Alphabet Inc.-owned X Development LLC, known for its so-called “moonshot” technologies, today launched a new division that’s designed to improve farming. Called “Mineral,” the new division is the result of an X project previously referred to as “The Computational Agriculture Project.” Mineral launches with an autonomous robotic plant buggy designed to analyze crops. The buggy is powered by solar panels ...

Autonomous building platform startup PassiveLogic Inc. announced today it has raised $16 million in new funding to accelerate research and development. The Series A round was led by Keyframe Capital and Addition and included RET Ventures, A/O Proptech and NREP. Founded in 2016, PassiveLogic offers an autonomous building platform that provides a full-stack solution including tools to design, engineer, install, ...

Intel Corp. today unveiled a range of new security features for its forthcoming 10-nanometer Ice Lake chips that offer hardware security to provide additional protection of data. With Ice Lake, the third generation of Intel Xeon processors, Intel is doubling down on its “security first pledge” with the Intel Security Guard Extension technology deployed across ...

Technology products supplier Intcomex Corp. has suffered a data breach and about a terabyte of its user data was released on a hacking forum. First reported by Cybernews today, the leaked data included credit card details, passport numbers, license scans, personally identifiable information, payroll data, financial documents, customer details, employee information and more. Parts of the ...

Cybersecurity firm McAfee Corp. is looking to raise up to $814 million in its initial public offering, the company said today. McAfee, which was once an independent company before being acquired by Intel Corp. in 2010 for $7.68 billion, was spun off in a deal announced in September 2016 and completed in April 2017. Private investment firm ...

Armory Inc., which offers the open-source continuous delivery software platform Spinnaker as a cloud service, said today it has raised $40 million in new funding to accelerate research, customer support, sales and marketing. The Series C round was led by B Capital and included Edge Capital, Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain ...

Most of the world has fallen into recession because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but much if not all of venture capital has been surprisingly resilient. That’s according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor third quarter 2020 report that’s out early Tuesday. In the third quarter, venture capital exit activity saw a major uptick, but pockets of the ecosystem ...

Amazon.com Inc.’s annual Amazon Prime Day is attracting the interest of hackers attempting to target shoppers. The annual event, delayed earlier in the year due due to COVID-19 is being actively targeted with emails and SMS text messages that offer fake deals in an effort to trick users into downloading malware or to “phish” their Amazon ...

Microsoft Corp. today claimed to have disrupted the infamous TrickBot botnet in partnership with other companies, but there’s evidence that only part of the botnet has been taken down. TrickBot dates back to 2016 and is believed to exist on a network of more than 1 million machines. Initially used to target banking credentials with ...

German tech giant Software AG has been hit by a ransomware attack that caused the company to suspend services. The attack occurred Oct. 3 and has been attributed to Clop ransomware. As is typical in a ransomware attack in 2020, the company’s files were encrypted and those behind the attack demanded a ransom payment of about ...