TechCrunch Startup News

As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank make industrial robotics into a key focus for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware that measures vibrations, sound, temperature and other factors to understand how machines are working Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

Level Zero Health, a female-founded medical device startup that’s aiming to break new ground by developing a device for continuous hormone monitoring, has closed an oversubscribed $6.9 million pre-seed funding round despite being only a little over a year old. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Generative AI is getting better at interpreting dense texts, and this progress has proven to be a boon for startups attacking one of the most complex sets of texts there is: the law. It makes sense then that we’ve been seeing a new burst of activity in the legal tech space Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Helsing, the German defense tech startup backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and others, is producing 6,000 HX-2 strike drones in addition to the 4,000 HF-1 strike drones financed by Germany that are currently being delivered to Ukraine. “We are scaling up production of HX-2 in response to additional orders from Ukraine.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical. On Monday, Paris-based AI startup Mistral — which is vying to rival the likes of U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI — is releasing a model that’s a bit different from its usual LLM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When EJ Cho started his first company in 2018, he was exposed to what it takes to market a product. He was surprised to find a market filled with different single-use tools. “It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

UX and UI designers work closely with engineers throughout product development to build and implement design concepts and wireframes for functional user interfaces. Regular communication, feedback and testing are required for the collaboration to work smoothly and deliver a user experience that aligns with the intended design goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Apptronik, a University of Texas spin-out that was quietly building humanoid robots before it became quite so fashionable, on Thursday announced a $350 million Series A round of financing. B Capital and Capital Factory co-led the round, which also featured participation from Googl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber Eats customers in Jersey City can now have their orders delivered by one of Avride’s autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. The launch, which kicked off this week in New Jersey, is Uber’s latest foray into autonomous vehicles and represents an expanding relationship with Avride. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re working for a small company and want to build a client portal or an internal tool, it can be difficult to find the budget and resources to allocate a developer to that small project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More and more legal professionals are embracing AI, surveys show. Per a recent poll from legaltech company Clio, 79% of firms used some form of AI for casework last year, up from just 19% in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The company buys marginal and degraded farmland, plants them with native trees, and harvests the resulting carbon credits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How much is a customer worth to a company? That’s the eternal question. To arrive at an answer, customer and sales teams are often forced to use spreadsheets and other manual data analysis methods. The problem is, these methods tend to be slow and error-prone, leading to gaps in reporting processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Escalating geopolitical tensions and a new administration with a hawkish defense agenda has led many startups to embrace dual-use strategies to secure revenue through military applications. And it’s a trend that is already heating up in aerospace.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mattoboard, the makers of web-based software designed to simplify the creative process for interior designers and architects, is getting into AI. On Tuesday, the startup announced its $2 million seed funding round, which will support the launch of a new feature called Design Stream, an AI-driven visual search and discovery tool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The GenAI boom of the last few years has unleashed a wave of startups promising to support the process of prompt engineering — i.e., coming up with instructions to precisely steer an AI chatbot to serve useful output. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 and schools transitioned to online learning, both Joe Titus and Paul Suhr were concerned about how to maintain their children’s activity levels in the absence of mandatory physical education classes and sports. The two friends’ solution was Hiveclass, a New York-based edtech platform that hosts online courses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

Fizz, the college social app, is looking for ways to enhance and expand its platform, and a recent new hire is poised to help drive these ambitions. The company has brought on David Vasquez, who previously served as TikTok’s head of creator monetization and a product lead for TikTok Shop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Supply chains have had a tumultuous few years, beginning in 2020, when COVID-19 upended legacy global supply chains. More recently, the “TikTok-ification” of retail has companies like Shein and Temu creating new products constantly as consumer demands change at the same rapid pace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tabular data is a broad term that encompasses structured data that generally fits into a specific row and column. It can be a SQL database, a spreadsheet, a .CSV file, etc. While there has been tremendous progress on artificial intelligence applied to unstructured and sequential data, these large language models are fuzzy by design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

The fashion industry has concerned Emily Gittins since adolescence.  The sector is, after all, one of the most polluting in the world. According to some sources, it is responsible for nearly 10% of the earth’s CO2 emissions and more than 20% of all water waste.  Yet people still want more, fast.; Also, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch.  The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices