Blueshift, a San Francisco-based startup that taps AI to help brands automate and personalize engagement across different marketing channels, has secured $40 million in debt financing from Runway Growth Capital.
Blueshift competes with a number of vendors in the marketing automation space, including several who aim to build solutions from the ground up on GenAI.
There’s also Pixie, an AI-powered full-stack marketing platform; Aampe, a marketing automation platform for mobile apps; and Connectly, which employs automation to nudge shoppers to complete purchases.
As of June 2023, HubSpot had a roughly 37% share of the marketing automation market, followed by Adobe (~7%), Oracle (~7%) and ActiveCampaign (~7%).
But it’s a very lucrative venture, marketing automation.
The deal would allow General Catalyst to tap deeper into India’s vibrant technology scene that has lured over $100 billion in startup investments since 2010.
The deal hasn’t finalized, so things may change, the sources cautioned, requesting anonymity as the deliberation is private.
The U.S. firm held conversations with many senior individuals in India last year looking to find an India-based partner, many people familiar with the matter said.
Its new focus on India follows the firm expanding in Europe last year by agreeing to merge with La Famiglia, an investor in several high-profile early-stage startups including AI firm Mistral.
Investing in India has proven uniquely challenging to many global venture firms that have entered the country or have explored such possibility, a partner at a India-based venture firm said.
Google today announced that it’ll stop charging Google Cloud customers a fee to migrate their data to another cloud provider or on-premise datacenter, effective immediately.
Customers using Google Cloud services including BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner and Persistent Disk are eligible for free transfers out of Google Cloud — but must first apply for approval through a form.
Only once an approved customer’s data has been transferred out of Google Cloud and they’ve terminated their cloud written agreement will the data transfer fee will be waived (via a bill credit).
According to an IDC survey, 99% of cloud storage users have incurred egress fees averaging 6% of their cloud storage costs.
In 2018, Cloudflare launched the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of companies pledging to reduce or eliminate data egress fees.
In September 2023, Amazon announced to developers that it would be launching new tools to build LLM-powered experiences.
Today, the company revealed three developers delivering new generative AI-powered Alexa experiences, including AI chatbot platform Character.AI, AI music company Splash and Voice AI game developer Volley.
All three experiences are available in the Amazon Alexa Skill Store.
Volley introduced its generative AI-powered “20 Questions” game, giving Alexa users a modern version of the well-known game.
The game uses generative AI to interact with users by asking them questions, providing hints and explaining “yes or no questions” if the human opponent gets stuck.
In September 2023, Amazon announced to developers that it would be launching new tools to build LLM-powered experiences.
Today, the company revealed three developers delivering new generative AI-powered Alexa experiences, including AI chatbot platform Character.AI, AI music company Splash and Voice AI game developer Volley.
All three experiences are available in the Amazon Alexa Skill Store.
Volley introduced its generative AI-powered “20 Questions” game, giving Alexa users a modern version of the well-known game.
The game uses generative AI to interact with users by asking them questions, providing hints and explaining “yes or no questions” if the human opponent gets stuck.
In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close collaborator and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content.
Today, OpenAI published a public response in which the startup — unsurprisingly — claims that the case is without merit.
“Interestingly, the regurgitations The New York Times [cite in its lawsuit] appear to be from years-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites,” OpenAI writes.
The Times is only the latest copyright holder to sue OpenAI over what it believes is a clear violation of IP rights.
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accuse Meta and OpenAI of having “ingested” Silverman’s memoir to train their AI models.
Kicking off the first day are some bigger announcements from companies, including Nvidia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Honda.
Nvidia gets its game onToday, Nvidia gets into artificial intelligence in a big way with the unveiling of its GeForce RTX, including the GeForce RTX 40 Super series of desktop graphics cards.
Apple Vision Pro to go on sale Feb. 2And Apple, in a surprise announcement preempting CES, stole some of the show’s thunder by announcing the Vision Pro will be available in the U.S.
The consumer electronics giant confirmed that the Vision Pro will be available in the U.S. starting February 2.
This startup is bringing a ‘voice frequency absorber’ to CES 2024.
Uber confirmed that the flexible pricing service has expanded.
However, many InDrive drivers in the country have complained about passengers offering them too low prices for their rides.
Moreover, while Uber’s flex pricing model is available for various modes, the raid-hailing giant is not applying it to all modes in one city.
TechCrunch learned that the company was also looking to test the new service model soon in metro cities in India, including Delhi and Mumbai.
In addition to Uber Flex, the San Francisco-headquartered company is testing different services in India to cater to the local demand.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its close collaborator (and investor), Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content.
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accuse Meta and OpenAI of having “ingested” Silverman’s memoir to train their AI models.
As The Times’ complaint alludes to, generative AI models have a tendency to regurgitate training data, for example reproducing almost verbatim results from articles.
And that’s why most [lawsuits like this] will probably fail.”Some news outlets, rather than fight generative AI vendors in court, have chosen to ink licensing agreements with them.
In its complaint, The Times says that it attempted to reach a licensing arrangement with Microsoft and OpenAI in April but that talks weren’t ultimately fruitful.
One of the longest-running hyperloop startups is reportedly shutting its doors.
Hyperloop One, once backed by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, will cease operations on December 31 according to Bloomberg News.
And it comes after Hyperloop One raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars since its founding in 2014.
It took on the name Virgin Hyperloop One after Branson invested in 2017.
DP World will wind up with Hyperloop One’s intellectual property, Bloomberg reports, while the rest of its hard assets — including a test track outside Las Vegas and other machinery — will be sold off.
