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, […]
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
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
When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for
Kilimo helps farmers save water and get paid for it Read More »
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
Genspark is the latest attempt at an AI-powered search engine Read More »
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
Decagon claims its customers service bots are smarter than average Read More »
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
Bitsening raises $25M for its high-resolution radar in autonomous driving Read More »
For the last two decades, Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of autonomous trucking startup Waabi, has been developing AI systems that can reason as a human would. The AI pioneer had previously served as the chief scientist at Uber ATG before launching Waabi in 2021. Waabi launched with an “AI-first approach” to speed up the
Waabi’s genAI promises to do so much more than power self-driving trucks Read More »
Companies in fields like financial services and insurance live and die by their data — specifically, how well they can use it to understand what people and businesses will do next, a process that is becoming increasingly dominated by AI. Now, a startup called Finbourne, founded out of London’s financial center, has built a platform
Finbourne taps $70M for tech that turns financial data dust into AI gold Read More »
Food technology startup Tender Food Inc. is a 4-year-old startup elbowing its way into a market that is already crowded with well-known brands. It’s doing so well that it already secured a contract with Clover Food Lab’s fast-food chain in the Boston area. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company, formerly known as Boston Meats, develops plant-based alternative
