Author: TechBrunch
A new startup called Auggie aims to provide a single platform where parents can buy products and connect with each other. The company's new app, released this week, provides a platform where parents can share product recommendations, shop vetted products, and find a community to get real-time advice on a range of parenting issues. Auggie was founded in August 2023 by Lily Walla, an entrepreneur who previously founded an edible branding startup called SPOTS NYC and sold it to 1-800-Flowers food retailer Branded Treats. Walla came up with the idea for Auggie while pregnant with her first child. She sought…
Shopping is fun, but choosing a set of skis from thousands of options is not. That's where Remark comes in. Remark co-founder and CEO Theo Satloff said the two-year-old startup is helping shoppers make purchases with more confidence. It does this by pairing shoppers with high-quality product experts via asynchronous live chat with one of its 50,000 experts – artists, musicians, stylists, golfers and ski instructors – who can discuss products in the same way they would with retail staff. And here's a little twist: Remark trains artificial intelligence models on these experts, creating personas that can answer questions in…
AI is just the newest and most demanding market for high-performance computing, with system architects working around the clock to squeeze the most performance out of every watt. Swedish startup ZeroPoint, which just raised 5 million euros ($5.5 million) in new funding, wants to help them with a new memory compression technique at the nanosecond scale. And the technique is exactly as complex as its name suggests. Here's the concept: By losslessly compressing data just before it enters RAM, and then decompressing it afterwards, we effectively expand the memory channel by more than 50% by adding just one small section…
In 2021, Roy Lavon, Asaf Riveanu, and Izar Gilboa joined forces to found Finout, an enterprise toolset that helps manage and optimize cloud costs. (We covered the company's stealth releases in 2022.) Lavon, CEO of Finout and previously director of engineering for observability platform Logz.io, says that when trying to understand cloud costs, said that obstacles he personally encountered prompted him to found Finout. “One of the main challenges enterprises face is the widespread adoption of cloud cost management tools, which is first and foremost an organizational change,” Ravhon told TechCrunch. “AI can have significant cost implications, either due to…
Fresh off a $102 million funding round earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding for security acquisitions. The company, which crowdsources the skills of more than 500,000 hackers to find and fix security vulnerabilities and other operational loopholes in enterprise networks and apps, has acquired Informer, which specializes in assessing and maintaining attack surface management (ASM). ASM is an important aspect of how security technology works today and involves the use of various techniques to continuously monitor potential attack vectors in an organization's IT environment. Terms of the transaction were not…
Bing, Microsoft's search engine, is currently not working properly. At first, I found that I couldn't perform any web searches. The search results appear to be loading correctly now. However, the outage appears to still be impacting Bing's application programming interface (API), meaning other services that rely on Bing are not working properly. For example, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, two alternative search engines that rely on Bing search results, are currently not returning search results. Microsoft Copilot is also not loaded. ChatGPT Plus subscribers who can perform web searches will also receive an error when trying to search for something. Screenshot:…
If you thought self-driving was just for cars, think again: The so-called “autonomous navigation” market, in which ships steer themselves according to AI instructions, saving fuel and time, is predicted to grow from $4.46 billion in 2023 to $5.33 billion in 2024 alone. Orca AI is a London-based startup that claims to have achieved the world's first autonomous commercial ship navigation in crowded waters. He was added $23 million in new funding led by OCV Partners and MizMaa Ventures. The funding is said to be between Series A and B, bringing the total raised to nearly $40 million. The startup…
The best-known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, the meat substitute approaching its 40th anniversary, but Finnish biotech start-up Enifer is developing something even older: its own single-cell fungus-based protein, branded Pekilo, which was originally developed in the 1960s and '70s by the local paper industry. The focus at the time was not on producing alternative proteins for human consumption, as the startup intended. However, his original Pekilo product was sold as animal feed. Simo Elira, CEO and co-founder of Enifer, said paper industry engineers are instead trying to solve the pollution caused by mills dumping production waste (“sidestreams”) into local waterways.…
Bay Area food supply chain startup Silo is in trouble. TechCrunch has learned that the company laid off about 30% of its workforce, or more than 24 people, on Tuesday. Silo confirmed the layoffs and clarified that the cuts were across the board and not focused on individual departments. Silo issued the following statement to TechCrunch regarding the layoffs: We recently made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by approximately 30%. We are committed to supporting affected team members and are offering severance packages and recruitment support. At the same time, Silo remains dedicated to serving our customers and…
Meta announced the creation of an AI advisory board made up entirely of white men on Wednesday. What else could we expect? For decades, women and people of color have spoken out about being ignored and excluded from the world of artificial intelligence, despite their qualifications and the critical role they play in evolving the field. Meta did not immediately respond to our request for comment on the diversity of its advisory board. The new advisory board is different from Meta's actual board and oversight committee, which has more diverse gender and racial representation. The AI board is not shareholder-elected…