Amazon shared an impressive vision of an “agentic” future on Wednesday — one in which the company’s improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen. If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with...
Millie, a California-based maternity clinic, founded by Anu Sharma, announced the raise of a $12 million Series A by investors including RH Capital, TMV, and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures. Sharma was inspired to launch the company after the birth of her daughter in 2019....
Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. The generative AI models receiving the...
Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert says reinforcement learning is helping his creations gain more independence....
“AI startups are like rockets — they need to launch fast, but they also need to be built to last,” says Gradient Ventures partner Eylul Kayin, who works on everything from seed-stage investments to helping companies scale. Today on Equity, Mary Ann Azevedo sits down...
ElevenLabs, an AI startup that just raised a $180 million mega funding round, has been primarily known for its audio generation prowess. The company took a step in another technological direction by launching its first standalone speech-to-text model called Scribe. The startup, valued at $3.3...
At Amazon’s annual Devices & Services event on Wednesday, the company introduced Alexa+, an enhanced version of its voice assistant, now powered by generative AI. During the demonstration, Amazon showcased how users can share documents with Alexa+, allowing it to recall important details and answer...
Amazon’s new and improved Alexa experience, Alexa+, starts at $19.99, or free for Amazon Prime subscribers. It’ll roll out in early access beginning next month in the U.S., and then will come to a wider group of users in waves over the subsequent months, Amazon...
As part of the reveal of Amazon’s new AI-powered Alexa+ assistant, the tech giant announced that it’s launching two new features designed for kids called “Explore with Alexa” and “Stories with Alexa.” The features, which leverage Alexa’s new AI capabilities, will be available to Amazon...
Amazon says that the new and improved Alexa unveiled on Wednesday, Alexa+, is powered by a “model agnostic” system that’s always using the “best” AI model for any given task. Onstage at a press event in NYC, Amazon VP Daniel Rausch said that Alexa+ draws...
Capim, a startup offering Brazilians the option to buy now, pay later (BNPL) for dental services, has raised $26.7 million in Series A funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Founded in July 2021 by Marcelo Lutz and Roberto Biselli, who serve as co-CEOs, São Paulo-based Capim...
A new startup wants to help developers create customized, contextual coding assistants that can connect with any model and integrate seamlessly with their development environments. Founded in June 2023 by CEO Ty Dunn and CTO Nate Sesti (pictured above), Y Combinator alum Continue has already...
TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place on June 5 at Zellerbach Hall in UC Berkeley, will feature a panel discussing how startups can compete against established rivals in the AI industry. The panel, “How to Launch a Product Against Entrenched Incumbents,” will look at ways small...
At an event in NYC on Wednesday, Amazon announced an upgraded Alexa experience — Alexa+ — powered by generative AI technologies. Onstage, Amazon’s devices and services chief Panos Panay called it a “complete re-architecture” of the AI assistant. “[W]hile the vision of Alexa has been...
The hub of AI awaits — don’t miss out! You have 5 more days to secure your spot at TechCrunch Sessions: AI with savings of up to $325. This offer ends on March 3 at 11:59 p.m. PT. As AI continues to be the biggest...
Tick-tock! The last three days to save up to $1,130 to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 are winding down! Get your tickets today for massive savings on Disrupt 2025 individual passes and up to 30% on group tickets. These offers end February 28 at 11:59 p.m. PT,...
Despite employers requiring their employees to complete yearly cybersecurity training courses, human-driven cybersecurity breaches still happen. The problem could even get substantially worse as generative AI increases the scale and personalization of social engineering campaigns. Anagram, formerly known as Cipher, is taking a new approach...
There’s no sure-fire approach to sales enablement, the process of providing a sales team with the resources it needs to close deals. Some teams are deficient on the prospecting side — that is, identifying and contacting potential customers. Others require help getting deals over the...
Birdgetown Research has raised $19 million in a round co-led by Accel and Lightspeed to deploy AI agents for business decisions and M&A deals. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Framework, the company that is better known for its modular, repairable laptops, just released its first desktop computer. It’s a small desktop PC that punches above its weight. The most interesting part is what’s inside the device. Framework is one of the first companies to...
Regions like the U.S. and Europe have been doubling down on rebuilding their industrial muscle, after decades of closing down factories and outsourcing the work to countries like China. To that end, a fast-growing Polish startup called Nomagic, which builds robots — specifically robotic arms...
Voice AI company ElevenLabs is now letting authors publish AI-generated audiobooks on its own Reader app, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed. The announcement comes days after the company partnered with Spotify for AI-narrated audiobooks. ElevenLabs, which raised a $180 million mega-round last month,...
Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI vendors, has a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models can perform a range of tasks, from captioning images and writing emails to solving math and coding challenges. With Anthropic’s model ecosystem growing so quickly,...
YC deleted a controversial demo video from one of its startups, which monitors factory workers with AI cameras. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power. That’s according to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who in an X post on Monday relayed a clarification he’d received from...
Perplexity, the developer of an AI-powered search engine, is raising a $50 million seed and pre-seed investment fund, CNBC reported. Although the majority of the capital is coming from limited partners, Perplexity is using some of the capital it raised for the company’s growth to...
On Tuesday afternoon, Anthropic launched Claude Plays Pokémon on Twitch, a livestream of Anthropic’s newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, playing a game of Pokémon Red. It’s become a fascinating experiment of sorts, showcasing the capabilities of today’s AI tech and people’s reactions to them....
Apptronik, an Austin-based maker of humanoid robots, on Tuesday announced a new pilot partnership with American supply chain/manufacturing stalwart, Jabil. The deal arrives two weeks after Apptronik announced a $350 million Series A financing round aimed at scaling up production of its Apollo robot. The...
OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it’s rolling out deep research, its web browsing agent that creates thorough research reports, to all paying ChatGPT users. ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu subscribers will get 10 deep research queries per month. OpenAI’s Deep research was previously only...
OpenAI says that it won’t bring the AI model powering deep research, its in-depth research tool, to its developer API while it figures out how to better assess the risks of AI convincing people to act on or change their beliefs. In an OpenAI whitepaper...