When generative AI tools started making waves in late 2022 after the launch of ChatGPT, the finance industry was one of the first to recognize these tools’ potential for speeding up the data-gathering and research process.
MIT alumni Jacob Chanyeol Choi and Subeen Pang founded Linq after they won the Samsung Open Collaboration in 2023, an accelerator-like program hosted by Samsung Financial Network.
Choi told TechCrunch that win spurred him to build large language models (LLMs) for enterprises, particularly the financial sector.
“We knew the potential for a tool that could seamlessly integrate with a company’s data ecosystem, which led to the birth of Linq,” Choi said.
In addition to its B2B service for enterprise clients, the startup also plans to build B2C tools for AI equity research.
In its early days, OctoAI focused almost exclusively on optimizing models to run more effectively.
With the rise of generative AI, the team then launched the fully managed OctoAI platform to help its users serve and fine-tune existing models.
OctoStack, at its core, is that OctoAI platform, but for private deployments.
Deploying OctoStack should be straightforward for most enterprises, as OctoAI delivers the platform with read-to-go containers and their associated Helm charts for deployments.
For developers, the API remains the same, no matter whether they are targeting the SaaS product or OctoAI in their private cloud.
The company has crafted an interesting distribution strategy for travel eSIM cards and simplified the experience as eSIM remains a confusing technology for most people.
Thanks to eSIM, the experience is much better — or at least on paper because the eSIM industry is a bit confusing.
For instance, if you’re traveling to Argentina, you might search for the best option for a travel eSIM before heading to the airport.
Kolet’s first travel partners are professional travel agency Resaneo and air ticket booking platform Ulysse.
It has also asked some travel industry experts to become advisors for the startup.
In enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), usage-based pricing, a pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service, is gaining ground.
According to a report from VC firm OpenView, ~60% of SaaS businesses offer some form of usage-based pricing today.
But while usage-based pricing has its advantages, it can be tougher to keep tabs on from a billing perspective.
There, he ran into blockers collecting usage-based pricing data from different providers and infrastructure and aggregating and analyzing this usage together.
“Competitors in the usage-based space only cater to the revenue teams with a closed-source, billing-first approach,” he said.
Apple says it plans to make it easier for customers to switch to Android as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into force today.
This solution is not yet available, but Apple is committing to having it ready by fall 2025, the company says.
On this front, Apple’s Data & Privacy website is being updated to allow users to export their App Store data to authorized third parties, the document says.
Today, would-be Android users can use Google’s “Switch to Android” iOS app to migrate important content, like contacts, calendars, photos, videos, messages, and more to a new Android device.
It’s unclear if Apple’s new solution will address these areas as Apple hasn’t yet said what, specifically, it aims to improve.
Adobe is making it easier for users to create and publish social content on mobile, as the company announced today that it’s launching the latest version of the Adobe Express app in beta.
With this update, Adobe is bringing its Firefly AI models directly into the app, allowing users to quickly create and edit social content using generative AI tools.
The Adobe Express app lets you preview and publish content to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Since Apple restricts the number of beta users in apps, iOS users need to sign up to get access to the beta app.
Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Adobe and TikTok announced that TikTok’s AI-powered Creative Assistant is now available directly within Adobe Express.
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.
At the moment, large organizations often employ “business intelligence” (BI) tools to figure out what the heck is going on inside their operations.
Essentially, BI tools connect to a business database and use SQL to create visualizations and build out BI dashboards.
There are huge companies involved in this space: Tableau (owned by Salesforce), Power BI (owned by Microsoft), Looker (owned by Google), and QuickSight (owned by Amazon) to name just a handful.
And how is this marketing campaign performing.” He said other players in the market target data users, whereas Fluent targets the business market, not data.
For example, Metabase is an open-source analytics and business intelligence application that allows users to create dashboards more easily.
Whenever you go to a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or an executive is speaking, there is a cost associated with that.
For executives, it is time away from the office, the cost of a ticket for attending and travel costs.
How do companies justify the cost of attending those events?
The target market is midsize business to enterprises, who are looking for a way to manage this process.
She eventually found Ivy Ventures, a firm that invested a modest $500,000 to get Sproxxy off the ground, and later added another $600,000.
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