Generative AI

EliseAI lands $75M for chatbots that help property managers deal with renters

Startups /

EliseAI, a company developing a suite of AI-powered property management tools for landlords, has raised $75 million in a Series D round that values the startup at $1 billion. EliseAI is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Minna Song, who met the company’s second co-founder, Tony Stoyanov, while the two were undergraduate students at Cambridge. […]

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Gemini Live first look: Better than talking to Siri, but worse than I’d like

AI /

Google launched Gemini Live during its Made By Google event in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday. The feature allows you to have a semi-natural spoken conversation, not typed out, with an AI chatbot powered by Google’s latest large language model. TechCrunch was there to test it out firsthand. Gemini Live is Google’s answer to OpenAI’s

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Gemini Live, Google’s answer to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, launches

Apps /

Gemini Live, Google’s answer to the recently launched (in limited alpha) Advanced Voice Mode for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is rolling out on Tuesday, months after being announced at Google’s I/O 2024 developer conference. It was announced at Google’s Made by Google 2024 event. Gemini Live lets users have “in-depth” voice chats with Gemini, Google’s generative AI-powered

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SEC charges crypto firm NovaTech with fraud

Government & Policy /

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is suing a crypto startup, NovaTech, for allegedly fraudulently raising more than $650 million from over 200,000 investors, many in the Haitian-American community. The SEC frames NovaTech, founded in 2019 by husband-and-wife duo Cynthia and Eddy Petion, as a multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme — one that lured investors

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Meta, Universal Music Group addresses AI music in new licensing agreement

Media & Entertainment /

Meta and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced on Monday the expansion of their multi-year music licensing agreement, which enables users to share songs from UMG’s music library across Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Horizon, Threads, and WhatsApp) without violating copyright.  What’s most notable about the new agreement is that it states that the two companies are

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AI business agent startup Bardeen pulls in strategic investment from Dropbox and Hubspot

Fundraising /

Every day, employees across the world spend incalculable hours performing tediously repetitive tasks, such as, for example, converting documents into PDFs and then uploading them to a drive, from where it’s sucked into a database and emailed to a team. While UiPath helped pioneer this kind of ‘robotic’ process, it’s also pivoted to an AI-driven mode

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Mechanical Orchard, led by ex-Pivotal CEO, scores $50 million round led by Alphabet’s GV

Fundraising /

Digital transformation — the process of transforming outdated apps and processes with cloud technologies and digital workflows — can be a risky undertaking. In 2023, Harvard Business Review reported that while 89% of large companies have a digital and AI transformation underway, they’ve only captured 31% of the expected revenue uplift and 25% of anticipated

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