Author: TechBrunch

As Uber continues to work to bring more electric vehicles to its ride-hailing and delivery platform, it believes it will be helpful to provide drivers with a chatbot that can answer all their EV-related questions. Starting in early 2025, Uber will launch an AI assistant for drivers in the U.S. powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o. At launch, the assistant will only answer questions about electric cars, such as where to charge and which one to buy, an Uber spokesperson said, but the integration could expand to other use cases in the future. That's what it means. Uber announced integration with OpenAI's…

Lightdash, the business intelligence (BI) platform and open source alternative to Google's Looker, has lifted the lid on a new product that will allow companies to train “AI analysts” specifically for individual team use cases. and allows anyone in your company to run queries. Aggregate business data. To support this, the four-year-old startup also announced Tuesday that it has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Accel. Lightdash is built around an open source command-line-based data transformation tool called dbt (Data Construction Tools) that leverages SQL to help businesses transform raw data into structured, analyzable datasets. We…

Middle school and high school students are both the easiest and most difficult audience. If you're building a neat little video game, chances are they'll download it right away. But if you're working on a learning app, like the team behind Revyze, try pitching it. Still, the French startup defied the odds and attracted 1 million users in the past two years. In June, the Revyze app reached the coveted number one spot in Apple's App Store for free downloads. A third of French grade 9 students used Revyze for last-minute study before national secondary school exams. Around 2,000 content…

Middle school and high school students are both the easiest and most difficult audience. If you're building a neat little video game, chances are they'll download it right away. But if you're working on a learning app, like the team behind Revyze, try pitching it. Still, the French startup defied the odds and attracted 1 million users in the past two years. In June, the Revyze app achieved the coveted #1 spot in Apple's App Store for free downloads. One-third of French 9th graders used Revyze for last-minute study before their junior high school entrance exams. Around 2,000 content creators…

French biotech startup Generare has announced a funding of 5 million euros (at current exchange rates) to step up the development of what it touts as a scalable approach to identifying promising compounds for drug discovery that already exist in nature. Closed a seed round of approximately $5.5 million. It focuses on screening molecules produced by microorganisms that have the potential to be repurposed as human treatments. Such molecules were once a rich source for drug discovery using early chemistry-based discovery techniques. A major example is the antibiotic efficacy of Penicillium, which was discovered after the mold was accidentally grown…

Chainalysis co-founder and CEO Michael Gronagar has taken a personal leave of absence from the company. The blockchain analysis group did not specify the reason, but said the development was temporary. According to The Block, which first reported the news, Chainaloss president and COO Sari Granat, who joined the company in 2022, will serve as interim CEO. Ten-year-old, New York-based Chaina Analysis quickly developed a reputation as a “crypto detective” working on behalf of the U.S. government and corporate clients. A year ago, Chainalysis laid off more than 15% of its 900 employees and plans to focus more on government…

General Catalyst, one of Silicon Valley's largest capital firms, is preparing to launch a so-called “continuation fund” worth between $800 million and $1 billion, according to people familiar with the plans. Continuation funds consist of a portion of the equity that a VC firm holds in its portfolio companies. With approximately $25 billion in assets under management as of 2023, General Catalyst's exact continuation fund portfolio composition has not yet been determined. However, it is likely to include shares in Stripe, Gusto and Circle, the people said. The company recently hired Jefferies as its secondary investment advisor. Once the fund…

Venture capital firm NFX laid off four employees in September as it seeks to “rebalance” resources from its software and product teams to its investment team, general partner Pete Flint told TechCrunch. Flint said the layoffs included one product leader and three engineers. About a week ago, Amy Lin, who had been chief product officer since 2017, announced on LinkedIn that she was leaving the company. NFX builds and runs its own in-house software to find and evaluate companies, but Flint said the company recently used AI to achieve the same level of results with fewer people. It turns out…

As companies increasingly integrate artificial intelligence into their workflows and products, the demand for tools and platforms that make it easier to create, test, and deploy machine learning models is increasing. This category of platforms, commonly known as Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), is already a bit crowded with startups like InfuseAI, Comet, Arrikto, Arize, Galileo, Tecton, and Diveplane, as well as offerings from incumbents like Google Cloud. I'm doing it. Azure, AWS. Now, one Korean MLOps platform called VESSL AI is carving out a niche of its own by focusing on optimizing GPU costs using a hybrid infrastructure that combines…

US money transfer giant MoneyGram has admitted that hackers stole customers' personal information and transaction data in a cyberattack last month. The company said in a statement Monday that customer data was “accessed and obtained” by an unauthorized third party during the Sept. 20 cyberattack. Although the nature of the cyberattack is still unknown, the cyberattack caused a week-long outage that resulted in the closure of the company's website and app. Go offline. MoneyGram says it serves more than 50 million people in more than 200 countries and territories each year. MoneyGram said in a statement Monday that the investigation…