startup

Database startup Neo4j embraces AI to supercharge growth

To make AI possible, you need to create connections between vast quantities of data. That’s where tech like graph databases come into play. Graph databases handle fast-changing, interconnected data more adeptly than traditional databases, which were designed to store rigidly structured information. Of course, graph databases need to be managed in order to be useful. […]

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Lightyear is on a mission to modernize network procurement

Dennis Thankachan isn’t someone you’d expect would launch a digital procurement startup. After college, Thankachan went to work for Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. Two years later, he left for a hedge fund, PointState Capital, where he helped to manage equity investing. At PointState, which specializes in telecommunications, Thankachan said he encountered an unexpected

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Precursor’s Charles Hudson believes founders should test their investors

Charles Hudson, managing partner of Precursor Ventures, told an audience at AfroTech the basics of knowing when to invest: A company should have product-market fit and some form of traction.  But the next thing he said garnered some surprised looks from the audience: Founders should test investors with a small issue to see how they

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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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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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Concentric helps companies keep track of their sensitive data

Enterprises have a data inventory problem. The amount of data they’re collecting and storing is increasing, and that data is being spread across disparate storage buckets. Yet many organizations rely on processes that essentially amount to pencil-and-paper methods for tracking data provenance. According to one survey, more than 50% of companies use Excel spreadsheets in

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Supply chain startup Interos lands new customers, cash

Each year, supply chain disruptions cost the global economy trillions of dollars. In a recent McKinsey poll, nine in ten businesses said they had encountered logistics challenges over the past 12 months. Headwinds have only grown stronger as chaos reigns in key shipping corridors. Attacks on freighters continue in the Red Sea. Flooding is disrupting

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Fixify blends automation and human analysts to tackle IT problems

Matt Peters has spent more than a decade working for cybersecurity vendors. He was a team lead at Check Point, climbed the corporate ladder to VP of worldwide operations at FireEye, and spent over four years at Expel, a managed detection and response firm, as chief product officer. Peters says a surprising common thread ran

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