Banking-as-a-service startup (BaaS) Synctera has conducted a restructuring that has resulted in a staff reduction, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
While Synctera did not share how many employees were impacted, a report in Fintech Business Weekly pegs the number to be about 17 people, or about 15% of the company.
Synctera built a platform designed to bring together fintech companies and sponsor banks.
Treasury Prime slashed half its 100-person staff in February, a year after it announced a $40 million Series C raise.
Meanwhile, Piermont Bank reportedly cut ties with startup Unit, FinTech Business reported.
Apple SVP Greg “Joz” Joswiak just confirmed via the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference is set for June 10-14.
In what is no doubt a nod to the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the exec is promising that the event will be “Absolutely Incredible.”Mark your calendars for #WWDC24, June 10-14.
pic.twitter.com/YIln5972ZD — Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) March 26, 2024As the name “D” in WWDC suggests, the event is heavily focused on developers for Apple’s various operating systems.
WWDC seems like the most likely platform for such an announcement — and, perhaps, details on a rumored Google Gemini partnership for the iPhone.
As ever, the event will include a small cohort of “winners,” 50 of whom will be invited to the in-person event in Cupertino.
Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned.
“It takes a lot less to run it than we had imagined,” Systrom confirmed to TechCrunch, adding that it’s just himself and Krieger running Artifact right now.
Artifact made a splash at launch, not only because it was the first major effort at a new social app from Instagram’s co-founders, but also because of its clever use of AI.
pic.twitter.com/5PaMavJbNS — @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io (@samhenrigold) March 16, 2024Following Artifact’s announcement of its impending closure, interest in using AI to summarize the news has heated up.
Browser startup Arc implemented an AI-powered “pinch to summarize” feature ahead of its $50 million fundraise.
Canva has typically targeted the beginner for their products, but company co-Founder Cliff Obrecht sees the acquisition opening the door to more advanced users.
“Canva needed products with more complex capabilities to go up against Adobe,” Wang told TechCrunch.
In a blog post on the Affinity website, CEO Ashley Hewson tried to allay customer fears about the change.
“In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels.
With Affinity, Canva gains 3 million users worldwide along with 90 employees who will be joining the company.
Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days.
While lacking the brand name recognition of some of these other players, it boasts the largest open source model API with over 12,000 users, per the company.
That kind of open source traction tends to attract investor attention, and the company has raised $25 million so far.
“It can be either off the shelf, open source models or the models we tune or the models our customer can tune by themselves.
Being an API, developers can plug it into their application, bring their model of choice trained on their data, and add generative AI capabilities like asking questions very quickly.
Borderless Capital, an investment firm that specializes in web3, announced Tuesday that it is acquiring CTF Capital, a quantitative trading and asset management firm headquartered in Miami, with technology and operation teams in Latin America.
With this acquisition, Borderless Capital will add AI-infused quant trading expertise to its own business.
After combining with CTF Capital, Borderless will have over $500 million in assets under management (AUM).
All the existing funds managed by CTF Capital will be merged into Borderless’s Multi-Strategy Fund V LP., launched last year with $100 million under management today.
“Borderless already has significant exposure through several portfolio companies from this geography [Latin America].
“Thoras essentially integrates alongside a cloud-based service and it consistently monitors the usage of that service,” company CEO Nilo Rahmani told TechCrunch.
They launched the company right after the first of the year and closed their pre-seed funding just a few weeks ago.
In terms of AI, the company currently uses more task-based machine learning than generative AI and large language models (LLMs).
“A lot of the problems that we’re facing are systemic issues, and there are a lot of numbers involved.
They see LLMs being more useful in troubleshooting after the fact at some point as they fill out the product.
The no-code development platform previously focused its outreach on robotics firms.
They were like, ‘we’re not a robotics company — we do food processing, we do PLC automation, we do boats, we’re not robots.’”Further complicating messaging was the fact that — while the company is simply named “Viam” — its various social media platforms are “Viam Robotics,” owing to the fact that it was unable to secure the four-letter word.
Viam’s large office overlooking New York City’s Lincoln Center has a lab space, where members of the local robotics community are invited in to use its platform to develop automation applications.
“When people ask me what I do and what [Viam’s software] does, I usually use an example from their life.
We are a platform that lives at the intersection of real-world hardware and real-world software and the cloud and machine learning.
A new report highlights the demand for startups building open source tools and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution, with the adjacent data infrastructure vertical also heating up.
A broader look at the “top 50 trending” open source startups last year reveals that more than half (26) are related to AI and data infrastructure.
This ethos often translates into commercial open source startups which might not have a traditional center of gravity anchored by a brick-and-mortar HQ.
For comparative purposes, there are other indexes and lists out there that give a steer on the “whats hot” in the open source landscape.
So the ROSS Index has emerged as a useful complementary tool for figuring out which open source “startups” specifically are worth keeping tabs on.
For his next trick the Paris-based robotics entrepreneur is fronting work on a far lighter kind of wearable: An arm-worn patch for monitoring chronic kidney disease (CKD).
At the same time rising costs of healthcare provision has increased pressure on services to find smarter ways to tackle expensive issues like chronic disease management, without compromising quality of service.
Biowearables offer a potential route to help square this circle for a range of chronic health conditions.
At the same time Boulanger’s co-founder, Chashchina, was dealing with a chronic health condition.
Metyos cites statistics which suggest there are more than 800 million CKD patients globally.
