Coverage Timeline
No timeline data available
All Articles(52)
What enterprises can take away from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's shareholder letter
One of the leading architects of the current generative AI boom — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, famed for having the software giant take an early investment in OpenAI — published his latest annual letter yesterday on LinkedIn , and it's chock full of interesting ideas about the near-term future that enterprise technical decision makers would do well to pay attention to, as it could aid in their own planning and tech stack development. In a companion post on X , Nadella wrote, “AI is radically ch...
Adobe Discussed $3 Billion Acquisition of AI Video Startup Synthesia
Adobe in recent months held talks with Synthesia, a London-based maker of artificial intelligence software that generates video avatars of people, to buy the startup for about $3 billion, a premium from the startup’s $2.1 billion valuation in a January financing, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. Synthesia and Adobe walked away without reaching a deal after disagreeing about the price, this person and two others said. The talks followed Adobe’s $10 million investment in th...
Khosla Says Robotics Valuations Are “Getting Bonkers”
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla predicted that 2% to 3% of AI startups will account for 85% to 90% of the valuation of companies by 2035. In an interview on The Information’s TITV , Khosla also said that venture capital firms which don’t have early access to those companies but buy in later ...
Open source agentic startup LangChain hits $1.25B valuation
As TechCrunch previously reported, the maker of a popular open source framework for building AI agents has officially become a unicorn.
Sesame, the conversational AI startup from Oculus founders, raises $250M and launches beta
Former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe’s new startup, Sesame, is building AI-powered smartglasses with natural, humanlike voice interaction. Backed by Sequoia and Spark, the company also launched an invite-only iOS beta to preview its conversational AI.
AI Is Speeding Up M&A Deals, Says Latham
A flurry of tech mergers and acquisitions catalyzed by the artificial intelligence boom has been big business for lawyers. Latham & Watkins, which has landed on some of the highest-profile deals, says tech is moving fast and companies are keeping pace, sometimes getting transactions done in days. “It’s speed oftentimes because the deal is existential to the business, whether it’s getting the acquisition done before a competitor or raising capital so they can make announcements,” said Seth Go...
Sources: Multimodal AI startup Fal.ai already raised at $4B+ valuation
Fal.ai announced its previous round at a $1.5 billion valuation in July.
AI Enigma: Search Traffic Drops to Sites, but Revenue Doesn’t—Yet
In the past year, Mexican hotel chain Tafer Hotels & Resorts has seen traffic to its website fall 25%. Despite that, Tafer’s revenue is up year over year, according to Max Gomez Montejo, chief digital marketing officer at the hotel chain. Tafer isn’t alone. A growing number of companies say their websites are losing traffic, thanks to how artificial intelligence chatbots have changed the way people use online search. Yet many companies that, like Tafer, don’t sell ads on their websites also ...
Moonshot AI raises $10 million in Seed funding to create websites that think and evolve - CTech
Moonshot AI raises $10 million in Seed funding to create websites that think and evolve CTech
Japan’s Sakana AI in Talks to Raise Capital at $2.5 Billion Valuation
Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based developer of artificial intelligence, is in talks with U.S. and Japanese investors to raise $100 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion, up 66% from a financing a year ago, The Information reported. The startup, founded in 2023 by former Google researchers, plans to ...
European AI rising star Nexos.ai raises $30M to unlock enterprise AI adoption
Nord Security co-founders have closed a €30 million Series A for their new startup, Nexos.ai, an orchestration platform aimed at helping companies adopt AI securely.
YC alum Cercli, an AI-powered Rippling for MENA, raises oversubscribed $12M Series A
In a region long defined by fragmented enterprise systems, outdated compliance tools, and HR software that rarely talks to finance, Cercli is building a unified alternative for MENA businesses with AI at its core. The Dubai-based startup, founded by ex-Careem operators Akeed Azmi and David Reche, has announced an oversubscribed $12 million Series A round led by
OpenAI’s Japanese Rival Sakana in Talks to Raise Capital at $2.5 Billion Valuation
Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based developer of artificial intelligence, is in talks with U.S. and Japanese investors to raise $100 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion, up 66% from a financing a year ago, according to two people involved in the discussions. The funding talks come months after CEO David Ha said publicly that the company would operate profitably within a year. Sakana is developing AI with a different type of technology than OpenAI, Anthropic and Google use. This year the startup has anno...
Indian startup taps generative AI to speed up analog chip design - Nikkei Asia
Indian startup taps generative AI to speed up analog chip design Nikkei Asia
Benchmark Names Everett Randle as New General Partner
Everett Randle, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins investing out of its growth-stage funds, has joined Benchmark as the firm’s newest general partner, the early-stage firm announced Monday. At Kleiner, Randle worked on investments including enterprise search startup Glean and legal AI ...
Top OpenAI, Google Brain researchers set off a $300M VC frenzy for their startup Periodic Labs
When Liam Fedus announced he was quitting OpenAI, VCs swarmed. One even wrote a love letter. Here's how Felicis' Peter Deng won the deal.
OpenEvidence, the ChatGPT for doctors, raises $200M at $6B valuation
Trained on medical journals like JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine, the platform helps users quickly get answers to existing medical knowledge to help treat patients. Verified medical professionals can access OpenEvidence’s tool, which is supported by advertising, for free.
Adobe Foundry wants to rebuild Firefly for your brand — not just tweak it
Hoping to attract more enterprise teams to its ecosystem, Adobe launched a new model customization service called Adobe AI Foundry, which would create bespoke versions of its flagship AI model, Firefly. Adobe AI Foundry will work with enterprise customers to rearchitect and retrain Firefly models specific to the client. AI Foundry version models are different from custom Firefly models in that Foundry models understand multiple concepts compared to custom models with only a single concept. These...
What Microsoft Could Teach Oracle
Was it something they said? Oracle shares fell 7% on Friday, a day after the software and cloud firm offered investors bullish growth projections for the next five years, both for revenue and for profits. In Oracle’s ideal world, those projections would have put to rest concerns about the cost of its artificial intelligence cloud expansion, which is driving the revenue growth. But as we noted on Thursday, the projections lacked plenty of key details, such as expected gross margins for the whole ...
Cisco warns enterprises: Without tapping machine data, your AI strategy is incomplete
Cisco executives make the case that the distinction between product and model companies is disappearing, and that accessing the 55% of enterprise data growth that current AI ignores will separate winners from losers. VentureBeat recently caught up with Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer and DJ Sampath, Senior Vice President of AI Software and Platform, to gain new insights into a compelling thesis both leaders share. They and their teams contend that every successful produc...
Amazon’s Ring now works with video surveillance company Flock
Amazon’s smart doorbell company Ring is now working with the AI-powered surveillance camera company Flock. According to a letter sent to the company by Sen. Ron Wyden, Flock had allowed data access to the Secret Service and the Navy — as well as ICE, as previously reported by 404 Media. The partnership is through Ring’s
World's largest open-source multimodal dataset delivers 17x training efficiency, unlocking enterprise AI that connects documents, audio and video
AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on. That data generally needs to be labeled, curated and organized before models can learn from it in an effective way. One of the big missing links in the AI ecosystem has been the availability of a large high-quality open-source multimodal dataset. That changes today with the debut of the EMM-1 dataset which is comprised of 1 billion data pairs and 100M data groups across 5 modalities: text, image, video, audio and 3d point clouds. Multimo...
Elumelu calls for investment to harness AI development in Africa - Digital Watch Observatory
Elumelu calls for investment to harness AI development in Africa Digital Watch Observatory
Oracle’s Hypergrowth Forecasts
Bearish sentiment about the cost-benefit equation of artificial intelligence has become so prevalent lately that it almost feels like conventional wisdom is now skepticism. But that certainly isn’t the case at Oracle, the nearly 50-year-old enterprise software firm turned cloud provider, which declared itself today to be a “hypergrowth company,” thanks to its fast-expanding AI data center business. And that wasn’t just rhetoric: Oracle presented an updated revenue forecast at an investor present...
Anthropic's New Tools Tackle AI's Real Enterprise Problem - Maginative
Anthropic's New Tools Tackle AI's Real Enterprise Problem Maginative
Bessemer Bets on War Worries in Europe
The name of Bessemer Venture Partners is tied closely with the cloud software boom of the 2010s. The backer of Twilio, Shopify and Zoom even created its own Nasdaq index of cloud software companies , which I look at often to track the ups and downs of the market. But it’s not a good time to be a software investor. That index of cloud stocks has badly lagged the overall market as corporate customers spend more on AI and less on older software. Where there’s a growing pile of money for startups is...
Oracle Assures Investors on AI Cloud Margins as It Struggles to Profit From Older Nvidia Chips
Oracle on Thursday sought to reassure investors that its business of renting out servers packed with Nvidia chips to OpenAI, Meta and other artificial intelligence developers will become far more profitable as revenue surges. Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk told financial analysts Thursday that the company’s AI data center business, which is mostly made up of rentals of Nvidia graphics processing units, will eventually generate a gross profit margin of 30% to 40%. The Information last week reported ...
The real reason Google DeepMind is working with a fusion energy startup
Google has invested in fusion startups as potential power suppliers. This latest move suggests Google sees them as potential customers, too.
XAI’s Unusual Dealmaking to Fund Musk’s Colossus 2
Elon Musk’s xAI is aiming to build and control the world’s most powerful data center and a massive natural gas plant to power it. The scale of the project and xAI’s precarious finances are forcing the company into unusual financial arrangements that rely on outsiders to raise funding and shoulder much of the risk. XAI wants to have as much control as possible over Colossus 2, its second supersize data center in Memphis. XAI’s desire to control its data centers is in contrast to rivals such as Op...
Amazon and Chobani adopt Strella's AI interviews for customer research as fast-growing startup raises $14M
One year after emerging from stealth, Strella has raised $14 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-powered customer research platform, the company announced Thursday. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Decibel Partners , Bain Future Back Ventures , MVP Ventures and 645 Ventures , comes as enterprises increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to understand customers faster and more deeply than traditional methods allow. The investment marks a sharp accel...