Fundraising

Labor shortages are still fueling growth at automation firms like GrayMatter

Fundraising /

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

Fundraising /

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

Fundraising /

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

Fundraising /

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

Fundraising /

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

Fundraising /

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

Fundraising /

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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Waabi’s genAI promises to do so much more than power self-driving trucks

Fundraising /

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

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Finbourne taps $70M for tech that turns financial data dust into AI gold 

Fundraising /

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

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