Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch – is being skewered on […]
It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year
Tech giants like Microsoft might be touting AI “agents” as profit-boosting tools for corporations, but a nonprofit is trying to prove that agents can be a force for good, too. Sage Future, a 501(c)(3) backed by Open Philanthropy, launched an experiment earlier this month tasking four AI models in a virtual environment with raising money
A nonprofit is using AI agents to raise money for charity Read More »
In a recent memo to employees, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke made a bold policy change: teams must demonstrate why AI can’t perform a job before they’re permitted to ask for more headcount and resources. “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” Lütke
Shopify CEO tells teams to consider using AI before growing headcount Read More »
Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta exec Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures. Laude is the new fund launched in 2024 by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who also co-founded Databricks. This isn’t the only check Laude has cut. But it
Arcade raises $12M from Perplexity co-founder’s new fund to make AI agents less awful Read More »
Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use. Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s behalf, has experienced explosive growth in the past week. Daily
Browser User, one of the tools powering Manus, is also going viral Read More »
Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use. Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s behalf, has experienced explosive growth in the past week. Daily
Browser Use, one of the tools powering Manus, is also going viral Read More »
Back in 2019, Microsoft open-sourced Dapr, a new runtime for making building distributed microservice-based applications easier. At the time, nobody was talking about AI agents yet, but as it turns out, Dapr had some of the fundamental building blocks for supporting AI agents built-in from the outset. That’s because one of Dapr’s core features is
Dapr’s microservices runtime now supports AI agents Read More »
Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking on stage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications, referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing —
AI agents are marching across the world of IT, and on Thursday a startup called Crogl is debuting its contribution to the field: an autonomous assistant for cybersecurity researchers to help them analyse thousands of daily network alerts to find and fix actual security incidents. The assistant — described by Crogl’s CEO and co-founder Monzy
