Not even the people inventing AI always know what it’s good for besides writing emails. But there are seed-stage companies, like Y Combinator grad and 2024 Disrupt Battlefield participant Nowadays, that are doing something mind-blowingly useful with AI. Nowadays uses LLM AI to automatically plan large, expensive events. Using its own database of 400,000 global
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Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. The week after Thanksgiving is usually rich in announcements, and this year was no exception. Blame it on the holiday season, but we would even go as
Google’s video generator is coming to a few more customers — Google Cloud customers, to be precise. On Tuesday, Google announced that Veo, its AI model that can generate short video clips from images and prompts, will be available in private preview for customers using Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s AI development platform. Google says that
Over a hundred colleges and high schools are turning to a new AI tool called Nectir, allowing teachers to create a personalized learning partner that’s trained on their syllabi, textbooks, and assignments to help students with anything from questions related to their coursework to essay writing assistance and even future career guidance. The company announced
MobiKwik, an Indian financial services startup, has cut the size of its planned IPO for the third time, setting a price band of ₹265-₹279 ($3.1-$3.3) that values it at $250 million — down sharply from its last private valuation of $924 million in 2021. The Gurugram-based fintech, backed by Peak XV and ADIA, is seeking
Amazon Music announced on Tuesday the launch of 2024 Delivered, a new personalized yearly recap feature inspired by Spotify’s popular Wrapped experience. The feature delivers a summary of your listening habits, including your top artists, songs, genres, and more. To see your 2024 Delivered, open the Amazon Music app on your iOS or Android device
A startup with founders who previously served in the German military has created a product akin to an Amazon Firestick for legacy defense equipment, complete with a software stack. ARX Robotics claims its system can turn old equipment into AI-driven devices, such as autonomous-driving trucks. Back in June this year ARX raised a €9 million
OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to “think” about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1’s reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive humans at a higher rate than GPT-4o — or, for that matter, leading AI models from Meta, Anthropic,
Turning sunflower seeds into sustainable, cocoa-free chocolate has netted Munich-based B2B food tech startup Planet A Foods (formerly QOA) a $30 million Series B funding round. Now, the Y Combinator alum is gearing up for industrialization, with the funds set to be deployed to scale its production capacity by around 7.5x. The round fast follows
Celeb greetings app Cameo is pivoting to creators with a new product called CameoX. The company became a pandemic hit, as people stuck at home marked various celebrations, like birthdays and graduations, with celebrity shout-outs. It became a tech unicorn valued at $1 billion, but as life returned to normal, Cameo was hit with multiple
Ladder, an Austin, Texas-based fitness startup that makes a popular strength-training app, is accusing Peloton of ripping off its work with the launch of Peloton’s new Stength+ app, which exited beta on Wednesday. After receiving feedback from Peloton’s beta testers that the app looked, felt, and functioned much like Ladder’s own, the company says it
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were expected to contribute to the round, along with Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund. The new cash
Recycling today kind of sucks. People are generally confused about what can be recycled and where. As a result, only about 32% of eligible waste actually gets recycled. It would be a lot easier if people could dump everything into one bin and let the waste management companies deal with it, but that’s proven to
Google said Thursday it is introducing multiple updates for Pixel and Android devices as part of the December feature drop. These features include new Gemini extensions, an updated Pixel Screenshots app, expressive captions, and accessibility enhancements. Android Google is introducing new Gemini extensions, including Spotify, Messaging, Calling, and Smart Home. This will enable users to
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw. “We would not be
Cyberattacks are on the rise. In Q1 2024, organizations experienced an average of around 1,300 attacks per week. The cost of attacks is climbing, as well. Per Statista, cybercrime-related losses could surge to over $13 billion by 2028. Software is one way to combat these attacks. Hardware is another. Startup Axiado is a proponent of
Revel is adding to its electric vehicle charging empire in New York City. The startup said on Wednesday that it has broken ground on the installation of 24 EV fast chargers at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The installation doubles the airport’s existing EV charging capacity. This is the second time Revel has partnered with
At its re:Invent conference on Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, announced a new family of multimodal generative AI models it calls Nova. There are four text-generating models in total: Micro, Lite, Pro, and Premier. Micro, Lite, and Pro are available Tuesday to AWS customers, while Premier will arrive in early 2025,
What do Tim Cook, Jay Z, and Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, all have in common? That would be their interest in Frère, a bespoke ready-to-wear clothing brand that has attracted names all over the tech world. The brand, which only launched in March, is opening its first store in New York’s SoHo. Frère is
Although heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, a significant portion of people who experience heart attacks are unaware that they have the underlying condition. Cleerly, a cardiovascular imaging startup, hopes to fix this. By analyzing CT scans of the heart, the company’s AI software aims to identify early-stage coronary
Earlier this year, Meta tried to get its own nuclear powered data center the easy way, by building one next to an existing reactor. But after regulators threw cold water on the plan — the site was reportedly home to a rare bee species — the company is back with a new idea: find a
DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds. Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot
Once a startup has raised its seed round, the perennial question becomes how much should the founders pay themselves and their first few employees? Kruze Consulting, a CPA firm that specializes in venture-backed startups, recently analyzed average salary ranges for over 450 seed-stage startups and shared that data with TechCrunch. The following averages are based
Three members of Google’s NotebookLM team, including its team lead and designer, have announced they are leaving Google for a new stealth startup. On Linkedin, ex-team lead Raiza Martin said she and her two other co-founders, designer Jason Spielman and engineer Stephen Hughes, “couldn’t shake the feeling that there’s a massive opportunity to build something
The globe likely breezed past 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels this year, crashing through the 2016 Paris Agreement’s aspirational target. Further warming increases the risk of catastrophic consequences, including more frequent extreme droughts, floods, and fires; stronger hurricanes; faster-spreading infectious diseases; and declining wildlife and fish populations. A host of carbon-capture startups hope to
After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify users are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going so far as to call it “boring” or a “flop.” Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative
A new company is emerging from stealth today with backing from Google’s AI-focused venture fund to help businesses compile their open-source AI infrastructure and reduce their engineering overheads. Cake integrates and secures more than 100 components for enterprises, including data source adapters (e.g. Apache Hadoop), data ingestion (e.g. Apache Kafka), data labelling (e.g. Label Studio),
Cyberattacks are on the rise, and the victims are high-profile. According to a KPMG survey, close to half of companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue recently suffered a security breach. Surprisingly, an overabundance of security tools may be contributing to the problem. In a separate poll, 43% of businesses said their teams
Fighting wildfire is a lot like waging war. There are foot soldiers and paratrooper-like smokejumpers, air support from airtankers, and mobile centers that can direct firefighter movements in the field. “It’s a battlefield,” Gadi Benjamini, co-founder and CEO of FireDome, told TechCrunch. “It changes, it’s dynamic, it’s unexpected.” But what firefighters have been missing is
Spotify Wrapped, the streamer’s highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived. In addition to its usual personalized summary detailing your favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more, the company this year is introducing two new features, including most notably, an AI-powered podcast of your 2024 Wrapped created with Google’s AI summarization tool, NotebookLM. Spotify is also
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