The Russian government is allegedly behind the data breach affecting the U.S. court filing system known as PACER, according to The New York Times.

Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper said Russia “is at least in part responsible” for the cyberattack, without saying what part of the Russian government is behind the hack.

The hackers searched for “midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames,” per the article. 

Last week, Politico reported that hackers had broken into the federal judiciary’s electronic case filing system, potentially accessing the identities of confidential informants, which are redacted and not publicly known, putting those people at risk of retaliation from the criminals they are helping authorities apprehend. 

Politico reported that the stolen data could include sealed criminal dockets and indictments, arrest warrants, and other documents not yet public, or may never actually be included in public dockets. 

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the agency that oversees the U.S. federal courts system, confirmed a cyberattack in a statement on August 7.

The New York Times also quoted a memo sent to Justice Department officials, clerks, and chief judges by the court system’s administrators, which said that “persistent and sophisticated cyber threat actors have recently compromised sealed records.” The email said “this remains an URGENT MATTER that requires immediate action.”

This may not be Russia’s first rodeo targeting the U.S. federal courts system. 

In 2020, a long-running Russian cyberattack targeted the SolarWinds software, used by large tech companies and government agencies, to deliver a tainted software update allowing Russian government hackers backdoor access to the networks of SolarWinds customers. 

The widespread hack affected several U.S. government departments, including PACER, allowing the theft of sealed court documents.

The U.S. Courts, in its statement on August 7, said that the agency was “enhancing security of the system and to block future attacks, and it is prioritizing working with courts to mitigate the impact on litigants.”

Two months ago, Indian electric motorcycle startup Ultraviolette expanded into 10 European countries. Now, fueled with $21 million in an all-equity round led by the corporate venture arm of Japanese electronics giant TDK Corporation, Ultraviolette is putting its expansion plans into overdrive.

The nine-year-old startup plans to grow its European footprint fourfold, enter other motorcycle-driven markets such as Latin America and Southeast Asia, and increase its portfolio to 14 models by early 2027. Ultraviolette’s global expansion follows the 2024 launch of its F77 Mach 2 flagship model and its second product, the F77 SuperStreet, in February.

Behind Ultraviolette are two childhood friends — CEO Narayan Subramaniam and CTO Niraj Rajmohan — who combined their expertise in mechanical engineering, automotive design, computer science, and electronics to electrify the mid-segment two-wheeler market.

The duo, which drew inspiration from Tesla, started Ultraviolette at a time when India’s electric two-wheeler market was dominated by low-speed models, mainly catering to commercial and utility needs. The early boom was driven by Chinese imports offering low-cost options, followed by a wave of homegrown startups and, more recently, legacy manufacturers entering the space.

Instead of becoming just another player in that race, the Ultraviolette co-founders set out to build electric motorcycles that could match the performance of 150cc to 800cc internal combustion engine sports bikes.

“We asked ourselves, if we have to make electric exciting in two-wheelers, what would it take? And that’s the objective with which we started,” said Rajmohan (pictured above, right) in an exclusive interview.

The Bengaluru-based startup took about four years from its inception in 2016 to unveil the first model in 2019. The startup went through multiple design iterations before finalizing the seventh version — hence the name F77. The commercial version debuted with a fixed battery pack to deliver over 186 miles of range and a top speed of 96 miles/hour with a 30kW peak power and up to 100 newton-meters of torque.

Ultraviolette has also unveiled the lightweight Shock Wave motorcycle as well as the Tesseract scooter, which features front and rear radars and cameras to enable an assisted-driving experience and blindspot detection. The scooter costs ₹145,000 ($1,650), while its motorcycles (ex-showroom) have a base price of ₹175,000 ($2,000) and goes up to $10,000.

Ultraviolette’s vehicles come equipped with eSIM connectivity and feature predictive maintenance powered by a proprietary diagnostics system. Rajmohan said the system can detect even minor issues, such as when the chain needs lubrication. The startup offers an app that provides all these insights to consumers on the go.

The company has also established a manufacturing and assembly facility in Bengaluru’s Electronics City, with a capacity of 30,000 units. Today, the company handles everything in-house from developing embedded software and battery management systems to motor controllers and even battery manufacturing. About 500 people work at Ultraviolette, including 200 in corporate functions and R&D.

Ultraviolette’s business model was shaped in part by Tesla owners. The co-founders spent time talking to Tesla owners in the U.S., who were among the first ones to buy the Model S in 2015, to learn what made the that car different from other EVs of its time.

“These Tesla cars were very special, as owning them was seen as progressive. It was more of a lifestyle statement,” Rajmohan told TechCrunch.

The co-founders brought that sentiment to Ultraviolette’s design and branding, aiming to make it a global company from day one. As Rajmohan explained, the word “violet” is pronounced similarly in over 30 European languages, while “ultra” signals something cutting-edge. Reinforcing that ambition, the startup pursued European certification for all its vehicles even before entering the market.

This is unlike other Indian electric two-wheeler manufacturers, which have tried to cater to local demand. India accounts for nearly 40% of global motorcycle sales — although most of those are powered by internal combustion engines.

Expanding beyond India makes strategic sense for Ultraviolette, given the domestic EV market remains relatively underpenetrated — with adoption at just 7.66%, compared to the global average of 16.48%, according to a recent report by government-backed think tank NITI Aayog. While India aims to reach 30% EV penetration by 2030, progress so far suggests that it may be an ambitious target.

India is also a price-sensitive market, where two-wheelers are typically not discretionary purchases, but essential and affordable modes of daily transportation. As a result, selling high-end variants at scale in the country could be a challenge for Ultraviolette — at least initially.

“We were very clear that what we’re doing is, we’re working toward segments which are more universal in nature,” Rajmohan said.

What’s next?

Ultraviolette plans to expand the capacity of its Bengaluru production facility to up to 60,000 units and add a larger location to scale to about 300,000 units by early next year. Ultraviolette operates 20 stores across 20 Indian cities and plans to grow to around 100 by March next year. About 50 of those stores — one per city — are expected to open by the festive season later this year.

Rajmohan told TechCrunch the startup is working on expanding its European presence, where it has 40 dealers.

“Next year is where the scale-up happens in Europe,” he said.

The startup also plans to start its pilot in Latin America and Southeast Asia next year and go to markets including the U.S. and Japan later.

Ultraviolette has sold more than 3,000 motorcycles in India and has projected to sell up to 10,000 later this year. It has also targeted over $50 million in revenue by the end of this financial year.

The new funding saw participation from Ultraviolette’s existing investors Zoho Corporation and Lingotto (previously Exor Capital). To date, it has raised around $75 million in funding and counts Qualcomm Ventures, Exor, and TVS Motor among its other key investors.

Most organizations say they aren’t fully prepared to use generative AI in a safe and responsible way, according to a recent McKinsey report. One concern is explainability — understanding how and why AI makes certain decisions. While 40% of respondents view it as a significant risk, only 17% are actively addressing it, per the report.

Seoul-based Datumo began as an AI data labeling company and now wants to help businesses build safer AI with tools and data that enable testing, monitoring, and improving their models — without requiring technical expertise. On Monday the startup raised $15.5 million, which brings its total raised to approximately $28 million, from investors including Salesforce Ventures, KB Investment, ACVC Partners, and SBI Investment, among others.

David Kim, CEO of Datumo and a former AI researcher at Korea’s Agency for Defense Development, was frustrated by the time-consuming nature of data labeling so he came up with a new idea: a reward-based app that lets anyone label data in their spare time and earn money. The startup validated the idea at a startup competition at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). Kim co-founded Datumo, formerly known as SelectStar, alongside five KAIST alumni in 2018.

Even before the app was fully built, Datumo secured tens of thousands of dollars in pre-contract sales during the customer discovery phase of the competition, mostly from KAIST alumni-led businesses and startups.

In its first year, the startup surpassed $1 million in revenue and secured several key contracts. Today, the startup counts major Korean companies like Samsung, Samsung SDS, LG Electronics, LG CNS, Hyundai, Naver, and Seoul-based telecom giant SK Telecom among its clients. Several years ago, however, clients began asking the company to go beyond simple data labeling. The 7-year-old startup now has more than 300 clients in South Korea and generated about $6 million in revenue in 2024.

“They wanted us to score their AI model outputs or compare them to other outputs,” Michael Hwang, co-founder of Datumo, told TechCrunch. “That’s when we realized: We were already doing AI model evaluation — without even knowing it.” Datumo doubled down on this area and released Korea’s first benchmark dataset focused on AI trust and safety, Hwang added.

“We started in data annotation, then expanded into pretraining datasets and evaluation as the LLM ecosystem matured,” Kim told TechCrunch.

Meta’s recent $14.3 billion acquisition-like investment in data-labeling company Scale AI highlights the importance of this market. Shortly after that deal, AI model maker and Meta competitor OpenAI stopped using Scale AI’s services. The Meta deal also signals that competition for AI training data is intensifying.

Datumo shares some similarities with companies like Scale AI in pretraining dataset provisioning, and with Galileo and Arize AI in AI evaluation and monitoring. However, it differentiates itself through its licensed datasets, particularly data crawled from published books, which the company says offers rich structured human reasoning but is notoriously difficult to clean, according to CEO Kim.

Unlike its peers, Datumo also offers a full-stack evaluation platform called Datumo Eval, which automatically generates test data and evaluations to check for unsafe, biased or incorrect responses without the need for manual scripting, Kim added. The signature product is a no-code evaluation tool designed for non-developers like those on policy, trust and safety, and compliance teams.

When asked about attracting investors like Salesforce Ventures, Kim explained that the startup had previously hosted a fireside chat with Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, at an event in South Korea. After the event, Kim shared the session on LinkedIn, which caught the attention of Salesforce Ventures. Following several meetings and Zoom calls, the investors extended a soft commitment. The entire funding process took about eight months, Hwang said.

The new funding will be used to accelerate R&D efforts, particularly in developing automated evaluation tools for enterprise AI, and to scale global go-to-market operations across South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. The startup, which has 150 employees in Seoul, also established a presence in Silicon Valley in March.

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