Enterprise

Our enterprise coverage includes everything from new products from large SaaS providers like Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow and Atlassian to funding for small SaaS companies and new products that help startups build their own SaaS service.

“Sophisticated SigmaOS Browser Employs AI-Driven Tactics to Generate Revenue, Supported by YC”

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Some of these features sound and work like rival browser Arc’s recent releases. But SigmaOS claims that its feature returns better-quality results, which is a hard metric to quantify. Going all out on AILast year, SigmaOS released some AI-powered features such as a contextual assistant called Airis, which can answer your questions about a web page or the broader web. Now, the company is looking to monetize its AI features. It said that all users would get access to AI-powered features but for $20 per month users would get better rate limits for AI features.

Exploring the Significance of Stability AI’s CEO Resignation for the Future of AI Startups

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What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market, and leadership structure? Well, you might call it Stability AI. Stability AI’s latest leadership shakeup is no joke, with its CEO Emad Mostaque departing to work on AI products that are less centralized — which is to say, owned and built by a single company, like, say, Stability AI. The startup’s fundraising journey is well-known to tech folks, while its best-known product — Stable Diffusion — is known even more broadly. We dig into all that and more in today’s TechCrunch Minute:

PipeDreams, an HVAC Startup, Secures $25M Funding from Ex-Nextdoor Executive

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“The top use of Nextdoor is people looking for providers, HVAC especially,” Laufer told TechCrunch. PipeDreams has purchased nine companies so far and currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tucson, and Denver with plans to expand. “The beauty of this industry is it’s massive, there are over 100,000 businesses doing plumbing and HVAC,” Laufer said about the U.S. market. Laufer said owning the HVAC companies outright is what differentiates PipeDreams from other competitors looking to just connect consumers with professionals, like Angie and Thumbtack. PipeDreams is also addressing the skills shortage in the HVAC and plumbing industries, as Gen Z is less interested in learning trades then generations before them.

Generative AI Now Accessible to All Developers with Fireworks.ai Open Source API

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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.

“Maximizing Efficiency: A Look at Thoras.ai’s Automated Resource Allocation for Kubernetes Workloads”

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“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.

Viam Expands Beyond Robotics: Introducing Their Revolutionary No-Code Automation Platform

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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.

“Unlocking AI’s Potential: Cyera Secures $300M at $1.5B Valuation to Tackle Data Challenges”

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AI is a data problem. Now Cyera is raising up to $300M on a $1.5B valuation to secure itA cybersecurity startup called Cyera is betting that the next big challenge in enterprise data protection will be AI, and it’s raising a big round of funding as demand picks up for it. Previous to this, Cyera — pronounced “Sierra” and headquartered in San Mateo and with roots in Israel — had raised a total of $160 million with its current $500 million valuation dating from last year. Cyera, Coatue and Sequoia declined comment. A source said that AI right now is a “huge driver” for business at Cyera.

Development of a Biowearable Device for Monitoring Chronic Kidney Disease by Metyos

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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.

Canoo Acquires Assets from Struggling EV Startup Arrival after Bankruptcy

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Bankrupt commercial EV startup Arrival has sold some of its assets, including advanced manufacturing equipment to Canoo, another struggling startup trying to build and sell electric vehicles. Canoo said the purchased assets, packed into more than 20 container ships, will be sent to the company’s facility in Oklahoma. The company previously acquired all of the new, and “like-new” assets owned by Arrival’s business unit in the United States. Arrival announced in January that it planned to sell off assets and IP from its U.K. division after filing for bankruptcy protection in the U.K. Arrival never produced any commercial vehicles at scale and its market valuation is now around $7.7 million.