AI agents

CoreWeave acquires agent-training startup OpenPipe

CoreWeave, which provides cloud servers to large companies training AI models, has struck an agreement to acquire OpenPipe, a 2-year-old Y Combinator-backed startup that helps enterprises develop customized AI agents with reinforcement learning, the companies announced on Wednesday. “Reinforcement learning is emerging as a pivotal force to strengthen model performance on agentic and reasoning tasks,”

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AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees

Firecrawl’s co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor to lead his Series A.  He was in a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partner’s Abhishek Sharma at the Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park (a favorite VC haunt). While describing the future of the company, he was gesturing so

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AI agents aren’t the ‘new Google,’ says Airbnb CEO

After a second-quarter earnings beat, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky shared his thoughts on the company’s AI strategy, cautioning investors that AI chatbots can’t yet be thought of as the “new Google.” That is, AI chatbots, while potentially driving new leads to the travel and services business, aren’t entirely a replacement for the referrals that the

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Cohere’s new AI agent platform, North, promises to keep enterprise data secure

AI agent tools promise to siphon out some of the drudgery from daily workflows, but most organizations are hesitant to adopt them yet, harboring a pressing concern: data security. Large enterprises with trade secrets, companies in highly regulated industries, and government agencies have thought more than twice about bringing in AI tools out of concern

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Fundamental Research Labs nabs $30M to build AI agents across verticals

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised

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Fundamental Research Labs nabs $30M+ to build AI agents across verticals

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised

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This startup thinks email could be the key to usable AI agents

AI companies are pushing agents as the next Great Workplace Disruptor, but experts say they’re still not ready for prime time. They often struggle with autonomous decision-making, can’t cooperate with other agents, fail at confidentiality awareness, and integrate poorly into existing systems.  Industry pioneers like Andrej Karpathy and Ali Ghodsi have said that, like the

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SaaS is in the past. The future belongs to agents, says Narada AI’s CEO

“SaaS is going away,” said Dave Park, co-founder and CEO of Narada AI. The company is betting big on a different future for enterprise software, one powered by agentic AI. Change is coming “in the not-too-distant future,” Park said on Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast. “The typical knowledge worker today deals with anywhere from 17 to

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