Fundraising

OpenAI buys Rockset to bolster its enterprise AI

OpenAI has acquired a company, Rockset, building tools to drive real-time search and data analytics. In a post on its official blog, OpenAI said that it would integrate Rockset’s technology to “power [its] infrastructure across products.” Members of Rockset’s team will join OpenAI, and Rockset’s existing customers will be transitioned off of Rockset’s platform “gradually.” […]

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Kevin Hartz’s A* raises its second oversubscribed fund in three years

Venture firms raised $9.3 billion in Q1 according to PitchBook data, which means this year likely won’t match or surpass 2023’s $81.8 billion total. While emerging managers are feeling the fundraising market’s frost the most, some emerging VCs like A* have enough name recognition, and a good enough track record, to still find success. A*,

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Labor shortages are still fueling growth at automation firms like GrayMatter

Robotics funding has broadly cooled off since its 2021-2022 peaks, but plenty of the issues exposed by the pandemic remain firmly in place. The biggest push behind venture funding in the category is an ongoing labor shortage. Analyst firm Garner forecasts that by 2028, half of large enterprise companies will employ robots in their warehouse

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PayPal Ventures leads $20M round into Gynger, which offers companies ‘buy now, pay later’ for technology purchases

Gynger, a platform that lends capital to companies for technology purchases, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by PayPal Ventures, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The financing brings the New York-based startup’s total venture capital raised to $31.7 million and included participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund), Velvet Sea Ventures,

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Daydream rakes in $50M seed funding to build an AI-powered search engine suited for e-commerce

For retailers, e-commerce is a bit of a puzzle at the moment. Online shopping trends are expected to stay strong this year, so companies can’t afford to curtail their e-commerce budgets, but at the same time, e-commerce is more fragmented than ever before. There is a seemingly endless number of avenues to exploit — from

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Internal SpaceX documents show the sweet stock deals offered to investors like a16z, Gigafund

Like many highly valued startups, SpaceX sometimes allows its employees to cash out some of their shares by selling to company-authorized outside investors. TechCrunch has gotten a peek at an internal SpaceX document about such a tender offer from May 2022. Musk posted on X last month that SpaceX holds such sales for employees about

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Genspark is the latest attempt at an AI-powered search engine

Move over, Perplexity. There’s a new AI-powered search engine in town — and its creators think it can best the many, many other attempts out there. Called Genspark, the platform taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. Type in a search like, “What’s the best baby formula for newborns?” and

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Decagon claims its customers service bots are smarter than average

One red-hot category in the generative AI space is customer support, which isn’t surprising, really, when you consider the tech’s potential to cut contact center costs while increasing scale. Critics argue that generative AI-powered customer support tech could depress wages, lead to layoffs and ultimately deliver a more error-prone end-user experience. Proponents, on the other

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Bitsening raises $25M for its high-resolution radar in autonomous driving

Self-driving vehicles rely on many sensors to detect objects and the world around them. The conventional approach is to work with cameras and lidars. But some tech companies and startups have built advanced high-resolution radar technology for autonomous vehicles, also known as 4D imaging radar.   Among them is a South Korea-based startup called bitsensing. The

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