Ashish Nagar, an engineer by trade, was working at Amazon’s Alexa org on the conversational AI team when he realized that AI had the potential to greatly bolster productivity in contact centers. “Frontline workers, like customer service workers, are the biggest human capital in the world,” Nagar told TechCrunch. “So, my idea was to use […]
Level AI applies algorithms to contact center pain points Read More »
After doing some consulting for Microsoft to develop protections against zero-day exploits, software engineer Joran Dirk Greef worked with Coil, a web monetization startup in San Francisco, to help build its payments infrastructure. At the time, Coil was using a traditional database to store and process transactions. But Greef had the insight that a specialized
TigerBeetle is building database software optimized for financial transactions Read More »
Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. Bloomberg says that the round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion. That’s more than double
Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals Read More »
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Most interesting startup stories from the week Shortly after Google parent Alphabet reportedly abandoned its ambitions to purchase online marketing software company HubSpot, the tech giant decided to pursue another big acquisition. This time, Google is in
M&A activity heats up with Wiz, Graphcore, etc. Read More »
When Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale launched AI talent and services company Tribe AI in 2019, they had to convince companies that having an AI strategy mattered. After the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and the AI mania it ushered in, the startup has experienced a “massive boom” in demand, Gale told TechCrunch. Rice
Tribe AI raised venture capital to keep up with demand after six years of bootstrapping Read More »
The threat of deepfakes is growing as the AI tools to create them become widely accessible. There was a 245% increase in deepfakes worldwide from 2023 to 2024, an uptick spurred in part by coming election cycles, according to verification provider Sumsub. It’s also affecting the corporate sector; a recent Business.com survey found that 10%
Deepfake-detecting firm Pindrop lands $100M loan to grow its offerings Read More »
Community colleges aren’t immune from the current reckoning higher education is facing. Student enrollment is declining while institutions keep raising tuition prices which can prevent students from finishing their programs. Clearly, it’s time for the industry to try something new. Tade Oyerinde thinks startups can help. Oyerinde is the founder and CEO at Campus, a
Campus wants to crack the code to get community college to work for everyone Read More »
The construction industry has a slow payments problem. Studies have found that it takes anywhere from two to three months on average for construction companies to get paid, due to factors such as delays, multiple payment layers and cost overruns. The cost of sluggish construction contract payments climbed to $273 billion in 2023, representing 14%
Adaptive builds automation tools to speed up construction payments Read More »
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week we’re looking at an AI startup that wants to help people get creative with video; Kudos, which raised $3 million to help get rid
Defending Russia’s EU neighbors | TechCrunch Read More »
As the demand for AI grows, so, too, does the demand for expertise in maintaining databases — a critical part in any AI pipeline. Databases store the information used to train, run and fine-tune AI systems, and it’s been shown that good data management can smooth the pathway to AI adoption in an enterprise. One
Database startup Tembo lands new cash to expand Read More »
