TechCrunch Startup News

Scimplify has raised $40 million in a new equity round backed by Accel to expand its presence in the U.S. and enter new markets.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hexa is trying something new. Instead of fostering startups from the ground up and incubating them for the first year or so, the Paris-based startup studio is acquiring a majority stake in Veevart, a vertical software-as-a-service company for museums that provides solutions for ticketing, fundraising, CRM and collection management.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The reactor, called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), is General Fusion’s latest iteration in a string of devices that have tested various parts of its unique approach.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Medical imaging is a broad term that encompasses several distinct technologies. After working on AI-powered tools to enhance X-rays and mammographies, French startup Gleamer now aims to tackle magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Instead of starting from scratch, Gleamer has acquired two startups that have already been working on AI-powered MRI analysis: Pixyl and Caerus Medica

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anna Patterson has had a storied career in Silicon Valley. She founded three startups, including search engine upstarts Xift and Cuil, as well as recall.archive.org, which became the Internet Archive.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Intangible AI, now backed by $4 million in seed funding, offers an AI-powered creative tool that allows users to create 3D world concepts with text prompts to aid creative professionals across a variety of industries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CollX, a company offering an online trading card marketplace, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Austin-based Brand Foundry Ventures and Philadelphia-based 114 Ventures, both of which were previous investors in the company. Other investors such as Next Coast Ventures, FJ Labs, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners also participated .

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Ukraine has brought drones to the forefront of modern warfare, creating a surge in demand for counter-drone systems. However, legacy solutions to counter drones, such as ground-based defense systems and cyber warfare, often come with a hefty price tag. For German startup Alpine Eagle, these solutions fall short:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in that effort is announcing a significant round of funding. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CoreWeave’s initial S-1 document for its upcoming IPO is full of surprises. Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave runs an AI-specific cloud service from its network of 32 data centers that together have more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024, according to the company.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy compared to burning fossil fuels, their power output isn’t always consistent.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thorton said.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The software supply chain is notoriously porous: a reported 81% of codebases contain high- or critical-risk open source vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability can have a far-reaching impact on the wider software supply chain, as evidenced by the likes of the Log4Shell exploit that saw millions of applications exposed to potential remote code execution hacks

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fintech has fragmented into increasingly specialized, cucumber-sliced micro-services, ranging from embedded buy-now-pay-later loans to specialized neo banks to yet more payment processing systems. What opportunities remain for innovators in such a fragmented landscape? One U.K. startup, Just Move In, zoomed out and realised that the home had been overlooked by everyone in the industry.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn’t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce, effectively ‘Uberising’ how deliveries worked down to the last mile.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Birdgetown Research has raised $19 million in a round co-led by Accel and Lightspeed to deploy AI agents for business decisions and M&A deals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite employers requiring their employees to complete yearly cybersecurity training courses, human-driven cybersecurity breaches still happen. The problem could even get substantially worse as generative AI increases the scale and personalization of social engineering campaigns.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Agentic AI” is the concept of the moment. Developers big and small are rushing to build apps to leapfrog the heavy lifting needed to employ generative AI in specific contexts… and investors are rushing to fund the most interesting of these. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For decades, patents have been a bone of contention in the technology world, seen by some as a way to protect intellectual property, but by critics as a blunt weapon against innovation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The AI observability platform has raised $70 million in Series C funding.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Solar and wind together now represent nearly a quarter of electricity demand and nearly 10% of all energy consumption in the U.S.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Recalls in the food and beverage industry due to contamination incidents can have catastrophic effects. Not only do companies have to pay fines and damages, but the impacts on the brand’s reputation can be long-lasting.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For decades, couples going through in vitro fertilization have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the procedures with no guarantee of success. It’s not only an emotionally draining process, but a financially exhausting one as well.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and are estimated to use up to 12% by 2028. The majority of the energy data centers suck up is used to help transfer data from chip to chip. A company called Hyperlume is looking to make that process more energy-efficient while also speeding it up.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank make industrial robotics into a key focus for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware that measures vibrations, sound, temperature and other factors to understand how machines are working

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Level Zero Health, a female-founded medical device startup that’s aiming to break new ground by developing a device for continuous hormone monitoring, has closed an oversubscribed $6.9 million pre-seed funding round despite being only a little over a year old.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Generative AI is getting better at interpreting dense texts, and this progress has proven to be a boon for startups attacking one of the most complex sets of texts there is: the law. It makes sense then that we’ve been seeing a new burst of activity in the legal tech space

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Helsing, the German defense tech startup backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and others, is producing 6,000 HX-2 strike drones in addition to the 4,000 HF-1 strike drones financed by Germany that are currently being delivered to Ukraine. “We are scaling up production of HX-2 in response to additional orders from Ukraine.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical. On Monday, Paris-based AI startup Mistral — which is vying to rival the likes of U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI — is releasing a model that’s a bit different from its usual LLM.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When EJ Cho started his first company in 2018, he was exposed to what it takes to market a product. He was surprised to find a market filled with different single-use tools. “It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho told TechCrunch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

UX and UI designers work closely with engineers throughout product development to build and implement design concepts and wireframes for functional user interfaces. Regular communication, feedback and testing are required for the collaboration to work smoothly and deliver a user experience that aligns with the intended design goals.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apptronik, a University of Texas spin-out that was quietly building humanoid robots before it became quite so fashionable, on Thursday announced a $350 million Series A round of financing. B Capital and Capital Factory co-led the round, which also featured participation from Googl

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber Eats customers in Jersey City can now have their orders delivered by one of Avride’s autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. The launch, which kicked off this week in New Jersey, is Uber’s latest foray into autonomous vehicles and represents an expanding relationship with Avride.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re working for a small company and want to build a client portal or an internal tool, it can be difficult to find the budget and resources to allocate a developer to that small project.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More and more legal professionals are embracing AI, surveys show. Per a recent poll from legaltech company Clio, 79% of firms used some form of AI for casework last year, up from just 19% in 2023.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The company buys marginal and degraded farmland, plants them with native trees, and harvests the resulting carbon credits.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How much is a customer worth to a company? That’s the eternal question. To arrive at an answer, customer and sales teams are often forced to use spreadsheets and other manual data analysis methods. The problem is, these methods tend to be slow and error-prone, leading to gaps in reporting processes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Escalating geopolitical tensions and a new administration with a hawkish defense agenda has led many startups to embrace dual-use strategies to secure revenue through military applications. And it’s a trend that is already heating up in aerospace.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mattoboard, the makers of web-based software designed to simplify the creative process for interior designers and architects, is getting into AI. On Tuesday, the startup announced its $2 million seed funding round, which will support the launch of a new feature called Design Stream, an AI-driven visual search and discovery tool.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The GenAI boom of the last few years has unleashed a wave of startups promising to support the process of prompt engineering — i.e., coming up with instructions to precisely steer an AI chatbot to serve useful output.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 and schools transitioned to online learning, both Joe Titus and Paul Suhr were concerned about how to maintain their children’s activity levels in the absence of mandatory physical education classes and sports. The two friends’ solution was Hiveclass, a New York-based edtech platform that hosts online courses.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fizz, the college social app, is looking for ways to enhance and expand its platform, and a recent new hire is poised to help drive these ambitions. The company has brought on David Vasquez, who previously served as TikTok’s head of creator monetization and a product lead for TikTok Shop

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Supply chains have had a tumultuous few years, beginning in 2020, when COVID-19 upended legacy global supply chains. More recently, the “TikTok-ification” of retail has companies like Shein and Temu creating new products constantly as consumer demands change at the same rapid pace.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tabular data is a broad term that encompasses structured data that generally fits into a specific row and column. It can be a SQL database, a spreadsheet, a .CSV file, etc. While there has been tremendous progress on artificial intelligence applied to unstructured and sequential data, these large language models are fuzzy by design.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The fashion industry has concerned Emily Gittins since adolescence.  The sector is, after all, one of the most polluting in the world. According to some sources, it is responsible for nearly 10% of the earth’s CO2 emissions and more than 20% of all water waste.  Yet people still want more, fast.; Also,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch.  The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Riot has raised a $30 million Series B round after reaching $10 million in annual revenue in 2024. Originally focused on educating employees about cybersecurity risks, the company now wants to go one step further and nudge employees so that they minimize their attack surface.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stress isn’t just bad for you — it’s also bad for your employer. Factoring in absenteeism, diminished productivity, turnover, medical costs, and accidents, the non-profit American Institute of Stress estimates that workplace stress costs U.S. businesses over $300 billion annually. One way to measure stress is by monitoring cortisol levels.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Swan has raised another €42 million (around $44 million at current exchange rates). The company considers this round as the second part of the Series B round that was originally announced in September 2024. Swan helps other companies offer financial products at scale.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jared Zhao originally got interested in data analytics during his time at UC Berkeley because he was drawn to how it could turn raw data into a story. Zhao founded his first data analytics startup Polyture in 2021

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve ever tried to book a venue for a company event, you’ll know how onerous a task it can be. You have to contact multiple vendors, wait for quotes, evaluate them, see if you can get a good deal, and then get all that approved.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lily Vittayaruksku was studying aerospace engineering when her aunt was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Her aunt had lived under the same roof as Vittayaruksku while she was growing up and helped raise her.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Barcelona-based business travel management platform TravelPerk has raised $200 million at a hefty $2.7 billion valuation — almost double the $1.4 billion valuation at its previous fundraise last year. Alongside the raise, TravelPerk also announced it has acquired Swiss startup Yokoy to bring native expenses management into the fray.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quantum computing remains something of a holy grail in the world of technology: it promises a huge leap in computing power, but only if someone can figure out how to square away the fault rates that prevent any scaling of the tech.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kodiak Robotics has officially handed off two autonomous trucks to customer Atlas Energy Solutions, marking the startup’s first commercial launch.  Atlas, a provider of proppant (i.e., sand) and oilfield logistics, received its first Kodiak-equipped trucks in December and began driverless operations in an off-road environment in West Texas’s remote Permian Basin shortly after.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve been following the AI industry, Mistral should be a familiar name by now. The French AI startup with a $6 billion valuation is arguably the biggest AI company working on foundation models in Europe. Alan, on the other hand, isn’t as well known.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many nonprofits are stuck with outdated, expensive, and limited tech that hinders their ability to fund their mission or cause. While most consider adopting tech to be a priority, they’re faced with a number of blockers, including siloed data and issues with integration.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Growing up with an OB-GYN father, Rachel Blank assumed that most women received excellent gynecological care.  She regularly witnessed her dad’s patients thanking him for delivering their child when they would bump into him around town.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The $1 billion acquisition of rent-to-own startup Divvy Homes, which was announced Wednesday, is expected to leave some shareholders without a payout, according to sources familiar with the deal.  The terms — and Divvy’s journey from buzzy startup to acquisition target — reflects the rollercoaster ride the proptech industry has endured over the past decade.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers wanting to learn about their state of health and how to prevent things going wrong. Now, investors are making a big bet on Neko.  The startup has raised a fresh $260 million in funding, a Series B that values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When George Avetisov was the founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup HYPR, he spent a lot of time in the trenches with the company’s sales team. He quickly realized that regardless of how good his sales team was, they were consistently pulling in other departments to answer customer questions or fill out technical questionnaires.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

London startup Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the very crowded world of expense management with a focus on applying AI to optimize a single area where businesses, collectively, are currently sinking hundreds of billions of dollars in IT budgets that are exceeding $5 trillion annually.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A U.S. federal safety regulator has “upgraded” its investigation into Ford’s hands-free advanced driver assistance system known as BlueCruise — a required step before a recall can be issued. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation launched a probe into Ford BlueCruise last April after the agency confirmed the system was active.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An arena. A hype tunnel, the kind through which NBA players typically streak. A competitor dressed in a jersey patterned with a six-pack abs. In a new piece, the New York Times takes readers to an event that organizers call the Microsoft Excel World Championship, a 40-minute, Las Vegas-based competition featuring 12 contestants; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that the company plans to release a “two-way” voice mode for its chatbot, Claude, as well as a memory feature that lets Claude remember more about users and past conversations; IMDb founder steps down as CEO after 35 years

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The process of getting screened for cervical cancer is quite intimidating. It’s the once-a-year, sometimes life-changing treatment that involves the bright lights of a doctor’s office and an uncomfortable insertion that always seems to last too long.  

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday. In anticipation of the coming U.S. TikTok ban, which will go through on Sunday unless paused by the Supreme Court, users have been fleeing to other video platforms

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the last few weeks, PayPal-owned Honey, which claims to find you the best coupon codes for a deal, has been at the center of controversy. Allegedly, the tool sneakily earned affiliate money by changing attributes of product links creators posted on their videos.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chinese firms continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other U.S.-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, an Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup that has raised around $850 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $2.5 billion, debuted three new models:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Hyperline wants to build the next-generation Chargebee. Over the past two years, the startup has built a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-off purchases, usage-based billing and more. Hyperline raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nvidia has been doubling down on the opportunity to build robotics and other industrial AI applications, with the launch of its Omniverse platform, and most recently Mega, an Omniverse Blueprint framework to create digital twins to operate these applications. It’s also investing in digital twin startups to get the effort off the ground.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given how many have failed or are close to failing. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has pulled it off by taking a hyper-focused approach to electrifying commercial trucking

E-commerce giant eBay has announced plans to acquire Caramel, a startup that helps car sellers and buyers complete the final steps of the transaction — including verification, financing, paperwork, ownership transfer, insurance, and more. Founded out of Los Angeles in 2021, Caramel formally launched last year with some $19 million in funding behind it

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nelly wants to become the biggest fintech startup in the healthcare industry. The Berlin-based startup is already working with more than 1,200 medical practices in a handful of European countries. But there are thousands more that could benefit from an upgrade for their administrative workflows.

Float Financial, an expense management and corporate card startup focused on the Canadian market, has raised $48.5 million in a Series B funding round. The Toronto-based fintech likens itself to U.S.-based fintech giants Brex and Ramp but says it is different in that its sole focus is on Canadian SMBs

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In an announcement Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, said it plans to invest $5 billion in Mexico over the next 15 years as a part of a “long-term commitment” in the region.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alex Dewez, a partner at 20VC, just released its highly anticipated State of the French tech ecosystem report. This is a nice followup to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, with a more granular view on French startups in particular.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The world of fashion is moving at a faster pace each year. Most retailers introduce new styles each season, and fast-fashion companies like Shein, H&M and Zara update their collections continuously.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think that AI has the potential to automate lots of business-relevant tasks, but that many of the AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and costly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gaming startups, specifically those building casual mobile games, are very hot in Turkey right now, and today another one is announcing a sizable round.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Businesses dependent on the physical supply chain — the network of facilities and transportation systems used to move materials from one location to another — chain face a number of challenges, from staff shortages to increasing customer expectations. The pressures aren’t easing up.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A startup hoping to provide a credible alternative to Amazon has picked up funding to double down on the gap in the market. PrettyDamnQuick (PDQ) provides tech to retailers to let them customize and test different shipping and checkout flows, and now it has picked up a deal of its own: a $25 million Series A to expand its business. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Xocean, an Irish marine robotics startup that provides ocean data to the energy and hydrography industries using uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), has raised €115 million ($119 million) as it looks to expand coverage to additional sectors.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup’s founder, Nik Shevchenko, started marketing this device on Kickstarter as “Friend,” but changed the device’s name after another San Francisco hardware maker launched his own Friend device and bought the domain name for $1.8 million. Shevchenko, a Thiel fellow with a history of eye-grabbing stunts, is taking a slightly different approach with Omi. Instead of seeing the device as a smartphone replacement or an AI companion, he wants Omi to be a complementary device to your phone that boosts your productivity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Valeria Kogan started her PhD program in bioinformatics, the scientific field that uses computation and software to analyze biological data, in 2017, she imagined her career would always be within the fields of mathematics, medicine, or biology. But after the first AI boom in the late 2010s, she got an intriguing opportunity in a sector she hadn’t considered: agriculture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“These are the kind of jobs that we shouldn't need people to do anymore," founder Leo Ma said about dangerous factory jobs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social network and X competitor Bluesky’s massive growth slowed in December in the U.S., after having surged from 9+ million in September to north of 20 million users in November.

The slowdown is based on an analysis of web traffic and mobile app daily active users by analytics firm Similarweb, which found that Bluesky grew less than 10% month-over-month in December 2024, compared with 189% growth in November.

Daily active users of the Bluesky mobile app in the U.S. also grew 12% in December, compared with 284% growth in November, the firm says.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week at CES 2025, the company is showcasing a prototype version of its forthcoming SolidddVision glasses. The Brooklyn-based startup is specifically targeting people with macular degeneration. The degenerative eye disease affects roughly 13% of U.S. residents aged 40 and up, according to figures from the CDC; Elvie, a female-founded hardware startup, has unveiled a new app-controlled smart bouncer that gently transforms into a bassinet — while the baby is still in it. With the new Elvie Rise, announced at CES 2025 on Monday, parents and caregivers don’t have to move their baby between soothing, sleep, and play products. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hydrogen startups are widely seen as a promising way to eliminate fossil fuels from heavy industry and long-haul transportation. But they have been stuck in limbo for the last couple years, waiting for official guidance from the U.S. Treasury on lucrative tax credits. That was until last Friday.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Electra has raised $76.3 million to clean up the dirty ironmaking industry, TechCrunch has learned. The startup has developed a novel method of using electricity to coax pure iron out of low-grade ores, opening the door to cleaner steel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As 2025 dawns, it’s a good time to look at the trends that are likely to define the coming 12 months.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French food delivery startup Epicery will cease operations Tuesday, after one last holiday season hurrah for its clients and the local food businesses that were using the platform during its nine years in business in exchange for a 25% commission.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A business built around increasingly customized ready-to-eat meals has netted Middle Eastern startup Calo a sizeable funding injection as it looks to expand both what it can offer its time-strapped customers and where it delivers its growing range of just-heat-to-eat dishes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI holds huge promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced machine learning-based systems can do a lot of good on adjacent tasks such as appointment scheduling and confirmations. Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If there was one phrase that captured the vibe and theme of 2024 — at least in the transportation sector — it was business whiplash. Legacy automakers changed direction on their all-EVs-or-bust strategy, startups pivoted, and some Silicon Valley VCs and executives adjusted their views to a changing political landscape

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes.  But there are some exceptions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the first day of Y Combinator the founders of PearAI got “cancelled." They used the hate to launch a new product, raise $1 million.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI creates a dilemma for companies: Don’t implement it yet, and you might miss out on productivity gains and other potential benefits; but do it wrong, and you might expose your business and clients to unmitigated risks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Once, not long ago, booking a table at a hot new restaurant didn’t entail a midnight dash to Resy. Truly, we didn’t know how good we had it then. Hours-long lines out the door are now the norm, not the exception, in major cities from New York to Los Angeles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley’s brother-in-law, and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste management space at the time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the last decade, the Sustainable Ocean Alliance has graduated from dorm room activism to a thousands-strong global network of experts, investors, and “ecopreneurs” — all of whom believe the best way to save the ailing oceans is to embrace innovation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drop by any given loading dock and a buzz of forklifts — loaded up with goods — can be spotted maneuvering in and out of truck trailers. This logistical dance can take up to an hour to fill a trailer, leaving truck drivers in idle limbo.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Grammarly is acquiring productivity startup Coda, the company announced on Tuesday. As part of the deal, Coda’s CEO and co-founder Shishir Mehrotra will become the new CEO of Grammarly. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The massive lasers will be installed in the startup’s future facility, which it is building in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cybersecurity practitioners take a community-driven approach to solving problems. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they find with the broader cybersecurity community, which allows companies to patch up their security holes before something catastrophic happens. Prequel is looking to bring that same approach to software.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While I have fond memories of past efforts to combine VR content with real-world locations, I’d assumed the pandemic had put those ambitions to an end. If I wanted VR in 2024, I thought I’d have to buy a headset, and it would be a largely solitary experience at home or in the office

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Threat exposure management startup Flare thinks it has an answer to info-stealers with a service that watches the dark web, resets passwords.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With disinformation on the rise, especially given the explosion of AI, companies are just as vulnerable to its effects as individuals. Refute is a London-based startup that detects and responds to disinformation on behalf of these commercial entities. It’s now raised a £2.3 million ($2.9 million) pre-seed round led by UK investors Playfair and Episode.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two prominent programs, Activate and The Engine Accelerator, have decided they can give founders an advantage if they team up.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI models that understand videos as well as text can unlock powerful new applications. At least, that’s what Jae Lee, the co-founder of Twelve Labs, believes. Granted, Lee’s a little biased. Twelve Labs trains video-analyzing models for a range of use cases. But there may just be something to his assertion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Upvest might not be a familiar name if you don’t pay close attention to the fintech industry, but chances are you’ve already interacted with the company’s products. Founded by Martin Kassing (pictured above), the Berlin-based startup builds a white-label investment platform that is used by some of the biggest fintech companies in Europe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If startup funding rounds are any metric, generative AI is seeing ample adoption in the sciences. It makes sense: there’s a lot of trial and error involved in research and development, and any tool that can speed up the process for researchers is bound to be useful.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Small and medium businesses are getting more love in the world of fintech these days, and one example of that is the growth of a startup out of Sweden. Mynt, which has built an AI-based platform for corporate cards and spend management catering to SMEs, has closed a round of €22 million ($23 million).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LambdaTest, a cloud-based software testing platform, has raised $38 million in a funding round as it looks to expand its presence in existing markets and advance its AI capabilities. The San Francisco and Noida-headquartered startup’s Series D round has been led by Avataar Ventures with participation from Qualcomm Ventures, bringing its total funding to $108 million.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup argues that its hot-water approach is not only more efficient, but also more useful.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Podcast recording platform Riverside said Monday that it has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Seven Seven Six, and angel investor Sam Lessin. The company wants to use this funding to grow its team and build out solutions for the podcast and content creation space.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do we really need another social media app for college students? With the looming TikTok ban in the U.S., a new app called Connyct seems to think so.  Connyct closely resembles the popular short-form video app, providing all the features you would expect, such as a personalized content feed, private chatting, as well as video .

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladder, an Austin, Texas-based fitness startup that makes a popular strength-training app, is accusing Peloton of ripping off its work with the launch of Peloton’s new Stength+ app, which exited beta on Wednesday. After receiving feedback from Peloton’s beta testers that the app looked, felt, and functioned much like Ladder’s own.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Turning sunflower seeds into sustainable, cocoa-free chocolate has netted Munich-based B2B foodtech startup Planet A Foods (formerly QOA) a $30 million Series B funding round. Now, the Y Combinator alum is gearing up for industrialization, with the funds set to be deployed to scale its production capacity by around 7.5x

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Not everyone agrees on what an “AI agent” actually is, but they are all still the rage. At a broad level, these so-called “agents” promise to go several steps beyond a mere chatbot, making decisions and taking actions on people’s behalf.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The overarching promise of companies working on AI-powered productivity tools is to build solutions that would do a task for you. Some of the early demos that we have seen don’t really fare well in fulfilling those promises. A to-do list app called Twos is approaching this problem differently.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this hyperconnected world we live in, it’s easier than ever to send feedback to the companies we patronize. But just because businesses offer more ways to get in touch doesn’t mean they’re poring over every comment. According to a 2020 survey from Productboard, 90% of companies fail to successfully capture feedback from all channels.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new company is emerging from stealth today with backing from Google’s AI-focused venture fund to help businesses compile their open-source AI infrastructure and reduce their engineering overheads. Cake integrates and secures more than 100 components for enterprises.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yurts has raised a $40 million Series B led by XYZ Venture Capital to provide the DoD with gen AI.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cancer incidence is on the rise, particularly among younger adults, but most new drug compounds fail to progress through clinical trials. According to French entrepreneur Fanny Jaulin (on the right in the picture above), the problem lies with clinical trial design. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On a September morning in 2024, two Jonathan Cohens — one from the Rockaways in Queens, the other from London — stood in an empty 15,000-square-foot parking garage near Hudson Yards in New York City. As they walked over chipped yellow lines, they explained how the space would help Joco, their shared e-bike startup.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As one of the most decorated track cyclists of all time, Sir Chris Hoy might not seem an obvious candidate to back the burgeoning electric bike movement. The common refrain, after all, is that e-bikes aren’t real bikes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

India has bucked the global trend in initial public offerings this year, establishing itself as a rare bright spot for tech listings while other major markets face continued headwinds. The world’s most populous nation is now preparing for an even more substantial wave of startup IPOs in 2025

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decarbonizing our economies in the race to fight climate change demands a wholesale overhauling of all sorts of production processes to make them as sustainable as possible. Greening chemicals, which are used as ingredients in all sorts of products, is where U.K. startup Deep Blue Biotech is putting its energies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Volta, a new startup with a team split between two headquarters in Milan and Paris, has secured a €6 million pre-seed round ($6.3 million) to develop a new vertical software-as-a-service platform focused on B2B sales. In more practical terms, the Volta team pitches its product as an equivalent to Shopify but focused on B2B transactions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Europe must get much better at scaling startups. That’s the prognosis of the European Union’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, who’s on the cusp of taking up her second five-year term steering the bloc of some 449 million people — with a December 1 start date now locked in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Writing the documentation that must go alongside the development of new drugs is a highly labor-intensive process: not much software is used and there’s a shortage of expert writers. Paris-based Biolevate helps medical writers go faster with a platform that uses NLP and visual document reading to assisting in writing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Battery tech is pivotal as the world leans into electrification to power decarbonization in the race against climate change. But rising demand is putting more attention on the limits and drawbacks of current generation lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a tiny board designed around a microcontroller that lets you build hardware projects at scale. Raspberry Pi is once again using the RP2350, its own, well-documented microcontroller. But what is a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers let you control other electronic components or devices.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anthropic, OpenAI’s close rival, has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, the primary place it’ll train its flagship generative AI models.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The company chose Chapter 11 in an effort to right its listing finances. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anthropic, OpenAI’s close rival, has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s cloud computing division — the sole place it’ll train its flagship generative AI models.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here is yet one more sign of the travel industry’s noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of $370 million.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Manufacturing has been one of the hottest categories in venture this year, but there are still many innovative materials and processes yet to scale.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bling Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has nabbed another $270 million for a new flagship, fourth fund.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dual-use drone startup Tekever has raised €70 million ($74 million) to develop its product and expand into new markets, specifically the U.S.. The news is part of a trend of smaller tech-driven startups moving into markets normally dominated by large ‘defense primes’.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As college tuition increases and the student loan debt crisis continues, three former executives from language learning app Duolingo are building a new startup aimed at making college education more affordable and accessible.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AIOps, short for artificial intelligence in operations, is a process that uses AI to automate IT tasks. More organizations are embracing it as AI commodifies, yet adoption is still lagging.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the wake of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, one fact became clear: Disinformation proliferated online at a startling rate, shaping Americans’ views about each candidate as well as a diverse set of topics, including public health, climate change, and immigration. Generative AI – with its ability to produce deepfakes in seconds

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Moonvalley, a new generative video startup, claims it's building models using more ethical and transparent approaches.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the influencer economy grows, startups like PassionFroot, Agentio, and One Impression, along with social platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are trying to build marketplaces to connect brands with creators. Miami-based startup Influur, is banking on two unique aspects of its platform: quick response from creators and financial tools to ensure they are paid

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can steer clear, or at least warn you it’s coming. The same can’t be said of “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

India's ePlane Company has raised $14 million in a Series B round as it plans to commercialize its air taxi in 2026.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Startup inspiration can strike anywhere. But for Atlas.co*, a freemium browser-based, real-time mapping tool that’s being built by an Oslo, Norway-based team of (initially student) engineers, the realization that there might be a business opportunity in competing with expensive legacy mapping software hit the founders during class.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway announced today that it is selling Grubhub to Wonder in a deal valued at $650 million. The company said that it expects the deal to be completed by Q1 2025. “The sale of Grubhub to Wonder will increase the cash generation capabilities of Just Eat Takeaway.com and will accelerate our growth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shares of Swiggy dropped 4% to 401 rupees on Wednesday as the food delivery and quick commerce startup concluded India’s second-largest IPO this year, in a closely watched debut that puts it in direct comparison with what analysts have long considered the benchmark Indian internet stock: Zomato.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Luggage storage as a vector for piling into convenience-based revenue opportunities in the business of global travel continues to put a spring in San Francisco-based Bounce‘s step. The startup has just tucked $19 million in Series B funding into its suitcase, with a plan to keep rolling revenue that’s grown 20x since its $12M Series

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The majority of the aging population in Japan still prefers using cash for transactions, according to a recent report citing government data. In 2023, cashless transactions in Japan totaled 126.7 trillion yen ($885 billion), accounting for 39.3 percent of all spending in the country, said the Japanese government.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Equal, an Indian startup founded by Keshav Reddy, has raised $10M in its maiden funding round led by Prosus Ventures to scale identity verification and financial data sharing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Running payroll is hard in any country, but perhaps especially so in Brazil thanks to consistently changing laws and extremely influential unions that make it significantly harder to get it right. Fernando Gadotti struggled with this as the co-founder and CEO of DogHero, LatAm’s version of Rover.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website. In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Exosonic, a startup developing supersonic commercial air travel and UAV tech, is winding down after five years of operation. In an update posted to its website, Exosonic said it was unable to find the traction necessary to continue operations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. The Norwegian software-as-a-service startup has built a platform that’s helping energy giants and large solar developers such as E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seagrass punches above its weight. The marine plant only occupies 0.1% of the ocean floor but can be credited with supporting marine ecosystems of plants and fish, filtering ocean water and capturing quite a bit of carbon

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many people who want to have children can’t, or shouldn’t, carry a pregnancy for a variety of reasons. Gestational surrogacy can be a great option for those individuals — if they can endure the lengthy wait times and afford to pay for the costly service.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind the work, but there was one thing she consistently hated: administrative tasks. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French tech startup Alan held a press conference this morning to announce three product updates. While it is better known as a health insurance company, the startup has always been trying to offer more than insurance coverage. It wants to build a super app for all things related to healthcare

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The end of zero-interest rates has driven companies to look for savings wherever they can, but one area continues to be a major budget drain. Observability — collecting and understanding data and systems — typically remains an organization’s second-highest cloud expenditure, right after cloud provisioning itself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CareYaya, a platform that matches people who need caregivers with healthcare students, is working to disrupt the caregiving industry. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to enhance affordable in-home support, while also helping students prepare for their future healthcare careers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CoffeeSpace is on a mission to help people find partners for their startup ideas online. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has launched a social networking app that matches people exploring startup ideas and looking for co-founders. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Buying a home has always been complicated. You have to figure out how much money to put down and how that down payment will affect a monthly mortgage bill.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2014, Ivan Crewkov moved his family from Serbia to the U.S. as his startup, Cubic.AI, was preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its smart speaker. A week before the campaign was supposed to go live, Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker, rendering Cubic.AI essentially dead in the water.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hummingbirds is a female-founded startup that connects hyperlocal content creators with locally-based brands that reward them for sharing products with their small and highly engaged communities via social media.  The company announced Wednesday its latest funding round of $5.4 million, bringing the total amount raised to $10 million.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

MealMe, a unified API that embeds food and retail ordering into consumer apps and websites, announced on Thursday that it secured $8 million in Series A funding. The newly raised capital brings the total amount raised to $16 million.  MealMe has undergone several changes since its launch in 2019. Initially,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new startup setting out to combat the scourge of deepfakes and spoofed evidence in the age of AI is showing off its wares on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Luna, a health and well-being app for teen girls that is designed to help them navigate teenhood. The app lets teens ask questions about their health and wellness and get responses from experts. It also lets them track their periods, moods, and skin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It might not be the sexiest of subjects, but facilities management is central to any business that has a physical premises — the bigger that footprint becomes, the more complex it gets.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fixing the climate crisis is a vast, world-sized puzzle. But one particularly large piece of this ginormous conundrum is construction and real estate — which collectively amount for around 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Enter Munich-based data startup Emidat, which has built a software platform for automating the generation of validated Environmental Product Declaration

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are plenty of startups now that have AI bots that will listen to your meetings, transcribe them, make notes, and create insights. That means companies in this area must differentiate themselves by offering additional feature sets and integrations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lithuania’s Vinted has secured a new valuation of €5 billion (around $5.4 billion at current exchange rates), after the second-hand fashion marketplace closed a secondary share sale worth €340 million ($367 million).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

U.S. venture capital giant General Catalyst has announced a fresh $8 billion in funds as it looks to ramp up its investments in multi-sector early-stage startups globally, with a specific focus on the U.S., Europe, and India. The capital constitutes around $4.5 billion for its “core VC funds” which spans seed and growth equity funding,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new app called Screenable will help parents introduce their children to technology by turning an iPhone or iPad into a starter phone. The app is designed to grow over time with a child, as it offers different modes for kids of different ages.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Each year, supply chain disruptions cost the global economy trillions of dollars. In a recent McKinsey poll, nine in ten businesses said they had encountered logistics challenges over the past 12 months. Headwinds have only grown stronger as chaos reigns in key shipping corridors.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Upflow, a French startup we’ve been covering for quite a while, originally focused on managing outstanding invoices. The company is now announcing a shift in its strategy to become a B2B payment platform with its own payment gateway to complement its accounts receivable automation solution.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Interface.ai, a customer automation platform for banks and other financial institutions, today announced that it closed a $30 million funding round led by Avataar Venture Partners. $20 million of the round was equity, while the remaining $10 million was in the form of debt. It’s Interface’s first outside capital; the startup had been completely bootstrapped

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Furno’s micro-kilns promise to reduce pollution and eliminate transportation costs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in 2022, João Moura was directing AI engineering efforts at Clearbit, a startup creating a unified hub for business intelligence tools. There, Moura was responsible for leading the development of AI integrations, as well as defining Clearbit’s AI product roadmap.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The software supply chain, which comprises the components and processes used to develop software, has become precarious. According to one recent survey, 88% of companies believe poor software supply chain security presents an “enterprise-wide risk” to their organizations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With the current unemployment crisis in Hollywood, many TV and film crew members are concerned about finding their next job. This is particularly the case for freelancers, who often face unstable work and irregular pay. Shobizzy is the latest professional networking app for the entertainment industry that aims to address this challenge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Small business creation has been on the rise in the U.S. since the pandemic. There are a lot of tech tools designed to help these companies with things like payroll or setting up retirement benefits — but more tools doesn’t mean small businesses know how to use them to make smart decisions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Byju Raveendran, the founder of the embattled edtech group Byju’s, acknowledged on Thursday afternoon that he made mistakes, mistimed the market, and that his startup, once valued at $22 billion, is now effectively worth “zero.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we’ve reported before, enterprise CIOs are taking generative AI slow. One reason for that is AI doesn’t fit into existing software engineering workflows, because it literally doesn’t speak the same language. For instance, LLMs (aka large language models) require a lot of cajoling to deliver valid JSON.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, North Carolina in September, the city’s police department reached out to public safety drone startup Paladin for help. The startup’s 30-member team jumped into action working nights and through the weekend to assist Asheville’s police department with locating people and dropping off supply.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in 2011, the world held its breath after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan suffered a failure of its cooling systems, in the wake of the country getting hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Karandish has been busy. Capacity, his support automation company, was planning a $5 million “bridge round” to help the company reach the break-even point. But TVC Capital, Toloka.vc, and the venture’s other backers had something grander in mind.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Storio, a French startup that’s focused on providing smart energy storage for commercial and industrial customers. Founded in 2023, the startup raised a €5 million seed round earlier this year (around $5.5 million at current exchange rates) and has signed its first client. Storio believes solar panels have a bright future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The data center industry is expanding rapidly to keep up with the flywheel growth of AI. While these data centers are necessary AI infrastructure, they store an AI company’s compute, they are expensive to build, seemingly more so to run, and they are a huge energy suck.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Table Space is targeting a valuation of $2.5 billion or higher for an India IPO planned planned for 2025.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Peanut, a social networking app for women, is launching a new feature to help users track their pregnancies. The new Peanut Track tool leverages seven years of data from questions asked on the social network and uses AI to anticipate questions that women have during different stages of their pregnancy. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s hard to know where to focus when speaking to Christoph Kohstall. The contents of his packed Palo Alto garage compete for attention. To his immediate right stands a tower of electrical components, dotted with flashing lights. To his left is a workbench and the tops of machining tools.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Advances in DNA sequencing and the vast amounts of genomic data being produced by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology have created a startup opportunity to build software for biologists so they can more easily analyze this big data and take the next leap.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Monzo is now valued at $5.9 billion after the U.K.-based challenger bank announced a secondary market share sale to provide liquidity for its employees. The transaction saw existing investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund (GIC) and StepStone Group procuring additional shares in the London-based fintech.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following its $40 million fundraise at the beginning of this year, streaming media company Plex announced on Wednesday it’s rolling out a new TV show and movie reviews feature, putting its app in more direct competition with other apps, like Letterboxd and TV Time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Health and life insurance providers face a rising volume of claims due to chronic disease and aging populations, but their processes lack scalability. AI automation can help, but it takes more tailoring than for other insurance types.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After keeping Century under wraps for several months, the startup gave TechCrunch a peek under the hood.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Odysee CEO Steve Casley sees dollar signs in data. Or more specifically, AI-powered software that can analyze reams of data to help commercial airlines get the most out of its complex flight schedules.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Distributional, an AI testing platform founded by Intel’s former GM of AI software, Scott Clark, has closed a $19 million Series A funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Middle and high schoolers are both the easiest and most difficult audience. If you’re developing a neat little video game, chances are they’re willing to download it right away. But if, like the team behind Revyze, you’re working on a learning app, good luck pitching them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The global pet food market has become fiercely competitive, with an estimated market share of $103.3 billion in 2023 and still growing. This growth has led many companies to target pet owners who are willing to invest in quality food to enhance their pets’ well-being and longevity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many screenwriters have embraced modern tools over traditional PDFs to craft their film or TV show pilots. SoCreate, the latest entrant in the screenwriting software arena, is challenging established players like Final Draft and Celtx with its fresh approach to storytelling.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To some degree, every business that has a presence on the web is in the content business — whether that’s for informing customers, finding new clients, or for SEO. That means managing the production of those texts and images, updating them, and potentially optimizing them for a search engine to index and rank.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI tends to make things up. That’s unappealing to just about anyone who uses it on a regular basis, but especially to businesses, for which fallacious results could hurt the bottom line. Half of workers responding to a recent survey from Salesforce say they worry answers from their company’s generative AI-powered systems are inaccurate

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the second anniversary of Spill rolls around, Spill has something else to celebrate: Emmy-winning actress Kerry Washington has made an investment in his app.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transportation and warehousing are multi-trillion-dollar industries, but the technologies that power them are often outdated, inefficient and siloed. Pallet, which is announcing an $18 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures today, has built an all-in-one transportation and warehouse management system that uses AI to help these businesses streamline their operations

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Numa, a startup developing AI-powered automation tech for car dealerships, has raised fresh capital in a Series B round.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A team of founders who sold their last company to Amazon to build a new business within AWS is setting out to reinvent the tricky business of backing up an organization’s cloud infrastructure. Today, Eon — as their new startup is called — is coming out of stealth with a product, a set of customers, and more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Beta Technologies unveiled Monday the next electric aircraft in its lineup — a passenger-carrying version of its ALIA vertical takeoff and landing and fixed-wing vehicles. Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles don’t rely on a runway, whereas fixed-wing aircraft do.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The HVAC industry is going through a transformation. The old guard of tradespeople are on the cusp of retiring while private equity firms are consolidating the industry. Airship is building a software solution for HVAC’s next chapter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Podcast listeners crossed half a billion people at the end of last year as listenership maintained steady growth. With countries in the Arab world having some of the most engaged listeners, a podcasting startup out of Dubai is doubling down on the opportunity

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apps catering to the Chinese and wider Asian diaspora, especially urban consumers focused on food, can be big business. Now, HungryPanda, one of the trailblazing startups in that market is announcing more funding. The food ordering and delivery app, founded in London and aimed squarely at Chinese and other Asian consumers living outside their home.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While online discourse would make it seem that venture has retreated to the Bay Area, with San Francisco being the most important place to build a startup, Index Ventures is looking to bulk up its New York-based investing team.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

UAE-based Redwood has acquired a majority stake in the game streaming platform Loco as the Indian firm looks to expand focus to international markets, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. Redwood, a newly-formed investment firm, has signed a $65 million deal with Loco, an investment that also gives full exit to all existing Loco backers

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A company that claims its tech can “revolutionize” emergency calls has raised $27 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company, Prepared, enables 911 dispatchers to get a caller’s real-time GPS location if their phone supports it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Japan has always been a strong market for bringing technology into the experience of consuming food, and now one of the startups leading on this idea is attracting investors from across the ocean.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Digital transformation — upgrading a company’s legacy apps and processes with new tech — has long been a buzzy and lucrative business. But the pandemic supercharged the market. Covid pandemic lockdowns and the widespread move to work-from-home spurred brands relying on old technology to modernize their organizations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Radian Aerospace has moved one step closer to achieving the “holy grail” of spaceflight: a reusable space plane that can take-off from an airfield and land on a runway like a conventional airplane. The startup just announced completion of a series of ground tests in Abu Dhabi earlier this summer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mortgage fintech Mesa has emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $9.2 million in seed capital and a novel idea for homeowners. It’s offering cash back and rewards on all spending done on the home, including the mortgage itself. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the volume of cyberattacks grows, there’s increasing interest from the corporate sector in tech to help automate responses to breaches. Per a 2023 survey from analytics firm Devo, 80% of security leaders expected expanded investments in security automation technology this year; most cited the tech’s potential to support cyber threat mitigation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jump offers full-time contracts to freelancers looking for some stability and the benefits involved with a full-time job.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

James McGinniss has been obsessed with decarbonization and the energy grid since he was a high schooler over a decade ago. Now, his startup David Energy has a lofty goal: getting the energy grid to run entirely on clean energy in the next 10 years.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new FTC report on how social media and streaming sites collect and monetize their hoards of user data doesn’t really feature a lot of surprises for anyone who’s followed the space

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Belfius is leading Alan’s Series F funding round of €173 million (around $193 million at current exchange rates).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup, previously known as GreenBlu, was working on desalination when it realized there was more value in the minerals that were left behind.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With an explosion of weather and climate data that the last generation of tools can’t handle, is AI the future of forecasting? Research certainly suggests so, and a newly funded startup called Brightband is taking a shot at turning machine learning forecast models into both a business and open source standard.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Parents understand the challenge of keeping young kids engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for children aged 4 to 7 that features interactive content and games to capture their interest. The company’s mission is to equip children with critical life skills such as socializing, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Neuralink, the Elon Musk-owned brain-computer interface company, has received “breakthrough device” clearance from the FDA. But this does not mean they have developed a cure for blindness, whatever Musk might say.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flink, a quick-commerce startup out of Berlin that was an acquisition target of Gorillas, Getir, Amazon, and Gopuff, is spelling out how it plans to go forth on its own. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that the company has raised $150 million, which it will use to double down on business in Germany and the Netherlands

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Construction permitting often involves drafting lengthy applications, leading to unpredictable timelines for developers and businesses. There are tens of thousands of jurisdictions — each with their own different forms and application processes for building permits. Ben Allen knows a thing or two about permitting.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Supermaven, an AI coding assistant, has raised $12 million in a funding round that had participation from OpenAI and Perplexity co-founders.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been three years since Life360’s $205 million acquisition of AirTag competitor Tile. The company announced Monday its new lineup of lost-item Bluetooth trackers, featuring a sleeker redesign in new colors—aqua blue, green, navy blue, and pink

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Small businesses are the unsung heroes of the American economy, employing nearly half of America’s workforce and making up 44% of the country’s GDP.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Humanz, a marketing platform for content creators and brands, has entered the U.S. market, the company announced on Thursday.  Having launched in Israel in 2017, Humanz has gained strong traction in global markets, including Europe, Latin America, South Africa, and the Middle East.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, Nuro is pivoting its business strategy to focus more on the startup’s core autonomous driving technology instead of owning and operating a fleet of low-speed, on-road delivery bots

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tune.FM is a decentralized music streaming service where users pay for each song they stream using Tune.FM's crypto token JAM.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paymob has evolved into an omnichannel gateway offering over 50 methods for offline and online payments to more than 350,000+ merchants.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tem wants to do for utilities what neobanks have done for the financial sector: disrupt an industry using tech, streamline it, and cut out the middlemen.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the world of pharmaceuticals, companies aim to operate under GMP guidelines — a set of production and manufacturing measures to assure standards for medicinal products. But too often, the reality is anything but that.  “Officially, GMP stands for ‘Good Manufacturing Practices,’” said Dr. David Schneider, the founder and CEO of Qualifyze.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects more than 366 million adults globally, according to a 2020 study, but beyond medicating with stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, there are few alternatives for people who suffer from the disorder. Therapy, education, and lifestyle changes are usually also advised, but those avenues can prove difficult as well.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup has devised a durable way to store solar power as heat that can then be used for household heating or hot water.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This year, the B’s made their debut in the Pioneer League, a professional baseball organization that’s partnered with the MLB, but unlike the minor leagues, it’s not tied to any existing MLB teams.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As with many open source startups, All Hands AI expects to monetize its service by offering paid, closed-source enterprise features.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The new business-to-business division is a bet on what co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe thinks is the future of mobility.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

European regulators are pushing hard for greener energy. The REPowerEU plan calls for 10 million additional heat pumps to be added by 2027, and solar panels are also on the rise. But most installations are done by small businesses that could be more productive with better work processes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No one is putting the remote working genie back in the bottle. Which is good news for Oyster, a payroll and HR platform that specializes in distributed workforces – or “global employment” as its marketing paints it

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you build an AI search product, you compete with Google. But Google has a lot easier time answering queries with a single, simple answer, such as “how many is a dozen?” than it does answering complex questions like “what influence did Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ have on Enlightenment ideals?”x

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New climate tech VC firms have emerged in recent years, but existing ones are also raising larger funds. Founded in 2007, Dutch firm SET Ventures is one of the latter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hospitals around the world regularly face bed shortages — an issue that can get exacerbated to breaking point when a health scare or other large-scale disaster occurs. A startup called Doccla is bringing technology to bear address the issue: it’s building “virtual bed” tech to help doctors remotely manage patients who have either been discharged or not.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fleet is launching several software services on top of its hardware-as-a-service proposition, from device management to cybersecurity and insurance.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Magic, an AI startup developing models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, says that it’s raised a large tranche of cash from investors including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post this morning,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As businesses experiment with embedding AI everywhere, one area starting to gain more attention is Emotion AI.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Atlassian plans to integrate Rewatch into its recently launched Rovo AI platform so that transcripts become searchable within the overall business context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the people who successfully sued the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to change real estate commissions has co-founded a new real estate startup. It all began in 2017 when Josh Sitzer and his wife listed their home for sale in Kansas City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bluesky on Wednesday introduced the ability to hide replies, as well as a way to detach your original post from someone's quote post.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fluid Truck, a startup that was founded to disrupt the commercial vehicle rental industry, has ousted its sibling co-founders – CEO James Eberhard and chief legal counsel Jenifer Snyder – according to sources familiar with the matter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Planera, scheduling and planning software for commercial construction projects, has raised $13.5 million to expand its reach and help general contractors with more features.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Supio uses generative AI to automate bulk data collection and aggregation for legal teams. It emerged from stealth Tuesday with a $25 million investment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GrubMarket, the $3.6 billion food delivery and supply chain startup backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock and nearly 100 other investors, has snapped up another food delivery startup on its consolidation march: It is acquiring FreshGoGo, a New York-based, B2C platform selling Asian groceries and ready-made dishes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI models are being applied to every dataset under the sun, but are inconsistent in their outcomes. This is as true in the medical world as anywhere else, but a startup called Piramidal believes it has a sure thing with a foundational model for analyzing brain scan data.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mical Jeanlys-White built WealthMore out of frustration.  She spent years on Wall Street, building products at American Express and serving as a managing director at JPMorgan Chase. She realized the finance industry still had a long way to go when it came to helping consumers build and understand wealth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Travly is a new social-first discovery and hotel booking platform designed to cater to the growing number of travelers who rely on short-form video content for trip ideas.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tingit, a startup out of Lithuania, wants to help people restore their used clothing to their former glory with its newly launched repairs marketplace.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, Ohtea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dropbox has acquired AI-powered scheduling tool Reclaim.ai, which counts Calendly and Index Ventures among its backers. The development was revealed in a blog post on Reclaim.ai’s website Tuesday. Dropbox hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Rounds, the startup that delivers recurring grocery and household essentials in reusable packaging, announced on Monday its $24 million Series B funding round. The new capital will go toward product development, hiring, and expanding the service to additional markets. Alongside the funding announcement, The Rounds introduced new features for customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SleekFlow, a Singapore- and Hong Kong-headquartered social commerce platform that has built a conversational AI suite for customer engagement targeted to Asian markets, said Wednesday it had secured a further $7 million in funding. The money will be used to continue developing its AI, as well as penetrate deeper into Southeast Asia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simulating the real world is a tremendously complex problem if you want to do it at any useful level of fidelity. Traditional techniques are holding back design teams at vehicle and aerospace companies, but Beyond Math is putting AI on the task with a new way of simulating the world that could save them days.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. Department of Defense is a mammoth organization. It not only employs millions of service members and hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, but also has the world’s largest military budget that’s used to buy and maintain more equipment than can likely fit into a single paragraph.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Popular iPad design app Procreate is coming out against generative AI, and has vowed never to introduce generative AI features into its products. The company said on its website that although machine learning is a “compelling technology with a lot of merit,” the current path that generative AI is on is wrong for its platform. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brands can use Keychain to look up different products and see who actually manufactures them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brands can use Keychain to look up different products and see who actually manufactures them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An AI social media vetting startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and is launching a new platform designed to screen election personnel. Founded in 2019, Ferretly leverages AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that traditional background checks may overlook.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of hype due to its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both the booster and second stage vertically returning to Earth. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Code reviews — peer reviews of code that help devs improve code quality — are time-consuming. According to one source, 50% of companies spend two to five hours a week on them. Without enough people, code reviews can be overwhelming and take devs away from other important work.