Human Native AI is a London-based startup building a marketplace to broker such deals between the many companies building LLM projects and those willing to license data to them.
Human Native AI also helps rights holders prepare and price their content and monitors for any copyright infringements.
Human Native AI takes a cut of each deal and charges AI companies for its transaction and monitoring services.
Human Native AI announced a £2.8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, two British micro VCs, this week.
It is also a smart time for Human Native AI to launch.
BIRA also takes aim at Amazon’s “Buy Box,” claiming that Amazon manipulated which retailers were selected for the coveted placement.
BIRA and its legal team say that the claim is the biggest ever collective action to be launched by retailers in the country.
Making itself a must use for retailers, Amazon has then proceeded to cause damage and financial loss to retailers by misusing their confidential data that Amazon was entrusted to keep safe and by preferencing its own retail operations.
Retailers in the U.K. were entitled to be treated better and fairly by Amazon.
The U.K. is its largest international market, where it made $33.6 billion in revenues in 2023 (out of $575 billion in global revenues).
It’s been 20 years since Shira Yevin, the lead singer of punk band Shiragirl drove a pink RV into the Vans Warped Tour grounds, the now-defunct punk rock festival notorious for being male-dominated.
After Shiragirl Stage, Yevin went on a “lifelong crusade for carving out a space for women in music and other male-dominated industries,” she told TechCrunch.
This began with the launch of Gritty in Pink in 2020, a Live Nation-backed platform designed to empower women in the music industry.
Like freelance platforms Fiverr and Upwork, users can publish listings to highlight their services on InPink’s marketplace and connect with major brands.
Yevin said InPink is already working with one sports client, Angel City Football Club (the LA-based women’s soccer league), to help them hire talent for pre-shows.
The capital, which brings total funding raised by the startup to $6.2 million, will enable it to serve more brands.
For diverse brands in particular, there are a lot of economic hurdles that these groups face, which makes it even harder for them to access capital.
Its other offering is a labor marketplace for brands not in a position to hire full-time teams but require talent occasionally.
Its community of brands recommends the talent or manufacturer, who are listed on the marketplace after several stages of vetting.
Brands gain access to the labor marketplace, capital and other resources, upon signing up (at a cost) on the startup’s main product, the B2B marketplace and SaaS product.
Former web3 gaming founders raise $2.5M for their NFT marketplace to retain users even when there ‘isn’t money to be made’Even though NFT sales volume is still down 88% from 2022 all time-highs (and down 38% year-to-date), Pallet Exchange is building a new type of NFT marketplace focused on user retention.
“It’s cool if there’s a lot of financial innovations happening, but at the same time we saw there’s pain points from a user experience,” Li said.
It’s using social media tactics like in-app messaging that lets people interested in the same NFT collections engage with each other on its marketplace.
That’s when Seiyans, an Sei-based NFT collection fueled by meme culture, capitulated the new blockchain and marketplace into the talk of the crypto world.
Down the line, Pallet plans to look into working with big partners in the art marketplace and create a separate marketplace for those creators.
The European Union has opened its third formal investigation of a very large platform under the Digital Services Act (DSA), with China’s AliExpress earning itself the dubious honor of being the first online marketplace to face formal probe by the Commission.
Social media platforms X and TikTok are the two other very large online platforms (VLOPs) already under formal DSA investigation (since December and February, respectively).
They said it will also look into transparency and safety concerns related to influencers’ use of AliExpress.
It said it will also investigate how the influencer affiliate program is implemented to verify whether it complies with DSA transparency rules.
There’s no fixed timeline for the EU to conclude a DSA investigation.
In the latest development, three-year-old Hohm Energy, which connects homeowners and businesses with accredited solar installers, product suppliers, and embedded solar finance in South Africa, has raised $8 million in seed investment.
The funding, whose first tranche of $4.25 million came in Q4 2022, is the largest seed round for a tech startup in South Africa, according to Hohm Energy.
Hohm Energy says its solution was built as an alternative and sustainable energy source for over 7 million addressable households connected to South Africa’s national grid.
Hohm Energy would then generate a final engineering proposal and present it to its banking partners for financing approval.
“We are thrilled to announce our inaugural investment in Hohm Energy.
Instagram said today that it is expanding its marketplace tool to connect brands with creators for paid partnerships or ads in eight new countries.
Meta added that apart from making the platform available to the brands in these eight countries, it will also invite Chinese export brands to connect with creators outside of China.
Marketers can approach creators for a paid partnership or even a partnership ad, which allows advertisers to boost organic content as ads.
On the marketplace, Meta helps brands match with relevant creators for a particular marketing campaign through its machine learning algorithm.
Instagram’s rivals like Snap, YouTube, and TikTok all offer creator marketplace functionality.
“The largest portion of anyone’s income almost always goes toward housing costs,” founder and CEO Atticus LeBlanc told TechCrunch.
“And if you look around, you know that housing costs are skyrocketing, as much as 40% in some markets.
Most notably, active members have saved $2.6 million monthly and around $47.4 million in total savings generated.
“The life-changing results speak for themselves… These incredible results have led PadSplit residents to purchase their own vehicles, traditional apartments, launch their own companies and buy their own homes,” added LeBlanc.
PadSplit, meanwhile, reports that the average monthly cost to live in one of its units is $729.
An increasing consumer appetite for sustainable packaging is powering a new wave of startupsWith the packaging market being valued at as much as €1 trillion globally it’s become a ripe field for startups to engage this market with digital products that can bring efficiency to a highly traditional industry.
This is perhaps why Packmatic, a Berlin-based digital packaging marketplace has raised a €15 million Series A round led by EQT Ventures.
These packaging startups tend to be attacking the same kinds of problems for both businesses and consumers.
Packmatic says its marketplace network of over 300 packaging suppliers across Europe, is able to match large companies and FMCG brands with specialized packaging suppliers.
Key to this is accessing sustainable packaging.
