Was the fundraising process any more or less difficult this time given the market?
If you really rewind the clock, back in 2018 when we raised our sixteenth fund, it was a “normal” environment.
There’s obviously a valuation reset going on for every company seemingly that’s not a large language model company, which is a lot of companies.
I’d guess that gives you easier access to top companies, but also hurts some of your existing portfolio companies.
I don’t think anyone has ever reached a great venture outcome feeling like, ‘Man, I got a steal on that deal.’ You always feel slightly uncomfortable.
Amazon has quietly introduced a “special store” called Bazaar in India, featuring affordable and trendy fashion and lifestyle products, as it ramps up efforts against Walmart-owned Flipkart and Reliance’s Ajio, which have made deeper inroads in the Indian fast-fashion market.
“India e-commerce category mix is changing; Mobiles and Consumer electronics share is declining.
Fashion has seen the strongest growth since FY19, and now holds the highest category share,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note last month.
India is a key overseas market for Amazon, which has invested more than $11 billion in the country to date.
The fast-fashion e-commerce market has gained significant traction in India in recent years, with local startups drawing inspiration from global pioneers like Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo.
Meta has announced changes to its rules on AI-generated content and manipulated media following criticism from its Oversight Board.
So, for AI-generated or otherwise manipulated media on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the playbook appears to be: more labels, fewer takedowns.
“Our ‘Made with AI’ labels on AI-generated video, audio and images will be based on our detection of industry-shared signals of AI images or people self-disclosing that they’re uploading AI-generated content,” said Bickert, noting the company already applies ‘Imagined with AI’ labels to photorealistic images created using its own Meta AI feature.
Meta’s blog post highlights a network of nearly 100 independent fact-checkers which it says it’s engaged with to help identify risks related to manipulated content.
These external entities will continue to review false and misleading AI-generated content, per Meta.
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Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit.
The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals.
Indeed, Varda’s first mission, which returned to Earth in February after 10-months in orbit, does not mark the first time a drug has been crystallized in microgravity.
Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle.
The startup’s next manufacturing mission will launch later this year, and the team plans to land that spacecraft in Australia.
Logspace co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Nader previously worked on machine learning problems at enterprise AI company Bitvore, together with co-founder and CTO Gabriel Luiz Freitas Almeida.
“This acquisition will provide current Langflow developers and current DataStax developers additional resources and integrations to elevate their applications to match the scale of their ambitions,” said Chet Kapoor, CEO and chairman of DataStax.
“Langflow is focused on democratizing and accelerating generative AI development for any developer or company, and in joining DataStax, we’re working together to enable developers to put their wild new generative AI ideas on a fast path to production.”The DataStax team argues that this acquisition effectively completes its effort to build a one-stop generative AI stack.
Langflow will continue to operate as a separate entity, so existing users shouldn’t notice any immediate changes.
“We couldn’t be more excited about joining the DataStax team and supercharging our ability to grow the Langflow platform, bringing it to more researchers, developers, enterprises and entrepreneurs working on generative AI applications,” said Nader.
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners.
In 2022, Aerospike added document support and then followed that up with graph and vector capabilities — two database features that are crucial for building real-time AI and ML applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform that can work with data at really high scale, or, as we call it, unlimited scale,” Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer said.
So our premise has held good that real-time data and real-time access to data is going to be important pretty much across every industry.
“Aerospike, with its impressive customer base and performance advantage at scale, is uniquely positioned to become a foundational element for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”
Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines.
The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15–20% using its products.
Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015.
Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
With the Apple Car firmly in the rearview, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots.
In spite of those efforts, however, the company has fared best when it focused its resources back into its robot vacuum.
The hockey puck design that’s prevalent across robot vacuums isn’t ideal for anything beyond the core functionality it’s built for.
That’s likely a big part of the reason the company is selling it as a development platform.
There’s nothing wrong with teleop in many scenarios, but it seems unlikely that people are going to flock to a home robot that’s being controlled by a human somewhere far away.
