Fundraising

BBG Ventures raises new $60 million fund to support diverse founders

Fundraising /

BBG Ventures raised a new $60 million fund to support founders from “diverse backgrounds,” including gender, race, age, and class, Business Insider reported. The firm is known for backing exclusively women founders, and this new fund is a slight departure from that focus but comes as funding to diverse founders continues to dip. Crunchbase found that […]

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Buddy.ai is using AI and gaming to help children learn English as a second language

Fundraising /

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. “It was a disaster,” Crewkov

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Equity Live: Bret Taylor’s $4.5 billion startup and Waymo’s $5.6 billion round

Fundraising /

The Equity crew was live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! Hosts Kirsten Korosec, Devin Coldewey and Margaux MacColl took over the Builders Stage to kick off day 2 of Disrupt with no shortage of conference highlights, startups deals and venture news to chew through. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Equity will be back with a special interview episode on

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Regal claims its customer service chatbots are better than most

Fundraising /

People are generally skeptical of customer service chatbots, and many outright despise them. In a recent Gartner survey, 64% of consumers said that they’d prefer companies didn’t use AI of any kind — including chatbots — in their customer service. Fifty-three percent went so far as to say they’d weigh switching to a rival if

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Actor and director Olivia Wilde launches a VC firm

Fundraising /

Actor and director Olivia Wilde, famous for in “Tron: Legacy” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” quietly launched venture firm Proximity Ventures late last year, according to Bloomberg. She launched the early- and growth-stage investment fund with Neil Sirni, formerly of Roc Nation’s venture division Arrive; Jason Mack, formerly of Mack Ventures; and Santi White, the musician

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Why Crosscut Ventures is ‘following the founders’ into climate, space, and beyond

Fundraising /

Eight years ago, Brian Garrett and his partners sensed the ground shifting.  At the time, Crosscut Ventures, where Garrett is co-founder and managing partner, had been investing in early stage startups in Los Angeles and Southern California for nearly a decade. It focused mostly on software companies, but it started shifting its attention to hardware,

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Read AI raises $50M to integrate its bot with Slack, email and more

Fundraising /

Now that we have so many startups offering AI bots that can do everything from listening to your meetings and transcribe them, to taking notes and surfacing insights, companies in the space are being forced to differentiate themselves by offering additional feature sets and integrations. One such company, Read AI is trying to do just

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