Author: TechBrunch

Construction companies deal with so much paperwork that it's difficult to process and manage it all. According to a recent survey, one-third of construction professionals find access to documentation a challenge in completing projects, and one-quarter say inaccuracies in project documentation contribute to construction delays. Sarah Buchner knows this all too well: a former carpenter who founded Trunk Tools, a startup that provides automated tools for organizing unstructured construction documents. “I grew up poor in a small village in Austria and started working as a carpenter at age 12,” Büchner told TechCrunch. “After many years as a carpenter, I moved…

The Rounds, a startup that offers scheduled deliveries of groceries and household essentials in reusable packaging, announced a $24 million Series B funding round on Monday. The new capital will be used for product development, hiring, and expanding its services to additional markets. Alongside the funding announcement, The Rounds also introduced new features for customers, such as one-time purchases and flexible delivery date options, and enhanced its AI-powered algorithms to better predict when customers need to restock their products. Launched in 2019, The Rounds allows consumers to order weekly bundles for a $10 subscription. Items range from household essentials and…

The U.S. Department of Defense is a massive organization. Not only does it employ millions of military personnel and hundreds of thousands of civilians, it also has the world's largest military budget, with more equipment purchased and maintained than can be contained in a single paragraph. There's a lot to coordinate. Operators across the Defense Department's various agencies must decide how to plan operations, coordinate resources and stay within budget for potentially contested events, like hurricanes or hostile forces. Two years after it was founded, Virginia-based startup Defcon AI has raised a $44 million seed round to solve this intractable…

As the AI ​​industry continues to release a plethora of new models, companies hoping to stay competitive are racing to adopt them for their own purposes. In fact, according to technology consulting firm Searce, roughly 10% of companies plan to spend a whopping $25 million on AI initiatives this year. But while a lot of money is being spent on AI, the ROI is unclear: According to Gartner, half of AI leaders don't know how to calculate or demonstrate the value of their AI projects. Former Airbnb data scientist Chetan Sharma argues that calculating AI ROI isn't that difficult with…

Simulating the real world is an incredibly complex problem when done with a practical level of fidelity. Traditional methods have held automotive and aerospace design teams back, but Beyond Math is leveraging AI to develop a new way to simulate the world that can save days or weeks of wait time. “Language doesn't have a mathematical model that explains what the next word is, but physics does, and it turns out machine learning is really good at not just pattern recognition, but computation as well,” co-founder Darren Garvey said. The field where Beyond Math is taking its first steps is…

AI models have proven they can do a lot, but what tasks do you actually want them to perform? Preferably mundane tasks, and there are plenty of them in research and academia. Reliant wants to specialize in the kind of time-consuming data extraction tasks that are currently the domain of exhausted graduate students and interns. “The best thing AI can do is improve the human experience — reduce menial labor and let people do the things that matter to them,” said CEO Karl Moritz. In the world of research, where he and co-founders Marc Bellemare and Richard Schlegel have worked…

PostEx, a Pakistani startup that provides financial and logistics services to online merchants, plans to enter new markets this year, starting with Saudi Arabia, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. “We want to go into other markets and really disrupt them, because we see a gap there,” PostEx founder and CEO Mohammed Omar Khan said in an interview. E-commerce in Pakistan currently accounts for around 1.5% of the total retail market but has grown by 50% in the past 12 months, and PostEx can be credited with contributing to this growth. Online merchants in Pakistan find it difficult to sustain their business…

The AI ​​boom is spurring demand for data centers, which in turn are increasing water consumption (used to cool the computing equipment inside them). Virginia, home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, is set to see its water usage jump by nearly two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons, according to the FT. It's a trend that's happening around the world, and many say it's unsustainable. Data center giant Microsoft says 42% of the water it consumes in 2023 will come from “water-stressed areas.” Google, which owns the world's largest data centers,…

OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but the price wars have made business around these platforms rather precarious. Selling access to the models is quickly becoming a “zero-margin business,” Aidan Gomez, CEO of rival AI provider Cohere, said in a podcast appearance on Monday. For now, the costs of these AI models are outpacing the revenue they bring in. “If you're just selling models, that's going to be very hard for the foreseeable future,” Gomez said in an interview with 20VC's Harry Stebbings. By “selling models,” he means selling API access…

What's the point of chatting with a human-like bot, an unreliable narrator and a personality off color? That's a question I've been pondering ever since Google last week began testing Gemini Live, a rival to OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode that's an attempt to create a more engaging chatbot experience, complete with lifelike voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any time. Gemini Live is “intuitive and customized to enable real, two-way conversations,” Sissie Hsiao, general manager of Gemini experience at Google, told TechCrunch in May.[It] “For example, they can provide information more succinctly and respond in a more…