Author: TechBrunch
Tengo uses AI to find, evaluate and respond to public tenders. It is a software-as-a-service tool that helps companies handle large public tenders. It is a bit like Govly in the US. Originally created within startup studio Hexa, the startup has raised a funding round of €3 million ($3.2 million at current exchange rates) led by Point Nine. For most companies, public tenders are a huge untapped market because they require huge resources: in France alone there are more than 200 platforms hosting public tenders, and even if you find an opportunity, putting together a strong application takes a lot…
Goodreads co-founder Otis Chandler is back to build the next big app community, except this time the focus isn't on books, but on content you can find online, including news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and more. Smashing, an AI- and community-powered content recommendation app currently released in invite-only beta, aims to connect users with their interests by surfacing the internet's hidden gems. The launch of the service comes at a time when many news consumers are still mourning the loss of Artifact, the AI news reader from an Instagram co-founder that was recently sold to TechCrunch parent…
Developers often write, build, and test code in their local environment (i.e., on their laptop) before sending it to a cloud service for integration and deployment. There's nothing wrong with this approach. But local development can introduce challenges, such as conflicts between development environments or, worse, security vulnerabilities. The usability issue of local development environments is one of the reasons why cloud development environments (CDEs), which offer a range of remotely hosted software development tools, have become increasingly influential in recent years. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using CDEs. One of…
It seems likely that not a week will go by in 2024 without a media organization, author group, or artist suing a generative AI company for using their work to train models without their permission. The problem, of course, is that there is as yet no clear framework for what constitutes copyright infringement in the context of GenAI training. While these lawsuits are sure to keep copyright lawyers busy, a new company, Created by Humans, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, aims to avoid costly legal battles by offering a marketplace where creators can license their intellectual property directly to…
Boeing subsidiary WiskAero has acquired Velocell, a software verification and validation company that has been serving the aerospace industry for 25 years. Wisk is taking an autonomy-first approach to electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft: The company's sixth-generation aircraft, which is set to begin aerial testing later this year, is designed for human oversight but will not be physically piloted by humans. This means that Wisk, more than any other company building eVTOL vehicles, needs to ensure that its software is up to par. “There's a ton of high-integrity software in the aircraft and everywhere on the ground that…
Job hunting can be daunting, especially for those who are not immigrants to the U.S. Not only do you have to compete on the strength of your resume, but you also have to comb through hundreds of job offers to find the few that will sponsor your work visa, and if you lose your job, you only have 60 days to find another one before you have to leave the country. The lottery (the H-1B program, which randomly selects skilled foreigners to work in the US) is notoriously difficult to win. According to official data, the US Citizenship and Immigration…
For indie developers building their games on their own, regulatory compliance is probably not a top priority. You still need to write the code, design the mechanics, and test and test your game to make sure it's actually fun to play. But compliance is often not an option, especially when it comes to child safety, and the task gets harder every year as regulations around the world evolve quickly and frequently. A startup called k-ID wants to smooth out compliance efforts, raising $45 million in a Series A round to build a platform that makes it easier for game developers…
A relatively new startup called EvolutionaryScale has secured a large amount of funding to build an AI model that can generate new proteins for scientific research. Evolutionscale announced Tuesday that it had raised $142 million in a seed round led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, with participation from Amazon and Nvidia's corporate venture arm NVentures. The startup also released ESM3, an AI model that it describes as a “state-of-the-art model” of biology that can create proteins for use in drug discovery and materials science. “ESM3 marks a step towards a future of biology where…
As companies shut down cloud and ghost kitchens, Local Kitchens is proving that its tech-enabled, multi-brand restaurant concept is a business model that works — and it's raising $40 million in new Series B funding for its efforts. Former DoorDash employees John Goldsmith and Andrew Munday teamed up with Jordan Bramble to found the San Francisco-based company in 2020. Their goal was to bring food from local restaurants and nationally-renowned chefs to consumers in Northern California. Local kitchens operate in a similar way to cloud kitchens or ghost kitchens, which are shared workspaces for restaurants to prepare food, often for…
Ashley Beckwith has spent years of her academic and professional career focused on the intersection of biology, materials, and manufacturing to more efficiently build medical solutions. When she realized this technology could be applied to plants and plant-derived materials, which were in desperate need, she decided to change direction. “Life on Earth is only as secure as the plant populations on Earth, and today plant populations are in danger,” Beckwith told TechCrunch. “Around 40 percent of plant species are at risk of extinction. Forest areas untouched by humans have shrunk by 12 percent. [in 2022]These plant resources are under pressure…