But other bumps can be attributed to the quirks of the industry itself: It’s a labor intensive business that’s resistant to automation and heavily fragmented.
It is crazier than many other services industries,” Lee Kesheshian, founder and CEO of Civic Renewables, told TechCrunch.
To try to address the quality and consistency problem, Civic Renewables is buying small installers and rolling them up.
“Now let’s go and put those systems in place under this umbrella.”Each company that Civic Renewables buys will retain its branding but append the umbrella organization’s name.
Because solar has been around for a while, the business plan underpinning Civic Renewables could show a path for at least part of the climate tech market.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will examine the rise of AI technology across all fronts, said FTC Chair Lina Khan, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
In fact, it’s already seeing an uptick in consumer complaint cases in some areas, like voice cloning fraud, Khan said.
Asked what areas of AI the FTC was watching, Khan explained that it was everything.
Of course, policing AI comes with its challenges, despite the number of technologists the FTC has hired to help in this area.
Another area of focus for the FTC is the focus on what openness really means in the AI context, Khan explained.
Reliability firstApple makes some of the most popular devices on the planet, and its AI features should serve to make them more useful.
A lot of AI-powered features rely on going back to the cloud to get answers or inputs back.
Rumors on the street are that Apple will announce a deal with OpenAI to power AI features across its operating systems.
Given AI’s hallucination problems, Apple might not want to be directly involved in content-related AI features just yet.
Companies like Google and OpenAI have had to walk back on AI features because of errors or copyright issues.
Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.
Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced).
Prior to the pandemic, Oda – founded in 2013 – carved out a place for itself as one of the strong regional players in online grocery delivery in Europe.
But by late 2022 Oda was raising $151 million at a valuation of $353 million.
Local publication e24 says Kinnevik and other existing backers Summa Equity and Verdane are expected to provide the bulk of the NOK600 million ($57 million) Oda is reportedly raising.
The company has bought Searchlight, a startup and recruitment platform that uses artificial intelligence-based technology to source talent.
The plan will be to use Searchlight’s tech to build new AI products for Multiverse to expand its professional training services.
After that, the plan will be to wind down Searchlight’s recruitment services as they focus on Multiverse’s business.
Some people will use AI to speed up what they do; others will claim that AI is taking over certain jobs altogether.
“From the start, Anna and Kerry have been thoughtful about building Searchlight’s AI models to complement their vision,” Keith Rabois, who led the Series A, said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.
Agility Robotics on Thursday confirmed that it has laid off a “small number” of employees.
The well-funded Oregon-based firm says the job loss is part of a company-wide focus on commercialization efforts.
Ultimately, however, those efforts were placed on the back burner, as the company shifted focus to understaffed warehouses.
Two years ago this month, the company announced a $150 million Series B. Amazon notably participated in the round by way of its Industrial Innovation Fund.
Last month at Modex, Agility showcased updates to Digit’s end effectors designed specifically for automotive manufacturing workflows.
“Building data models is best done in Python, but many of my team members only understood spreadsheets,” Kircos told TechCrunch.
“Quadratic is on a mission to build the best tool for understanding data,” Kircos said.
“Quadratic is a brand-new type of spreadsheet, not an Excel clone,” Kircos said.
There’s Sourcetable, whose headlining features include real-time document collaboration, data syncing with business apps and an editor for querying large data sets.
Neptyne, which launched in March 2023, is building a Python-powered spreadsheet targeting data scientists.
Stell, a two-year-old software startup, is focused on this latter part of the engineering ecosystem.
The company has developed a tool for requirements management that allows teams to track, verify and validate requirements on complex projects.
She founded Stell in 2022 with Anne Wen, a professional with experience in venture capital and getting space startups off the ground.
They imagined something different: a tool that was truly useful and user-friendly, that cut down on paperwork, and that engineers would actually want to use.
People might not have time to go to a two-week training on how to use a tool,” McLemore said.
Dating app maker Bumble is rethinking its vision for the company’s future after announcing weak earnings and massive job cuts that will see the company cutting a third of its staff, or around 350 employees.
“Candidly, we have been slow to realize this broader vision with Bumble BFF thus far,” she told investors on Tuesday’s Q4 2023 earnings call.
The CEO noted that the current BFF product has a small, but strong following.
This is due to BFF using the same one-to-one match paradigm for friendships as Bumble uses for dating.
That could limit BFF’s ability to monetize as Bumble’s dating product does.
As Techstars retools, some former staffers say it lost focus on what made it successfulWell-known accelerator group Techstars announced a slew of changes to its operations this week, including the shuttering of some of its city-based programs.
And one former Techstars managing director (MD) told TechCrunch that the move away from local fundraising for city-based accelerator programs was an error.
One former managing director (MD) said that having local limited partner investors in Techstars meant that more people in those cities had a stake in its local programs.
The shift away from local capital and more focus on corporate dollars meant that city-based boosters and founders were less central to Techstars’ focus, the MD said.
Still, Techstars faces competition, not just from Y Combinator domestically, but from other accelerator programs in the US and elsewhere around the world.
