Author: TechBrunch
True Fit, an AI-powered size and fit personalization tool, has been providing size recommendation solutions to thousands of retailers for nearly two decades. Now the company is branching out into the generative AI space with a new tool called “Fit Hub,” which aims to make it easier for online shoppers to find the right clothes for their body type. Size issues remain one of the biggest sources of friction for online consumers, with an average e-commerce return rate of 17.6%. Many customers carefully study size charts, descriptions, and customer reviews on product detail pages to determine how a garment will…
Early winners in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Take data labeling startup Scale AI and its long and diverse list of customers and investors. Founded in 2016, the San Francisco-based startup developed software that labels image, text, audio, and video data that companies use to train machine learning models. Scale AI started by providing companies like Nuro and Zoox with the labeled data they needed to train machine learning models for self-driving cars. The company quickly expanded to government, e-commerce, enterprise automation, and robotics companies. Scale AI's current…
Imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Then imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting purchase approval for the final selected part, and tracking those parts until they arrive at headquarters. It's exactly as complicated as it sounds. But it doesn't have to be, say two brothers who just secured funding to update their hardware company's procurement process. Like many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in cutting-edge industries — CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin, and Stoke…
The Raspberry Pi 5, a small but powerful computer that has become hugely popular among tech enthusiasts and industrial companies, is now an AI computer, too. The company just released the AI Kit, a $70 expansion kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inference. With this new expansion module, Raspberry Pi is taking advantage of its HAT+ expansion card, where HAT stands for “Hardware Attached on Top,” a cutesy acronym the company uses for expansion cards that can be mounted on top of a regular Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi's HAT+ expansion card adds…
When Stacklet founders Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu left Capital One to launch their startup in 2020, most companies weren't too concerned about containing cloud costs. But in the years since, economic headwinds — first the pandemic and then rising interest rates — have made containing cloud costs a necessity. That's why Stacklet's cloud cost management and governance platform is growing in popularity. In fact, CEO Stanfield said the company will triple its revenue in 2023 compared to the previous year, though he couldn't provide specific numbers. Investors seemed pleased with what they saw, and have now invested $14.5 million…
Lance Riedel and Nigel Daly, who have both spent decades in search discovery, began to understand how search engines could create personalized search for online shopping when they worked at Pinterest and launched Pinterest Shopping. When most people shop online, they type in keywords and expect search engines like Google to work their magic and return ranked results. But the big magic they learned at Pinterest was how to flip the script using large-scale language models and image recognition AI to customize results to a person's past behavior, not just keywords, Riedel told TechCrunch. The more times a user uses…
GetWhy, a consumer research technology company that helps businesses conduct market research and derive insights from video-based interviews using AI, has raised $34.5 million in a Series A funding round from California-based venture capital firm PeakSpan Capital. The big Series A highlights investor enthusiasm for backing the next big thing in AI, especially companies that already have connections to big name customers — in GetWhy's case, the Danish company claims a host of big name clients, including Nestle, McDonald's, Nike and L'Oreal. GetWhy's platform allows customers to describe what they want to do — for example, get initial responses to…
Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, has raised $30 million to allow employees to sell $100 million worth of stock to new and existing investors, including Khosla Ventures. The round values the nine-year-old company at $3 billion, up 50% from the $2 billion it raised in its Series D in November 2021. Sword CEO and founder Virgílio Bento told TechCrunch that the company had initially planned to only raise a $100 million second round in which employees and early investors could sell shares, but after the second round proved oversubscribed, the company decided to also raise a $30…
WndrCo, a holding company and technology investment firm founded by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, has raised its first venture capital fund, closing on more than $450 million in capital commitments. Katzenberg is best known as the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, while Jaswa was a principal at New Enterprise Associates before joining Dropbox as one of its early employees. In 2022, we profiled the eight-year-old company after noticing WndrCo's name popping up multiple times in venture capital deals in a short space of time. “The common thread in all of them…
If content is king, today's focus is on how the king is expanding his empire. Print and traditional media were first powered by websites, and now websites are powered by a rapidly expanding array of apps, social media platforms, and content created by artificial intelligence. Now a company building toward that content horizon has raised a major round of funding to expand its operations. Storyblok, a Linz, Austria-based startup offering a content management system (CMS) for organizations built on a “headless” concept, has raised $80 million in a Series C round. The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that…