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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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Noma is building tools to spot security issues with AI apps

Enterprise /

Companies are concerned that their eagerness to adopt AI has made them more vulnerable to cyberthreats. Per a recent poll of over 350 IT leaders, more than half of the executives surveyed said the complexity of AI applications weakened their organization’s cybersecurity posture. More than two-fifths of executives believe their security teams lack the skills

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Rivian’s chief software officer says in-car buttons are ‘an anomaly’

Transportation /

The trend of big touchscreens in cars has left many yearning for the not-so-distant days when most user interactions happened with physical buttons. But Rivian’s chief software officer Wassym Bensaid believes using buttons in a car is an “anomaly.” “It’s a bug. It’s not a feature,” Bensaid said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “Ideally, you

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Zoox co-founder on Tesla self-driving: ‘they don’t have technology that works’

Transportation /

Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson doesn’t believe Tesla will launch a robotaxi ride-hailing service in California (or anywhere else) next year despite what Elon Musk recently claimed. The “fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works,” Levinson said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “And by works, I want to differentiate between a driver

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Zoox custom robotaxis are finally coming to San Francisco and Las Vegas

Transportation /

Amazon-owned AV company Zoox will start rolling out dozens of its purpose-built autonomous vehicle in San Francisco and in Las Vegas in the coming weeks, co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson announced on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. Levinson said that Zoox will start offering rides — starting with employees — in the SoMa neighborhood of

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Scout Motors EVs will use Rivian-VW software and architecture

Transportation /

VW’s new offshoot EV company Scout Motors, which revealed its first two vehicles last week, will use the software and zonal architecture being developed by the joint venture between Rivian and the Volkswagen Group. Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid confirmed to TechCrunch at Disrupt 2024 that Scout will leverage the joint venture tech when

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Bifrost helps industrials speed up model training with its 3D data generation platform

Enterprise /

For many companies working on AI models with applications in the physical world, data presents the biggest opportunity. It’s also the biggest hurdle they face, as nicely labeled and clean real-world data is as readily available as hen’s teeth, and the costs and effort required to gather and clean up data can be immense. Bifrost,

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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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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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Brightwave’s AI agent helps asset managers find signal, and it’s fundraising fast

AI /

The finance world is constantly looking for signal: indicators of a buying or selling opportunities in the markets. Some seek out signal in pricey analyst reports, while others might find it in backdoor conversations with insiders. But sometimes, investors just need help seeing such indicators hiding in plain sight. That’s what Brightwave promises its AI

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