The economy remains on shaky ground in Europe, but there is some silver lining for enterprise startups: those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost to their business.
“We are now poised to take the AccountsIQ product and service to the next level,” said Tony Connolly, founder and CEO of AccountsIQ, in a statement.
Thus, the prosaic accounting startup continues to get attention.
(AccountsIQ and its primary investor for this round, Axiom Equity, are not disclosing its valuation.)
In contrast, Cran says that AccountsIQ positions itself as the platform that businesses will move to as they scale up.
The funding, which would go to Rocket Lab subsidiary SolAero Technologies, would help increase the company’s compound semiconductor production by 50% within the next three years.
The funding would help the company build out its Albuquerque-based facilities and create more than 100 direct manufacturing jobs, Rocket Lab said in a statement.
Rocket Lab acquired SolAero, which operates a ~115,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, in 2022 for $80 million.
The company is one of just two in the United States that specializes in the production of space-grade, radiation-resistant compound semiconductors, or space-grade solar cells.
SolAero is highly vertically integrated: In addition to the solar cells, the firm also manufactures solar panels and power modules.
New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles.
Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama 3 8B model featuring eight billion parameters, and the Llama 3 70B model some seventy billion parameters.
The company’s new models, which were trained on 24,000 GPU clusters, perform well across benchmarks that Meta put them up against, besting some rivals’ models that were already in the market.
What matters for those of us not competing to build and release the most capable, or largest AI models, what we care about is that they are still getting better with time.
While Meta takes an open-source approach to AI work, its competitors are often prefer more closed-source work.
Uber Eats is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed to boost discovery and help restaurants showcase their dishes.
With this launch, Uber Eats now joins numerous other popular apps that have launched their own short-form video feeds following TikTok’s rise in popularity, including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Netflix to name a few.
The new Uber Eats short-form videos are visible in carousels placed across the app, including the homescreen.
Verma also shared that in order to further support merchants, the company has revamped its Uber Eats Manager software and added personalized growth recommendations.
Uber Eats announced today that it now has more than one million merchants around the world on its platform, across 11,000 cities in six continents.
SiftHub’s AI assistant is built on open-source large language models (LLMs), and is supported by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, which uses additional data sources to fine-tune the quality of content generated by AI.
All that eventually brought her focus to sales and presales teams.
“Sales teams have a shadow team — a presales team or solutions engineers — and they are usually the unsung heroes of the organization.
Sales and presales teams lack the necessary tooling to handle this new selling environment.
We are excited to back the SiftHub team and be a part of their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, a partner at Blume Ventures.
Sila, Group14, Envoix, and Amprius are all trying to commercialize their silicon anode technology, hoping to cash in on consumers’ desire for ever more EV range.
Ionobell, a seed stage startup, is hoping to be at the top of that list, claiming its silicon material will be cheaper than the established competition.
Both established companies impregnate porous graphite structures with silicon; Sila also adds a coating to the particles.
Ionobell’s silicon supply comes from a waste material, Neivert said, which helps keep costs down.
Like other battery materials companies, Ionobell faces a challenging road ahead.
Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth.
The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol.
Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol.
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.
The NYT Games app is debuting a new redesign to help users discover games and track their progress more easily.
The redesign comes nearly a year after the New York Times renamed its games-focused app from “NYT Crosswords” to “NYT Games” to better represent its growing family of games.
NYT Games principal product designer Lian Chang told TechCrunch that the redesign caters to both old and new players.
Chang says the redesigned game cards incentivize players to come back to a game and finish it.
The idea behind the redesigned game cards was to not only be inviting for discovery purposes, but also be functional.
The bid would help inform investors about any climate- or energy transition-related risks publicly traded companies face.
And depending on how far the SEC takes the proposed climate disclosure rule, many of these startups stand to benefit.
Scope 3 emissions are the broadest category, and if the SEC would require their reporting, the effects would ripple far beyond just publicly traded companies.
Look for it to be one of the first climate tech companies to list publicly when the IPO window opens.
Enter Bend, a corporate spend startup that focuses not just on tracking expenses, but also carbon emissions.
Phrasing requests in a certain way — meanly or nicely — can yield better results with chatbots like ChatGPT than prompting in a more neutral tone.
So what’s the deal with emotive prompts?
Nouha Dziri, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, theorizes that emotive prompts essentially “manipulate” a model’s underlying probability mechanisms.
Why is it so trivial to defeat safeguards with emotive prompts?
Another reason could be a mismatch between a model’s general training data and its “safety” training datasets, Dziri says — i.e.
