Author: TechBrunch
Boardy, a professional networking startup powered by AI voice technology, announced Thursday the closing of a $3 million pre-seed round. The company was co-founded by CEOs Andrew D'Souza, Matt Stein, Shen Sivananthan, and brothers Ankur Boyed and Abhinav Boyed. They came up with the idea in March, started building it all summer, and just officially launched this month. The mechanism is simple. Users provide their number to Boardy.ai and of course receive a call from an AI voice assistant named Boardy. That person chats with Boardy and tells the AI what he is working on. Boardy then checks to see…
Supply chain disruptions cost the global economy trillions of dollars every year. In a recent McKinsey poll, 9 out of 10 companies said they faced logistical challenges in the past 12 months. Major transportation routes have been disrupted, and the headwinds are only increasing. Attacks on cargo ships continue in the Red Sea. Floods have disrupted car production in Europe. And trade tensions are hampering the movement of manufacturing equipment to Southeast Asia. Not surprisingly, supply chain risk intelligence companies like Interos have had no trouble enrolling customers these days. Earlier this year, Interos secured major contracts with the Department…
Finix has spent years slowly chipping away at Stripe, which processes payments for millions of businesses. But the startup previously helped businesses build their own in-house payment systems before officially becoming a payment processor, similar to Stripe, in 2023. Now, Finix is gearing up for its biggest offensive yet against the fintech giant. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO and founder Richie Serna said becoming a payment processor was a “huge change” for the business and was a key driver of the $75 million funding announced Thursday. spoke. When Serna founded Finix, he saw it not as a payments business,…
US venture capital giant General Catalyst announces $8 billion in new funding to ramp up investment in multi-sector early-stage startups around the world, with particular focus on the US, Europe and India did. This capital accounts for approximately $4.5 billion in “core VC funds” spanning seed and growth equity financing, while $1.5 billion is for new company formations by repeat or “proven” founders. The funds will be used for so-called “creative strategies” that focus on support. Another $2 billion is for “separately managed accounts,” which are specialized investment vehicles typically created for a single institutional investor. “As a global investment…
Lithuania's Vinted has been given a new valuation of 5 billion euros (approx. 5.4 billion). The deal was led by private equity giant TPG, with additional participants including Baillie Gifford, FJ Labs, Hedosophia, Invus Opportunities, Manhattan Venture Partners, and Moore Strategic Ventures. It's unclear how much Vinted's existing investors have cashed out, but the company said all existing institutional investors, including Accel, EQT, Insight Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, retained at least some stake. That's what it means. This year is proving to be a bumper year for secondary market deals, as scale-up companies look to free up liquidity for…
Perplexity, an AI-focused search startup, released a native Mac app today to compete with other AI apps like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Quora's Poe app. The latter aggregates various large-scale language models. Perplexity teased the app earlier this month, asking users to sign up for pre-orders to receive notifications when the app becomes available. The Mac app is free to use, but Perplexity Pro can be purchased for $20 per month or $200 per year. With this subscription, users can benefit from over 300 Pro searches, which provide more detailed search results compared to the free Quick Search pane. In the…
Spotify let listeners comment on podcast episodes on the app in July, and now the company is rolling out a new set of controls to help podcasters moderate and manage comments. When comments first started, podcasters had to first review and publish their comments. The platform now has configurable automated moderation tools that allow you to filter out and review sensitive or inappropriate comments, and publish the rest. When set to the “Standard” level, Spotify's new tool will not publish comments it detects as potentially sensitive or inappropriate and will instead redirect them to the podcaster for review. When set…
Nvidia has embarked on a series of partnerships with Indian companies to deploy its AI chips and technology, strengthening its reach into key growth markets. Jensen Huang, CEO of the US chip design company, said the company has partnered with Reliance, India's most valuable company, to build infrastructure for AI applications in India. He also said Tech Mahindra will use NVIDIA chips and software to develop the Hindi AI model 'Indus 2.0'. Infrastructure providers Tata Communications and Yotta Data Services also plan to purchase and use tens of thousands of Nvidia H100 chips by the end of the year. Huang…
Upflow, a French startup that we've been covering for quite some time, originally focused on managing unpaid invoices. The company is now announcing a shift in its strategy to become a B2B payments platform with its own payment gateway to complement its accounts receivable automation solution. Like many Software-as-a-Service products, Upflow started by building a central hub specifically designed for the specific role of the CFO. From the Upflow dashboard, CFOs and finance teams can see all of their company's invoices, track payments, communicate with team members, and send reminders to clients. It integrates well with other financial tools and…
Startup VC firm Chemistry has raised $350 million for its debut fund, Forbes reported Wednesday. The company was founded by Mark Goldberg, a former partner at Index Ventures. Christina Shen, former general partner of Andreessen Horowitz; and former Bessemer partner Ethan Kurzweil (pictured above). Axios first reported in April that the three were planning to launch a fund together. Chemistry's debut fund was twice as oversubscribed, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The firm primarily invests in early-stage startups at the Series A stage, but also invests in seed across categories such as fintech, infrastructure, developer tools and work…