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Detroit startup Grounded has a Lego-like way of designing EV vans for small businesses

Transportation /

When Also Capital managing partner Mike Annunziata walks around New York City these days, he sees lots of vans — and opportunity. It’s something he admits he never noticed until he met former SpaceX engineer Sam Shapiro, who is the founder of a new Detroit-based modular electric RV startup called Grounded. Sometimes, Annunziata told TechCrunch, […]

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Investors are scrambling to get into ElevenLabs, which may soon be valued at $3 billion

AI /

ElevenLabs, a startup that makes AI tools for audio applications, is being approached by existing and new investors about a new round, which could value the company as highly as $3 billion, TechCrunch has learned.  The two-year-old company specializes in making AI tools to generate synthetic voices for audiobook narrations, and for real-time video dubbing

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Voyage AI is building RAG tools to make AI hallucinate less

Startups /

AI tends to make things up. That’s unappealing to just about anyone who uses it on a regular basis, but especially to businesses, for which fallacious results could hurt the bottom line. Half of workers responding to a recent survey from Salesforce say they worry answers from their company’s generative AI-powered systems are inaccurate. While

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ETH Zurich spinoff Voliro’s flying robots save lives, but don’t tell its CEO

Robotics /

We have only touched the surface of what drones can do and how ubiquitous they will become. This is also true in industry, where they have the potential to replace human labor in risky activities such as inspection at height. Swiss startup Voliro operates in this space, with flying robots that can inspect wind turbines,

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News agency AFP notifies French authorities of potential data breach

Security /

Agence France-Presse, one of the world’s largest news organizations, has notified French regulators of a potential data breach following a cyberattack last week. The AFP, which has an editorial presence in 260 cities across 150 countries, said in a brief statement on Saturday that it detected an “attack on its systems” that affected part of

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Femtech startup Perelel is acquiring Founders Fund-backed sexual health startup LOOM

Fundraising /

Women’s health company Perelel announced on Wednesday the acquisition of LOOM a women’s educational health platform, for an undisclosed amount. LOOM’s founder Erica Chidi will join Perelel as a strategic advisor.  Chidi co-launched LOOM in 2017 as an in-person experience, offering women educational content about reproductive and sexual health education. By 2020, it expanded into

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Acceleron Fusion has raised $15M to take another stab at cold fusion, filing reveals

Climate /

Fusion startups have been on a fundraising tear lately, and a young startup, Acceleron Fusion, is joining the pack, having raised $15 million of a targeted $23.7 million round, according to an SEC filing. The fusion sector recently has been showered with interest from investors, who no doubt have been encouraged by the breakthrough experiment

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How the FBI and Mandiant caught a ‘serial hacker’ who tried to fake his own death

Security /

In the early hours on January 20, 2023, a doctor’s user account logged onto the Hawaii Electronic Death Registry System from out of state to certify the death of a man named Jesse Kipf. The death certificate listed the cause as “acute respiratory distress syndrome” due to COVID-19 a week earlier. And with that, Kipf

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Series, a GenAI game development platform, has quietly raised $28M from Netflix, Dell, a16z, others

AI /

It’s been quite the year for gaming industry exec Pany Haritatos.  Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new game studio startup Series Entertainment, according to an SEC document and confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix, Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on investments from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT,

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