startup

Venture orgs form alliance to standardize data collection

Seven venture capital and startup organizations focused on diversity within tech have announced the Diversity Data Alliance, a commitment to standardizing the way that data is collected and shared. Data transparency remains a pressing issue within venture for people looking to better track where and to whom money is allocated. Many firms already privately compile

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Anthropic hires Instagram co-founder as head of product

Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch corporate parent Yahoo recently acquired), is joining Anthropic as the company’s first chief product officer. As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, management and design efforts, Anthropic says, as the company works to expand

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Cruise founder Kyle Vogt is back with a robot startup

Kyle Vogt, the former founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise, has a new VC-backed robotics startup focused on household chores. Vogt announced Monday that the new startup, called the Bot Company, has raised $150 million from former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder and investor Daniel Gross, Spark Capital general partner

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Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global market for contact center AI could grow to nearly $3 billion in 2028, from $2.4 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, a recent survey found that around

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Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become part and parcel of major sports broadcasts. Replay caught the attention of Intel, which acquired the company in 2016 for a  reported $175 million, and

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Legion’s founder aims to close the gap between what employers and workers need

While taking a long road trip across the U.S. years ago, Sanish Mondkar realized that there were stark, problematic disconnects between employers and the staff they employ. To critics of late-stage capitalism, that might sound like an obvious observation. But Mondkar, who has a master’s in computer science from Cornell, says that seeing the issues

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Daloopa trains AI to automate financial analysts’ workflows

Thomas Li was working at Point72, the hedge fund founded by notorious investor Steve Cohen, when he realized that the financial industry relies heavily on manual data entry processes that could be prone to errors. “As a buy-side analyst, I felt the pain of manually sourcing and entering data to build and update financial models,”

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DocuSign acquires AI-powered contract management firm Lexion

As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to private equity, it’s acquiring a company itself. On Monday, DocuSign (which now prefers to go by Docusign, with a lowercase “S,” a PR rep from the company tells me) announced that it’s buying Lexion, a contract workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The purchase comes as DocuSign makes increasing investments

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SafeBase taps AI to automate software security reviews

Entrepreneurs Al Yang and Adar Arnon met at Harvard Business School and quickly realized that they had an interest in common: cybersecurity. “We’ve witnessed an evolving business climate that brought along with it an unprecedented need for improved security processes,” Arnon told TechCrunch. “Security’s importance has increased exponentially … [it’s] non-negotiable for technology buyers.” Yang

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