Today at its annual WorldWide Developer Conference in Cupertino, Apple announced updates to VisionOS, the operating system running on the Vision Pro.
The upgraded VisionOS — VisionOS 2 — brings with it productivity enhancements and “new immersive experiences.” One lets you “spatialize” photos from regular photos, leveraging AI tech.
Another is a new navigation option: VisionOS 2 lets you switch to the home screen by just tapping, or flip your hand over to bring up the control center with notifications, shortcuts and more.
When you’re looking for a startup idea that could slow climate change, you might become an expert at home energy assessments.
Instead, the startup has put together a small team of engineers to create its own AI model specialized in home energy assessments using machine learning.
The company uses open data, such as satellite images, as well as its own training data set with millions of photos and energy assessments.
In the company’s first tests, its home energy assessments have been accurate within 5% of old-fashioned assessments.
The startup has now raised €4.7 million ($5.1 million at today’s exchange rate) with Racine² leading the round and a non-dilutive investment from Bpifrance.
The UAE is home to most of its customers, and people from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait form the bulk of its international customer base.
Entering Saudi ArabiaStake claims it has surpassed Dubai-based fractional property investment platforms like Smartcrowd, but it will be starting afresh in Saudi Arabia.
Property investment companies therefore set up special purpose vehicles through which they let investors buy real estate.
“Saudi Arabia has properties that are recently completed and under development that are worth billions.
We are going to use [our] experience to offer a similar unified product for investment in Saudi Arabia within the same app,” Mahmassani said.
While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe by VC investment, according to Dealroom.
Newly created Italian Founders Fund (IFF) hopes to help with the catching up, both in quantity and in quality.
It will use this geographical flexibility to also back Italian founders operating abroad, as well as foreign startups interested in entering the Italian market.
It will also help that some of its LPs are GPs of foreign funds, and that it plans to back Italian founders with global ambitions.
Global Italian startups include Bending Spoons, the owner of popular apps and services like Evernote and Meetup, which is valued at $2.55 billion.
Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal.
Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator that helped the company launch in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A financing.
The company has built an LLM-powered co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours on gathering medical documentation required by insurance.
While Anterior’s initial offering is in prior authorization automation, the company eventually plans to expand into other medical administrative functions.
Makhzoimi also backed Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup that launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
Human Native AI is a London-based startup building a marketplace to broker such deals between the many companies building LLM projects and those willing to license data to them.
Human Native AI also helps rights holders prepare and price their content and monitors for any copyright infringements.
Human Native AI takes a cut of each deal and charges AI companies for its transaction and monitoring services.
Human Native AI announced a £2.8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, two British micro VCs, this week.
It is also a smart time for Human Native AI to launch.
Snowflake’s security problems following a recent spate of customer data thefts are, for want of a better word, snowballing.
TechCrunch earlier this week found online hundreds of Snowflake customer credentials stolen by password-stealing malware that infected the computers of employees who have access to their employer’s Snowflake environment.
It’s not yet known how many Snowflake customers are affected, or if Snowflake knows yet.
Snowflake said it has to date notified a “limited number of Snowflake customers” who the company believes may have been affected.
Snowflake declined to say what role, if any, the then-Snowflake employee’s demo account has on the recent customer breaches.
He had been accused of falsely inflating revenues at the UK startup ahead of its $11 billion sale to HP in 2011.
This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch.
Mr Lynch made £500M from the sale of Autonomy to HP.
Prosecutors accused Lynch and Chamberlain of illegally inflating revenues prior to the acquisition and hiding high-margin software revenues inside unprofitable hardware sales.
In the trial, Lynch successfully argued that he had not been involved in accounting and contract matters, instead focusing on technical and marketing issues.
LinkedIn has confirmed it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on data gleaned from their participation in LinkedIn Groups.
In response to the complaint it received in February, the EC wrote to LinkedIn to request further information on how it might be enabling targeted ads based on sensitive personal data such as race, political allegiances, or sexual orientation.
While LinkedIn maintained that it complied with the DSA, the company has now removed the ability for advertisers to “create an advertising audience” in Europe using LinkedIn Group membership data.
“We made this change to prevent any misconception that ads to European members could be indirectly targeted based on special categories of data or related profiling categories,” Corrigan wrote on LinkedIn today.
LinkedIn will still allow targeted advertising, just not using data garnered from LinkedIn groups.
The subject has been a massive question mark looming over Cupertino for the last few years, as competitors like Google and Microsoft have embraced generative AI.
Apple’s near-term strategy is a deep integration between existing properties and generative AI, with Siri at the center.
Rather than replacing Assistant outright, Google has been integrating its generative AI platform into different applications.
Smart speakers have a broader bellwether for platforms like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.
Other people do it well.”The company’s approach to generative AI is currently in the same place.
