AI agents are the new hot craze in generative AI.
On Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, the company introduced a new tool to help companies build AI agents.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate).
“We’re now bringing you grounding in Google Search, bringing the power of the world’s knowledge that Google Search offers through our grounding service to models.
EarliTec Diagnostics just raised fresh capital to expand its system that helps clinicians diagnose children as young as 16 months old.
According to EarliTec, children with autism won’t focus on the video the same way that kids without autism will.
The Autism Impact Fund closed a $60 million fund, 20% higher than its $50 million target, this week.
Divergent Ventures raised a $10 million fund in 2021 that focuses on early-stage companies across the neurodiversity space.
Opya, a digital therapy platform for autism, has raised more than $19 million from backers including SoftBank’s Open Opportunity Fund.
Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines.
The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15–20% using its products.
Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015.
Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline that process and now looks to expand into a one-stop-shop HR platform for the agriculture industry.
Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for his advice on whether or not her organic farm should expand.
Once he started talking to potential farm customers, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their HR beyond just finding workers.
“When it comes to the back office, every farm we visited had thousands of filing cabinets,” Guirguis said.
“Your HR team is in the back office doing traditional HR work,” Guirguis said.
The AI world needs more data transparency and web3 startup Space and Time says it can helpAs AI proliferates and things on the internet are easier to manipulate, there’s a need more than ever to make sure data and brands are verifiable, said Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time, on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Dykstra thinks the answer is through verification of data and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), which are cryptographic actions used to prove something about a piece of information — without revealing the origin data itself.
“It has a lot to do with whether there’s an incentive for bad actors to want to manipulate things,” Dykstra said.
Anytime there’s a higher incentive, where people would want to manipulate data, prices, the books, finances or more, ZK proofs can be used to verify and retrieve the data.
Dykstra’s most recent concern is that AI data isn’t really verifiable.
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories and themes from the week.
But while the SBF news was a big deal, there was so very much more to cover on today’s news roundup episode of Equity.
We also dug into two companies building startups focused around kids.
Then, to wrap up, a look at just who unicorn founders really are, and a new $100 million fund that to back climate tech.
The State Department blamed the prolific ransomware group for targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, including healthcare services.
Last month, an affiliate group of the ALPHV/BlackCat gang took credit for a cyberattack and weeks-long outage at U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare, which processes around one-in-three U.S. patient medical records.
The affiliate group went public after accusing the main ALPHV/BlackCat gang of swindling the contract hackers out of $22 million in ransom that Change Healthcare allegedly paid to prevent the mass leak of patient records.
Change Healthcare has said since that it ejected the hackers from its network and restored much of its systems.
U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of Change Healthcare, has not yet confirmed if any patient data was stolen.
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI.
Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the program is to be funded by $20 million in grants and include 21 nonprofits to start, including Quill.org, a company creating AI-powered tools for student writing feedback, and World Bank, which is building a generative AI app to make development research more accessible.
“Generative AI can help social impact teams be more productive, creative and effective in serving their communities,” Annie Lewin, director of global advocacy at Google.org, said in a blog post.
But there remain significant barriers for nonprofits looking to build their own AI solutions or adopt third-party products — chiefly cost, resources and time.
Nonprofit accelerator Fast Forward said that this year, more than a third of applicants for its latest class were AI companies.
So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans.
Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen.
And while 37% of respondents say that they work with a financial adviser, two-thirds of Americans believe that their financial planning needs improvement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study 2023.
Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers?
Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.
Even when some or all of those are addressed, there remains the question of what happens when a system makes an inevitable mistake.
We can’t, however, expect consumers to learn to program or hire someone who can help any time an issue arrives.
Thankfully, this is a great use case for LLMs (large language models) in the robotics space, as exemplified by new research from MIT.
“LLMs have a way to tell you how to do each step of a task, in natural language.
It’s a simple, repeatable task for humans, but for robots, it’s a combination of various small tasks.
