant by design,” ensures that compliance is proactively embedded in AI-generated content, internal communications, agreements, marketing materials, and sales processes. By treating compliance as a core…