Startups

Smashing, from Goodreads’ co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations

Goodreads‘ co-founder Otis Chandler is back to build the next big app community. But this time, his focus isn’t on books; it’s on the content you can find online, including news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts and more. With Smashing, an AI and community-powered content recommendation app, now launching into an invite-only beta, […]

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Foray Bioscience is breaking down the barriers of bringing biomanufacturing to plants

Ashley Beckwith spent years of her academic and professional career focused on the intersection of biology, materials and manufacturing to build medical solutions more efficiently. When she realized the tech could be applied to plants and plant-based materials, an area that desperately needed it, she decided to switch gears. “Life on earth is only as

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Materia looks to make accountants more efficient with AI 

The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured

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Meet Seen, a new app for friends to record reactions to TikToks and other content

We all know the feeling when we send a funny TikTok video, anticipating a response from a friend, only to receive a basic laughing emoji or, worse, no reaction at all. Seen aims to solve this with its new social app, where friends record a live video reaction to content you send them.  The video

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Steve Case on why policy is crucial to make sure AI success isn’t concentrated to a few players

Steve Case is no stranger to how policy can help aid innovation. His former company AOL would have been dead in the water if not for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required telecoms companies to open access to their tech. Now, Case is hoping the federal government will look to take the same stance

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What StepStone’s $3.3B venture secondaries fund tells us about LPs’ current appetite for venture

StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week. This fundraise doesn’t just say a lot about StepStone’s venture secondaries investing prowess, but also about how LPs are thinking about the current venture market. The fund, StepStone VC Secondaries Fund VI, raised $3.3 billion. This marks a

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Amazon says it’ll spend $230 million on generative AI startups

Amazon says that it will commit up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications. The investment, roughly $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services.

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DC’s political class doesn’t know Y Combinator exists, but it’s trying to change that

Washington, D.C., may be the hub for legislation and regulation that affects startups, but many people in the city don’t know anything about one of the more prominent accelerators fueling the industry: Y Combinator. Speaking at a TechCrunch Strictly VC event on Tuesday evening, YC Head of Public Policy Luther Lowe said the startup incubator

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