Author: TechBrunch

Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its generative AI platform. The round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures. Writer CEO May Habib said the new cash, which brings Writer's total raised to $326 million, will be used for product development and “strengthening the company's leadership in the enterprise-generated AI category.” “At Writer, we don't just create models that can perform tasks; we develop advanced AI systems that enable mission-critical enterprise operations,” Habib…

AI is driving the demand for cloud services. Cloud spending is expected to more than double between 2019 and 2023 and exceed $2 trillion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs Research. However, poor spend management can put your ROI at risk. Yodar Shafrir discovered this while working at Run:AI, a workload management startup that Nvidia is acquiring. “I saw firsthand the frustration of DevOps teams due to resource inefficiency,” Shahrir told TechCrunch. “We observed high costs for unused resources and saw applications crash due to lack of sufficient resources. Constant pressure on engineering teams to fine-tune application resources reduced core…

Nelson and Freddie Mills, founders of Vatn Systems, spent their childhoods sailing across the turquoise waters of a yacht off the Caribbean islands and doing homework. Although their surroundings were idyllic, the ship they chose was clearly not. “The first boat I remember, I think my parents bought it for about five or ten grand,” Freddie said. “There was no refrigerator. It was leaking.” However, the unreliable ship turned out to be the perfect place to train future engineers. The brothers, who spent several months each year on a yacht, would occasionally forget their homework and pick up a wrench…

A battle is brewing for AI chips among major cloud vendors. Google's Trillium, a custom chip for training and running AI models, recently entered preview, and Microsoft's Maia is expected to follow soon. It has AI chips like Trainium, Inferentia, and Graviton to compete with Amazon Web Services. To draw attention to Trainium in particular, the company is launching a new funding program for AI research. The new program, called Build on Trainium, will award a total of $110 million to institutions, scientists, and students conducting AI research. AWS will award up to $11 million in Trainium credits to each…

Data integration is a necessary part of many workflows, from customer data onboarding to payroll, but for many datasets, the process is time-consuming and manual. Data is siled into databases and SaaS applications, each holding information in different formats, making it difficult to move information from one database to another. Lume is using AI to change this. Lume's system uses AI and algorithms to automate data mapping by extracting data from database silos and “normalizing” it. This means converting your data into a standardized format that can be easily moved and integrated into other workflows. If data integration gets interrupted…

Apple's regulatory problems in the European Union are once again intensifying. The iPhone maker has been accused of illegally discriminating against consumers in the region by restricting how some of its media services can be accessed. Consumer protection authorities in three EU member states are investigating geo-blocking measures (access restrictions) applied by Apple to services such as Apple Music, iTunes Store, and App Store. The European Commission and the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network, which coordinates joint actions by national consumer protection authorities, said in a press release on Tuesday that Apple has “several geo-blocking practices that may be prohibited.…

Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software company, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI algorithms to run on general-purpose processors. The transaction is subject to applicable regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions. Terms were not disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveyev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their research into high-performance execution engines for AI. Neural Magic's software aims to process AI workloads on processors at speeds comparable to dedicated chips. The company's software can achieve speedups by running AI models through off-the-shelf processors, which typically have more available…

Enterprise spending on cloud services continues to grow, reaching $675 billion this year, thanks to organizations' embrace of software-as-a-service, the proliferation of distributed work, and the rise of computing. Intensive technologies like AI. A startup called PointFive believes it has found a better way to understand usage, and today announced $20 million in funding from a strong list of backers to take on the market. New backer Salesforce Ventures is leading the Series A, with participation from Index Ventures, Entree Capital, Sheva VC, and Vesey Ventures. The company, headquartered in New York, was founded out of the Israeli tech industry…

Global food production generates at least a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than 80% of which comes from agriculture. But managing that impact is easier said than done because there are so many variables to deal with. 'Regenerative' agriculture is being hailed as one way to move towards several sustainability goals, as it offers farmers the opportunity to increase biodiversity and enrich soil while reducing carbon emissions. Well advertised. It has a direct impact on food production and thus the food supply. Berlin-based agritech startup Klim is working to make it easier for farms to switch to regenerative agriculture,…

It was 2020, and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux, and Stéphane Maarek were all too unhappy with Apache Kafka. Tools to process real-time data streams simply weren't up to the task of meeting the trio's engineering needs, especially during the pandemic as companies rushed to deploy cloud services. “Many companies found it difficult to scale their data operations,” Orbán told TechCrunch. “And they struggle to leverage the full potential of their data, leaving vast amounts unused or siled.” After some discussion, Orbán, Derochaux, and Malek concluded that, although unwieldy, Kafka was not a total waste. They thought that maybe some tools…