Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Despite this general downturn, certain segments like generative AI continue to attract significant funding, indicating a selective yet substantial interest in specific AI applications.
AI investment is slowing down for a few reasons, like the crowded market and the steep costs of building big AI models.
Investors are getting pickier and want to see real, solid returns instead of just throwing money at hopeful growth.
(That isn’t stopping them from raising billion-dollar funds focusing on AI, of course.)
Midas, a fintech startup that allows people in Turkey to invest in U.S. and Turkish equities, says it has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Portage Ventures of Canada.
The startup is aimed at Turkey’s retail investor market and claims to have more than 2 million users.
That’s in a country of 80 million,” Egem Eraslan, CEO and founder of Midas, told TechCrunch.
The company has plans to expand beyond Turkey, and aims to target countries in the MENA region.
Globally, Portage invests in transformational financial technology and Midas is poised to lead that initiative in a region of early adopters.”
Last week, Meta started testing its AI chatbot in India across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
Meta confirmed that it is restricting certain election-related keywords for AI in the test phase.
When you ask Meta AI about specific politicians, candidates, officeholders, and certain other terms, it will redirect you to the Election Commission’s website.
But just like other AI-powered systems, Meta AI has some inconsistencies.
This week, the company rolled out a new Llama-3-powered Meta AI chatbot in more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., but India was missing from the list.
That means there’s a market for a layer between companies and Large Language Models (LLMs) — something companies can use to pick LLMs easily without needing to commit for all time to one platform.
That’s the market Langdock is targeting with its chat interface that sits between LLMs and a company.
“Companies don’t want to have a vendor lock-in on just one of those LLM providers,” Lennard Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Langdock, told TechCrunch.
In addition to the chat interface, the company also offers security, cloud and on-premises solutions.
In contrast, Langdock’s chat interface works for a broader range of use cases and can be used by any kind of staff.
Tesla is recalling all 3,878 Cybertrucks that it has shipped to date, due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Reports of problems with the Cybertruck’s accelerator pedal started popping up in the last few weeks.
Tesla said it first received a notice of one of these accelerator pedal incidents from a customer on March 31, and then a second one on April 3.
It also told NHTSA that it has started building Cybertrucks with a new accelerator pedal, and that it’s fixing the vehicles that are in transit or sitting at delivery centers.
While the Cybertruck only first started shipping late last year, this is not the vehicle’s first recall.
Shares are not continuing to climb in early trading, but are holding steady above its IPO price, at around $100 at the time of writing.
Its successful debut marks the third major tech IPO in the United States this year, and is the third in a row to price well and immediately trade higher.
Investor eagerness for Ibotta indicates that “there is an increasing appetite for IPOs again” Smith said, “particularly in the tech space.”Don’t pop the champagne yet for the tech IPO market coming roaring back, however.
Classic tech IPOs tend to feature tech companies still in growth mode and deeply in the red.
Smith agrees, calling the upcoming Rubrik IPO “an even bigger test” for tech debuts “given its weaker current financial picture.”We’ll find out next week.
That’s privacy by design.”The funding is notable in part because Cape appeal to users is not yet proven.
The latest round is being co-led by A* and Andreessen Horowitz, with XYZ Ventures, ex/ante, Costanoa Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Forward Deployed VC, and Karman Ventures also participating.
Those jobs may exposed him to users (government departments) who treated the security of personal information and privacy around data usage as essential.
(Cape today also announced a partnership with USCellular — which itself provides a MNVO covering 12 cellular networks, and Doyle said that it’s talking with other telcos, too).
Although payments for this might be anonymous, a user’s data is still routed through the network infrastructure of the underlying carrier, making a users movements and usage observable.
Chasing after other popular services in the market such as those from OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg claimed today that Meta AI is possibly the “most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”Meta first rolled out Meta AI in the U.S. last year.
Meta said that it plans to keep Meta AI in test mode in India.
New featuresUsers could already ask Meta AI for writing or recipe suggestions.
Plus, they can ask Meta AI to animate an image or turn an image into a GIF.
All AI things everywhere at onceMeta is adopting the approach of having Meta AI available in as many places as it can.
Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth.
While Serve’s debut in the public markets comes from a reverse merger and not a SPAC, the two alternate paths to IPO are not too dissimilar.
However, Serve Robotics said it’s expecting enormous growth fueled by money generated by going public.
“I never thought that I would start a robotics company and then be in the ads business,” said a tired, but excited, Kashani in a phone interview minutes before the bell rang.
Upon the closing of the merger, Uber held a 16.6% stake and Nvidia an 14.3% stake in Serve, according to regulatory filings.
If you want to get your product in a grocery store in Mexico City, Dataplor has global location intelligence to help you do that.
The company raised $2 million in 2019 to bring Latin American food delivery vendors online.
Dataplor uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models and a purpose-built technology platform to take in public domain data.
While that is not totally unique — there are companies like ThoughSpot, Esri and Near doing something similar around business and location intelligence — Dataplor’s “secret sauce” is combining all of that technology and public domain data with a human factor.
The round also includes participation from Quest Venture Partners, Acronym Venture Capital, Circadian Ventures, Two Lanterns Venture Partners and APA Venture Partners.
