Author: TechBrunch
A group of leading healthcare organizations specializing in cancer treatment has entered into a partnership to better leverage the potential of AI to advance the field. With $40 million in cash and resources from leading technology backers, the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA) could be a major step forward in precision medicine. Members of the alliance include Fred Hutchinson, Johns Hopkins University, Dana-Farber, and Sloan Kettering, specifically the cancer research arms of these organizations, who are coordinating the new effort. Tom Lynch, president and president of Fred Hutch, made the remarks on stage at the Intelligent Applications Summit in Seattle, where…
Ali Rowghani, a former Y Combinator managing director and former Twitter executive, is launching a venture company called Maxq. Maxq is targeting $250 million for its debut fund, Maxq Fund I, according to SEC filings. The company will focus on seed-stage investments, Axios reported on Wednesday. According to Axios, Loughani's former YC colleagues Mia Mabanta, Simon Lu and JJ Fliegelman are all expected to participate. Mr. Rowghani previously headed YC's Continuity Fund. The fund was a vehicle to realize YC's pro rata rights and invest in select late-stage rounds of YC companies. The fund was established in 2015, but YC…
Hello everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to have this sent to your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. After a short hiatus, we're back with some show notes for OpenAI's DevDay. The keynote address, delivered yesterday morning in San Francisco, was notable for its subdued tone, in contrast to CEO Sam Altman's raucous, hypebeast-like speech last year. This DevDay, Altman wasn't on stage to pitch his shiny new project. He didn't even show up. Moderated by Olivier Godement, Head of Platform Products. Improving quality of life was on the agenda for this OpenAI DevDays, the…
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has closed its largest VC round in history. The startup announced today that it has raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values OpenAI at $157 billion pre-money. The new cash, led by previous investor Thrive Capital, brings OpenAI's total funding to approximately $17.8 billion, according to Crunchbase. “The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase our computing power, and continue to build tools that help people solve tough problems,” the company said in a blog post. said. “We are grateful to our investors for placing their…
JB Hunt, a transportation and freight network giant, is looking for software and digital products that will help it accelerate its business, adapt to the modern world, and even dominate its industry. And it's using startup incubator UP.Labs to help build it. On Wednesday, at the UP.Summit event in Bentonville, Arkansas, the companies announced a logistics and freight venture lab that will launch up to six startups over the next three years. The first of these startups will be launched in 2025 and will focus on some of the biggest problems in logistics and freight. UP.Labs is not structured like…
Poolside, an AI-powered software development platform, has raised $500 million in new funding. The cash came in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from big tech players like eBay (via eBay Ventures) and Nvidia. This brings Poolside's total funding to $626 million. Bloomberg reported that the startup is currently valued at $3 billion. TechCrunch revealed this summer that Poolside is in the midst of raising a significant amount of funding. Poolside, which has offices in the US and Europe, was founded last year by CEOs Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, both software engineers.…
Instant hopes to recapture some of the magic of Firebase before the Google acquisition by building a modern Postgres-based open source version. Like the original Firebase, San Francisco-based Instant focuses on giving front-end developers easy access to a real-time database with offline capabilities without having to manage the back-end architecture. Masu. The service supports applications written in React, React Native, and vanilla JavaScript. In addition to the database, it also provides tools to manage authentication and permissions, as well as real-time features such as shared cursors and presence. The team recently open sourced this project. Instant was founded by former…
Competition in the email market is fierce. After Apple's iOS 18 introduced a number of Gmail-like features to Apple's Mail app, including categorizing transactions, updates, and promotions and adding smart replies (in the upcoming iOS 18.1 update), Google on Wednesday announced a series of announced the functionality of Also includes enhancements to Gmail. Google's popular email service now lets users better organize and take actions like tracking packages, checking in for flights, setting reminders, and marking bills as paid right in their inbox. , a revamped “Summary Card” is added. The company says summary cards visually organize information from all…
Agence France-Presse, one of the world's largest news organizations, has notified French regulators of a possible data breach following last week's cyber attack. AFP News Agency, which has editorial offices in 260 cities in 150 countries, said in a brief statement on Saturday that it had detected an “attack on its systems” that affected some of its news distribution services to customers. “AFP's technical team is working on this incident with support from the French National Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI),” the organization said. “We are currently working to analyze and address this incident.” AFP did not post further details…
Transportation and warehousing are multitrillion-dollar industries, but the technology that powers them is often outdated, inefficient, and siled. Pallet, which today announced an $18 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, is building an all-in-one transportation and warehouse management system using AI to help companies from order entry to driver dispatch and management. We have made it possible to streamline our operations. Inventory and accounting. Sushanth Raman, CEO and co-founder of Pallet, was an early engineer at low-code startup Retool before leaving to start his own company with co-founder and fellow Retool engineer Andrew Spencer. In fact,…