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Fintech Payoneer is buying 5-year-old global payroll startup Skuad for $61M in cash

Fintech /

New York-based fintech Payoneer has acquired Skuad, a Singapore-based global HR and payroll startup, for $61 million in cash, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.  Payoneer said it could also pay up to another $10 million, contingent on if Skuad meets various performance goals within the first 18 months of the acquisition. Payoneer also committed to […]

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AI-powered water heater could banish cold showers and carbon pollution

Climate /

Chances are you’ve been there: Your formerly hot shower suddenly turns cold, darkening your mood in the process.  Maybe someone in your household took an extra shower or you did a few too many loads of laundry. It’s a classic case of supply not meeting demand. Michael Rigney thinks he can predict when a household

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Why Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and other investors are scouring universities for founders

Fundraising /

The humble garage is so steeped in Silicon Valley lore it’s almost cliché. Yet that’s exactly how Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush started Molten Industries: in the garage of the Stanford professor’s on-campus home, where Kevin rented an apartment. It had everything they needed: space and, most importantly, power. The two wanted to break methane’s

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Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google

AI /

In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed startup. In his previous stint, Shazeer spearheaded the team of researchers that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that was used for conversational AI tools. Character.AI co-founder Daniel

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Adept Materials’ dehumidifying paint was inspired by trees and semiconductors

Fundraising /

The steam that condenses on your bathroom mirror may not seem like a big deal, but for architects and builders, it can be an enormous headache. “Moisture control is something that is a major pain point,” Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials. “If you just google your favorite home builders’ name and then

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Pharma giant Cencora is alerting millions about its data breach

Security /

Cencora has so far notified over a million people around the U.S. that their personal and protected health information was compromised in a data breach earlier this year, TechCrunch has found. The pharmaceutical giant in May said that a February incident resulted in the compromise of patients’ data, which Cencora obtained through partnerships with drug

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Sequoia-backed Knowde raises Series C at a valuation cut

Biotech & Health /

Knowde, an online marketplace for chemicals and polymers, just closed on a Series C round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The San Jose-based startup raised $60 million in a round that values it lower than the $500 million valuation it garnered in its most recent round, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. This round

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Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for Y Combinator startups

AI /

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry business. “We want to

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Sybill raises $11M for its AI assistant that helps salespeople reduce administrative burden

AI /

Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales representatives, said on Wednesday it has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft. The market for sales AI assistants has grown quite crowded as companies have leveraged generative AI and large language models to help salespeople automate grunt work

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