Government websites aren’t known for cutting-edge tech. GovWell co-founder and CTO Ben Cohen discovered this while trying to help his dad, a contractor, apply for building permits. Cohen worked as a full stack engineer at Uber during the day and faxed documents for building permits at night. The difference in tech was stark. Years later, […]
GovWell is bringing automation and efficiency to local governments Read More »
Farmers have got to do something about pests. But nobody really likes the idea of using more chemical pesticides. Thomas Laurent’s company, Micropep, thinks the answer might already be in the plants themselves. Micropep is exploring how naturally occurring compounds, known as micropeptides, might work as an entirely new class of pesticides. If the startup
Micropep taps tiny proteins to make pesticides safer Read More »
After hearing that a U.S. Navy submarine ran into an underwater mountain, Joe Wolfel was surprised to find out just how little both government and commercial organizations knew about the ocean floor. It stuck with him throughout his time in the Navy and years later he launched a company to try to fix it. Wolfel
Terradepth wants to map the rest of the ocean floor Read More »
Quality assurance in the app development world is a necessary, but often resource-draining, undertaking. According to Statista, 23% of companies’ annual IT budgets are allocated to in-house or third-party contracted QA and testing. The stakes are high. In a survey by QA software-testing company QualiTest Group, 88% of app users said that they’d abandon apps
QA Wolf secures $36M to grow its app QA-testing suite Read More »
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 »
