Author: TechBrunch
To give female academics and others focused on AI their well-deserved and overdue spotlight time, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Start. As the AI boom continues, we'll be publishing several articles throughout the year highlighting key research that may go unrecognized. Click here for a detailed profile. Kathi Vidal is an American intellectual property attorney and former engineer who serves as Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Vidal began his career as an engineer at General Electric and Lockheed Martin, working in the fields…
Agnes Kozera and David Kieszkowski, co-founders of podcast sponsorship marketplace Podcorn, today launched their newest app, Storiaverse. Storiaverse is a short-form entertainment platform that combines animated videos and written content to provide a multi-format reading experience. Available on iOS and Android devices, Storiaverse caters to graphic novel readers and adult anime fans who want to discover original stories in animated short form. “Our mission is to make Storiaverse the largest storytelling platform and make reading more immersive and engaging,” Kozera told TechCrunch. He is also the co-founder of the YouTube marketing platform FameBit (which Google acquired in 2016). “We believe…
Hello. Welcome to Equity, the startup business podcast. Uncover the numbers and nuances behind the headlines. This is a Wednesday show where we dig a little deeper into a ton of startup and venture capital news. There's no big technology here! Y Combinator's Demo Day starts today, so keep an eye out for the rest of the week to be buzzing with startup news. Think of today's show as the calm before the storm. This morning's podcast covers BlaBlaCar's new credit facility and how they got it, how PipeDreams was able to embark on a new model of building startups,…
There are countless technology companies developing HR technology for small and medium-sized businesses, but many are aimed at “professionals sitting behind a desk in some capacity,” argues John Waldmann, founder and CEO of Homebase. Homebase is a human resources software that targets two-thirds of American small business employees, offering hourly jobs that require on-site supervision. Homebase recently closed on $60 million in Series D funding after acquiring more than 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses as customers and covering more than 2 million employees. . L Catterton Growth led the round, with participation from Emerson Collective. Existing investors Notable Capital, Bain…
Smart ring maker Oura is introducing a new section in its app called Oura Labs to test new features and get user feedback. As part of this rollout (currently available only on iOS), the company is releasing Symptom Radar, which tracks strain markers in the body to detect the onset of changes in health status. Oura said Symptom Radar monitors biological signals such as body temperature range, breathing rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability. Image credit: Oura This feature tries to observe if you notice any sudden changes in your body. You'll see notifications about changes in your…
Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it has raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). The new funding will be used to build out Gig, the platform's main service. It's a marketplace for companies to post job openings, from part-time and internship opportunities to one-off projects and more long-term roles. Home From College has job listings from hundreds of top brands, including Poppi, Aquaphor, Burt's Bees, Nivea, Urban Decay, Thrive Market, Peacock, Steve Madden, and more. The Los…
SiftHub, an AI startup founded by former CTO and LogiNext co-founder Manisha Raisinghani, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to build an AI assistant. This is intended to free up sales and pre-sales teams to focus on building relationships. With a monotonous job. The company's generative AI assistants can handle most of the non-sales activities that sales reps have to handle, such as entering data into CRM systems, submitting requests for proposals (RFPs), researching customer information, and creating presentation materials. The target is SiftHub integrates with information sources like Google Drive, Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce, allowing sales and…
Web browser company Opera announced today that it will now allow users to download and use large-scale language models (LLMs) locally on their computers. This feature will first be rolled out to his Opera One users who will receive the developer stream update, allowing users to choose from her 150+ models in 50+ families. These models include Meta's Llama, Google's Gemma, and Vicuna. This feature is available to users as part of Opera's AI feature drop program, giving users early access to some AI features. The company said it uses the Ollama open source framework in its browser to run…
Full Glass Wine, a brand acquisition management startup specializing in wine market capture, raises $14 million in Series A round to continue capturing the direct-to-consumer (DTC) wine market and take the lead in the DTC wine market We are aiming for DTC wine brands bypass traditional distribution channels and sell wine directly to wine lovers. Full Glass Wine recently acquired Bright Cellars, a subscription-based wine service provider in Wisconsin, for an undisclosed price. The deal is the company's third acquisition in a year and will allow it to expand its subscription-based model. Previous acquisitions include Winc, a DTC wine platform…
BlaBlaCar is an iconic name in the French startup ecosystem. The carpooling and bus ticketing company has been around so long that it's hard to consider it a startup anymore. Still, BlaBlaCar is a very interesting company today because of its unique trajectory. What started as a rough-and-tumble online hitchhiking community has become a startup that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and reached unicorn status. It then expanded to many countries on several continents, but then scaled back its ambitions and started considering profitability. Today, the company announced that it has secured a €100 million ($108 million at…