That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth Wednesday with $13 million in a seed round of funding led by European VC giant Atomico.
The Copenhagen-based startup is reimagining general ledger software from the ground up, replete with AI to cleanse transactional data, while also enabling finance teams to ask plain-English questions and receive straightforward answers from their data.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is king, packing support for CRM (customer relationship management), HR (human resources), project management, and perhaps the most crucial component of all, the general ledger.
And it’s this element of the ERP that Light is focused on dragging into the modern digital era, where AI increasingly rules the roost.
“Our mission is to be the first automated ledger for global companies,” Sanders told TechCrunch.
Fresh off the success of its first mission, satellite manufacturer Apex has closed $95 million in new capital to scale its operations.
The Los Angeles-based startup successfully launched and commissioned its first spacecraft, a model called Aries, in March.
The company is on track to manufacture five Aries this year alone, Apex CEO and co-founder Ian Cinnamon told TechCrunch.
Apex was founded on the thesis that the one of the main bottlenecks facing the growth of the space industry was satellite bus manufacturing.
The company is approaching fifty people and that number is likely to double by the end of this year.
It’s something Apple is striving to answer with its own take on the category, Apple Intelligence, which was officially unveiled this week at WWDC 2024.
Apple Intelligence is a more bespoke approach to generative AI, built specifically with the company’s different operating systems at their foundation.
It’s a very Apple approach in the sense that it prioritizes a frictionless user experience above all.
The operating systems also feature a feedback mechanism into which users can report issues with the generative AI system.
This should function the same with all external models Apple partners with, including Google Gemini.
You could open up the TikTok app and snap a picture of it to find similar items available for purchase on TikTok Shop.
The ability to use image search for shopping is something that Google has offered for years with Google Lens, its visual search tool.
TikTok recently revealed that TikTok Shop now has more than 15 million sellers worldwide, including over 500,000 in the U.S.
It spent more than $400 million on platform safety and created a team of more than 7,500 people to help keep TikTok Shop safe.
TikTok has been betting big on e-commerce, as it sees TikTok Shop as its next big potential revenue source.
Voodoo, a French mobile apps and games publisher, has acquired BeReal for €500 million.
As part of the acquisition, BeReal co-founder and CEO Alexis Barreyat will leave the company after a transition period.
Aymeric Roffé, the CEO of Wizz, one of Voodoo’s social media apps, will take over as CEO of BeReal.
On BeReal, users receive a push notification each day prompting them to post they’re up within a two-minute window.
“Voodoo has a proven track record of driving significant growth in mobile apps,” said BeReal founder Alexis Barreyat, in the press release.
Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round with General Catalyst leading the round.
The company has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt.
As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the artificial intelligence space.
It also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure — Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.
According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (around $500 million and $140 million respectively).
Traffic is down, newsrooms are undergoing layoffs, and publishers fear that AI technologies will only make matters worse.
Entering the fray, news reader startup Particle is teaming up with publishers to seek out a new business model for the AI era, where AI summaries of news don’t have to mean lost revenues.
Now, the company is bringing its first publishing partners into the mix to help it guide its next steps.
As a start, Particle now subscribes to Reuters newswire to help it deliver information about current events in the news.
What Particle isn’t yet ready to reveal is its business model.
“Big tech companies have ‘mis-set’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch.
According to one survey, over half of businesses have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations.
Per market research firm Markets and Markets, revenue in the market for call center AI alone is set to climb from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by year-end 2027.
And it’s scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations at once.
Image Credits: Cognigy“Cognigy provides a platform to build, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” Heltewig said.
Who would have thought that Raspberry Pi, the maker of cheap, single-board computers, would become a public company?
It means that Raspberry Pi could end up raising more than $200 million during its IPO process.
If you’re looking to buy Raspberry Pi shares as a retail investor, this isn’t possible just yet.
Raspberry Pi Ltd, the public company, is the commercial subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Arm previously announced that it intended to increase its stake in Raspberry Pi with the public listing.
When Urvashi Barooah applied to MBA programs in 2015, she focused her applications around her dream of becoming a venture capitalist.
She got rejected from every school, and was told she was being unrealistic about her prospects in the venture industry, but she didn’t let that deter her.
She landed a spot at Wharton and said she catered all of her classes and extra cirriculars around learning everything she could about the venture industry.
While growing up with entrepreneur parents didn’t introduce Barooah to venture capital, she thinks her upbringing makes her a better VC.
“I started my journey in venture four years ago and knew nothing,” Barooah said.
