startup

AI social media vetting startup Ferretly secures $2.5M, launches election personnel screening tool

An AI social media vetting startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and is launching a new platform designed to screen election personnel. Founded in 2019, Ferretly leverages AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that traditional background checks may overlook. The startup is […]

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

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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Encord lands new cash to grow its data labeling tools for AI

Labeling and annotation platforms might not get the attention flashy new generative AI models do. But they’re essential. The data on which many models train must be labeled, or the models wouldn’t be able to interpret that data during the training process. Annotation is a vast undertaking, requiring thousands to millions of annotations for the

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CloudPay, a payroll services provider, lands $120M in new funding

In 1996, two companies, Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions, formed a venture called CloudPay to provide payroll and payments services to enterprise clients. CloudPay grew quietly over the next several decades, adding workflow automation features to maintain pace with upstart rivals. It’s still growing, CFO Andy Thomson assures TechCrunch. Thomson claims that CloudPay is handling

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

Digital transformation — the process of transforming outdated apps and processes with cloud technologies and digital workflows — can be a risky undertaking.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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Hyperspace is building custom instances to accelerate database searches

The growth in the demand for generative AI apps has led to a need for larger and larger databases to store the associated data (e.g. model training data). These databases tend to be resource-intensive from a hardware perspective and depending on the algorithms used to orchestrate them, they can be high-latency. Often, companies are forced

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Zuckerberg and Jensen show off their friendship, while an AI necklace covets yours

A fireside chat between Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg at SIGGRAPH 2024 took some unexpected turns. What started as a conversation about the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Zuckerberg’s vision of an AI chatbot future quickly became a more casual affair — including a swap of custom-made jackets, a rare F-bomb from the Meta CEO,

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Sequoia-backed Knowde raises Series C at a valuation cut

Knowde, an online marketplace for chemicals and polymers, just closed on a Series C round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The San Jose-based startup raised $60 million in a round that values it lower than the $500 million valuation it garnered in its most recent round, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. This round

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