“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.
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.
Spotify has carved out a business for itself in music streaming, podcast entertainment and audiobooks.
Starting with a rollout in the U.K., Spotify is testing the waters for an online education offering of freemium video courses.
Mohit Jitani, the London-based product director for the education business, said in an interview that pricing choices were part of what it’s testing.
Around half of Spotify Premium subscribers have listened to education or self-help themed podcasts, Spotify says.
Offering educational content aimed at running a business, or improving your music production, fits with that.
What’s been billed as a Windows event is, predictably, focused on AI efforts, with Copilot taking the wheel.
The new Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business both sport a devoted Copilot key wedged between the Alt key and arrows.
At the end of the day, a Copilot key is simply a physical shortcut that surfaces one particular service.
That the key has been added to a pair of business-focused devices highlights how much the company is considering Copilot an important enterprise play.
The Surface Pro 10 for Business sports a 13-inch touchscreen, powered by either the Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7 and the Intel AI Boost NPU.
One path, which is particularly well trodden, is to start a venture fund.
Instead of launching a VC fund, they’re starting with an incubator called Montauk Climate, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Montauk Climate is one of the latter.
Montauk Climate will remain shareholders in its spinout companies and have seats on their boards.
As the number of incubated companies expands, Montauk Climate expects to raise its own venture fund to help support them.
Fisker’s finances are back in the news after the company warned back in February that it didn’t have enough cash to make it through its next year.
The company said this week that it intends to halt production for six weeks to get its business back in order.
Softening demand growth for EVs is making the normal challenges of scaling a company all the harder for Fisker and its peers.
Not that we’re all doom and gloom here at TechCrunch — we’re actually rather bullish on the prospect for EVs in the near and far future.
Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood here:
TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband and CTO Ralph Gootee helped build their previous startup, PlanGrid, into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018.
Yet in spite of that success, they always felt they left business on the table because of an inability to forecast business changes accurately.
“TigerEye is a business simulation engine that helps companies predict their future,” Young told TechCrunch.
The couple was advising other startups at Y Combinator in 2021 when they decided it was time to build TigerEye.
The following year, they brought a bunch of the core members of the PlanGrid team back together and started working on the problem.
Among the many stress points in e-commerce machine, delivery has long been seen as one of the more painful ones.
“Delivery is the biggest unsolved puzzle is delivery part,” Piotr Zaleski, Ingrid’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview.
And in case you are at all curious: Ingrid the business was not named to ensure coverage in TechCrunch by me, Ingrid.
Ingrid has identified a very obvious problem that most certainly can use fixing, but it also faces a few challenges.
“The only way is to build a hell of a platform that retailers want to use to take a volume position,” Zaleski said.
A few years later, Levie’s original idea was becoming commoditized, and he switched gears to enterprise content management in the cloud.
Traditional enterprise content management, whether on prem or in the cloud, has involved storing, managing, securing and governing unstructured content.
Today, the industry is changing once more, and Box is again working to position itself on the forefront of that shift.
Levie has always had a knack for seeing where the puck is going, and his company is embracing the software shift toward AI and workflow automation.
Last year, Box bought Crooze, a small company that specializes in workflow automation and metadata management with integrations into Box, making it a logical acquisition target.
LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots.
Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment in Bear Robotics, the California startup that makes artificial intelligence-powered server robots for restaurants and other venues — autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters.
With the investment, LG Electronics becomes Bear’s largest shareholder.
We’ve contacted Bear and LG for further comment.
The Korean electronics company has been researching and developing software and hardware in robotics.
