funding

Ex-Duolingo execs raise $13M for a startup that’s making it easier to access a college education

As college tuition increases and the student loan debt crisis continues, three former executives from language learning app Duolingo are building a new startup aimed at making college education more affordable and accessible. The company, tentatively named Outsmart Education (the name is not final yet), is headed by co-founders Daniel Falabella (CPO), former senior director […]

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Text marketing firm Take Blip secures backing from SoftBank, Microsoft

People prefer texts over phone calls — especially when it’s a company on the other side. According to one survey, two-thirds of consumers say they’d switch to a company that offered texting as a contact option. With the text-message marketing industry expected to grow to $12.6 billion by 2025, it’s not surprising that vendors like

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Text marketing firm Blip secures backing from SoftBank, Microsoft

People prefer texts over phone calls — especially when it’s a company on the other side. According to one survey, two-thirds of consumers say they’d switch to a company that offered texting as a contact option. With the text-message marketing industry expected to grow to $12.6 billion by 2025, it’s not surprising that vendors like

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This generative AI startup is strapping cameras to people’s backs

A startup is training an AI model that it claims will enable creators to generate cinematic worlds, with complete control over the scenery, characters, lighting, and motion. How? By having humans strap cameras to their backs and hike around the world. Odyssey, founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke (Cameron was previously the

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Anysphere acquires Supermaven to beef up Cursor

Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, has acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven for an undisclosed sum. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell announced the deal in a post on Cursor’s blog. Supermaven, he said, will enable Anysphere to launch a new version of its Tab AI model that’s “fast, context-aware, and highly intelligent,” especially at sequences of long code.

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Generative AI startup Writer raises $200M at a $1.9B valuation

Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-focused generative AI platform. The round — a Series C — was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures. Writer CEO May Habib says

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Red Hat acquires AI optimization startup Neural Magic

Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI algorithms to run on commodity processors. The transaction is subject to applicable regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions. The terms weren’t disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in

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Symbiotic Security helps developers find bugs as they code

Symbiotic Security, which is announcing a $3 million seed round today, watches over developers as they code and points out potential security issues in real time. Other companies do this, but Symbiotic also emphasizes the next step: teaching developers to avoid these bugs in the first place. Ideally, this means developers will fix security bugs

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Bret Taylor’s customer service AI startup just raised $175M

Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, has raised $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion. Sierra, founded by Taylor and longtime Google exec Clay Bavor, focuses on selling AI-powered customer service chatbots to brands like WeightWatchers and Sirius XM. There’s an “agent” component, as well.

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