Author: TechBrunch

Recalls are costly and damaging to any company, regardless of size or market. For example, McKinsey estimates that recalls for companies that manufacture medical devices have cost $600 million in recent decades. The reputational impact tends to be long-lasting. Customers won't forgive you right away. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 55% of buyers said they would change brands after a recall, and 21% said they would avoid buying brands made by the manufacturer of the recalled product. So what should a business do? Well, perhaps you should look to AI, suggests Daniel Furst. The first is the CEO of…

Scientific advances are accelerating the pace of new drug development. Tierra Bioscience believes the pace could be even faster. The San Leandro-based company has developed an AI-guided custom protein synthesis platform to help pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural organizations develop new proteins in weeks instead of months. Simply put, Tierra allows customers to order proteins online that can make everything from antibodies to food growth factors. This platform creates cell-free reagents or digital arrays of proteins. Tierra creates her DNA, the code for proteins. That reagent is combined with the customer's protein sequence and fed into a robotic platform to create…

DoorDash hopes to reduce abusive and inappropriate interactions between consumers and delivery workers with a new AI-powered feature that automatically detects offensive language. Dubbed “SafeChat+,” DoorDash leverages AI technology to review in-app conversations to determine if a customer or Dasher is being harassed. Depending on the scenario, you have the option to report an incident and contact DoorDash's support team if you are a customer, or cancel your order immediately if you are a delivery person. If a driver is on the receiving end of abuse, they can cancel the delivery without affecting their rating. DoorDash also sends warnings to…

If you want to ask Google's AI chatbot a question about an upcoming election, you'll need to do so from a country that doesn't hold an election. TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has begun restricting queries made on Gemini when related to elections in any market around the world where elections are being held. The search giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it has begun rolling out restrictions on Gemini to limit the surfacing of answers to election-related queries globally. TechCrunch understands that the update has already been rolled out in the US and is starting to roll out…

MIT professor Mike Stonebraker has been at the forefront of database technology for more than 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres database and his Postgres database and helped launch many companies including Streambase Systems (which he acquired by Tibco in 2013), VoltDB, Tamr, and SciDB. Now 80 years old, he knows a thing or two about database technology and starting a company. His latest project, DBOS, puts the database at the center of the software stack and reduces the operating system to a small kernel of low-level functionality. In today's data-centric world, he believes Linux has…

Nanonets, a startup that uses AI to automate back-office processes, has raised $29 million in a new funding round led by Accel, aiming to improve the accuracy of automated processes involving large amounts of unstructured data. Processing unstructured data from documents such as invoices, receipts, and purchase orders often requires repetitive tasks and significant human resources. Primarily targeting the financial services sector, Nanonets says his company's AI platform aims to improve the efficiency of these processes and make them more cost-effective. The startup, an AY Combinator alumnus, has built an AI platform through which it offers no-code solutions that help…

This year's early stage social gathering in Boston is fast approaching. That means it's time to add three more names to the ever-growing list of high-performance smart speakers and answer your hottest questions. Today, we're excited to announce that Tobi Coker from Felicis, Julia Neagu from Quotient AI, and Nabiha Saklayen from Cellino are on the scene and ready to hit the ground running next month. Regular readers of TechCrunch will remember that Cellino won the 2021 Battlefield event. The company later raised $80 million in a round in which Felicis also participated. Quotient is a bit of a secret…

AI may be the “IT” of the moment. But that doesn't mean it's easier to implement. According to the 2023 S&P Global Survey, approximately half of companies with at least one AI project in operation are still in the pilot or proof-of-concept stage. There are many reasons for slow startups, but commonly cited challenges include data management, security, and computing resources. Roughly half of companies responding to an S&P poll said they are not ready to implement AI and do not intend to do so within the next five years or more. Fortunately, there is a growing number of products…

Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated, personalized video campaigns, confirms $18 million in new funding, It can be built into its own software, which has opened up its platform to third parties to integrate their technology. Reports date back to August that Tavus had raised “approximately $18 million,” but details have not been released. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has indeed raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Scale Venture Partners, an early-stage VC firm that has previously backed companies like Box, HubSpot, and DocuSign.…

Peak XV aims to become a key LP in the company's future business and explore investments across various asset classes, creating an 'Evergreen' fund funded by investment partners and an extended team. a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The most influential investor in India and Southeast Asia revealed the news to its limited partners at its annual general meeting in New Delhi this week. With the “forever” fund, Peak XV aims to bring “a culture of high accountability and collaboration with LPs” and a “differentiated” ability to grow as an organization, according to LP sources familiar with the…