Like many immigrants, the New York City skyline was one of the first sights young brothers Edi and Etrit Demaj took in when they arrived in the U.S. over 20 years ago.
“The first building that we saw was the Empire State Building,” Etrit recalls.
The Demaj family soon settled in Detroit, where the brothers completed their education and started various companies, including their latest, Kode Labs, which integrates and automates various systems in commercial buildings — including the Empire State Building.
When the Demaj brothers founded Kode in 2017, they sought to bring building management into the cloud era.
The brothers liken it to an OS that integrates building systems like a computer OS integrates various circuit boards.
The startup charges a listing fee (subscription fee) to publish jobs on the platform and a success fee when a hire is made.
“The listing fee ensures buy-in from startups to the two-way marketplace and a commitment to the recruiters they’re working with,” Kim said.
In addition to early- and late-stage startups, Kim said the platform also works with larger in-house talent teams to fill challenging roles.
“More than 50% of our customers have great in-house talent teams, but they continue to post roles on Paraform.
“We’re already branching out into research, science, manufacturing and defense roles due to the demand we’re seeing from potential customers,” Kim said.
Today, four out of 10 Formula 1 teams use an evolution of that same technology.
However, where Formula 1 cars rely on 1,000-horsepower hybrid V6 engines, Baqué’s first practical application of the technology was human-powered.
At its core, NCS helps engineers avoid potential aerodynamic pitfalls while pushing them into directions they might not have considered.
NCS will then dig into its neural network to suggest improvements or modifications, possible paths in a 3D game of choose-your-own-adventure.
But like in most sports, success is cyclical for Formula 1 teams, and right now, Williams is very much in a rebuilding phase.
Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech.
Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event.
Lorenzo wrote about how hackers stole over ~340,000 Social Security numbers from government consulting firm Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA).
Elsewhere, Sarah had the story on Spotify’s personalized AI playlists, which lets users create a playlist based on written prompts.
Emulators in the store: Apple updated its App Store rules to globally allow emulators for retro console games an option for downloading titles.
When Josh Silverman started shopping around the idea for his methane-eating microbe startup, Windfall Bio, eight years ago, the market just wasn’t ready.
Menlo Park–based Windfall Bio raised a $28 million Series A round to expand its commercialization efforts.
The round was led by Prelude Ventures with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Incite Ventures and Positive Ventures, among others, as well as existing investors, including Mayfield.
Windfall works with industries that produce large levels of methane, such as agriculture, oil and gas, and landfills.
The startup supplies methane-eating microbes that absorb methane emissions, turning them into fertilizer.
Spotify is working on mixing tools that would allow users to remix songs on the streaming service, according to screenshots captured by tech veteran and app researcher Chris Messina.
The screenshots indicate that the mixing tools would be available under a new “Music Pro” premium subscription tier.
While Spotify’s mixing tools can’t get rid of this issue altogether, they could help remedy it to a certain extent.
It’s not surprising that Spotify is developing mixing tools, especially as sped-up songs and mashups are having a moment thanks to TikTok.
According to TikTok’s 2023 year-end report, the most popular songs on the app were sped-up remixes of songs.
Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison.
In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence.
Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors.
While the name of one of his victims was never disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.
In the case of Nirvana Finance, the stolen funds “represented approximately all the funds possessed by Nirvana,” which led Nirvana Finance to shut down, according to the press release.
There’s a big difference between a “solution” and a “product” slide.
The biggest problem with the Xpanceo deck isn’t what is in there, but rather what isn’t.
The market sizing fallacyWhen assessing the potential market size for Xpanceo’s contact lenses, it’s crucial to differentiate the nature of the product from traditional contact lenses.
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The fancy drip coffee maker has a $365 price tag to match.
The latest addition to its aficionado-forward lineup is the Aiden coffee machine, a sleek brewer taking a stab at transforming the at-home coffee experience.
Even my parents, who have Fellow products laid out on their counter, still use a basic coffee maker.
Aiden is designed for them.”The Aiden coffee maker promises precision and customization that rival professional setups, all from the comfort of one’s kitchen.
Aiden Precision Coffee Maker is today available for presale for $365 on FellowProducts.com, and the company says it will ship in September.
Airtree Ventures already returned its first fund thanks to Canva while maintaining the majority of its stakeVenture secondaries has exploded over the last couple of years.
While some firms have used the increase in activity to build up their positions in their most promising portfolio companies, Airtree Ventures is taking advantage of the momentum a little differently.
So in 2021 Airtree started seeking out alternative ways to get liquidity for some of their earliest stakes, Blair said.
Airtree got a 1.4x return on Fund I from this transaction alone and was able to maintain the majority of their original stake.
They aren’t wrong, and Blair acknowledges that when a company does eventually exit, Airtree makes less money off of it because of this strategy.
