“Big tech companies have ‘mis-set’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch.
According to one survey, over half of businesses have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations.
Per market research firm Markets and Markets, revenue in the market for call center AI alone is set to climb from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by year-end 2027.
And it’s scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations at once.
Image Credits: Cognigy“Cognigy provides a platform to build, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” Heltewig said.
Cloud-based education software vendor PowerSchool is being taken private by investment firm Bain Capital in a $5.6 billion deal.
The announcement comes amid a swathe of take-private deals led by private equity firms seeking a bargain on under-performing enterprise software firms.
Founded in 1997, PowerSchool is a web-based platform that helps educational institutions manage areas of their operations such as enrollment, grades, attendance, and communication with parents and students.
The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 2021, after previously been acquired by private equity firms Onex and Vista.
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Google is launching its upgraded Find My Device network in the U.S. and Canada, the company announced on Monday.
Find My Device’s crowdsourced network of over a billion Android devices can help users find their misplaced Android devices and everyday items.
The Find My Device Network, which is similar to Apple’s Find My network, works with devices running Android 9+.
The new Find My Device network also integrates with Nest smart home gadgets and shows a lost device’s proximity to home Nest devices.
“Multi-layered protections built into the Find My Device network help keep you safe and your personal information private, while keeping you in control of the devices connected to the Find My Device network.
Model N, a platform used by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and AMD to automate decisions related to pricing, incentives, and compliance, is going private in a $1.25 billion deal.
Vista Equity Partners is doling out $30 per share in the all-cash transaction, representing a 12% premium on Friday’s closing price, and 16% on its 30-day average.
Founded in 1999, Model N’s software integrates with various data sources and internal systems to help companies analyze trends, pricing efficacy, market demand, and more.
The platform is typically used in industries such as pharmaceuticals and life sciences, where there may be complex pricing structures, and where regulatory or market changes can impact business.
However, its valuation has generally hovered below the $1 billion market for the past six months, sparking Vista Equity Partners into action today.
Avendus, India’s leading investment bank for venture deals, is looking to raise about $300 million for its private equity unit, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
With its third private equity fund, Avendus plans to write larger checks more frequently, one of the sources said.
The firm raised its second fund, amounting to around $185 million, in 2021.
Avendus employs over 150 bankers and was the top financial advisor in India last year.
In the past decade, similar to financial advisors in other regions, Avendus has diversified its offerings, venturing into wealth management, credit financing, and private equity.
New U.S. ‘green bank’ aims to steer over $160B in capital into climate techFor years, banks have been financing large renewable power projects, from utility-scale solar farms to horizon-spanning wind farms.
But the demand is there, which is why advocates have been clamoring for the federal government to support a so-called green bank, which will underwrite these sorts of projects.
That green bank is now a reality.
Green bank loans have a pretty good track record, too.
The Connecticut Green Bank, for example, has a delinquency rate that’s on par with other commercial lenders across both residential and commercial portfolios.
Meta is denying that it gave Netflix access to users’ private messages.
Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, reposted the original X post on Tuesday with a statement disputing that Netflix had been given access to users’ private messages.
However, The New York Times had previously reported in 2018 that Netflix and Spotify could read users’ private messages, according to documents it had obtained.
“No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission.
Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct,” the blog post stated.
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.
With the aim of identifying criminal suspects, U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies.
So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to turn over information from their vast stores of user data.
Reverse searches effectively cast a digital dragnet over a tech company’s store of user data to catch the information that police are looking for.
Microsoft, Snap, Uber and Yahoo (which owns TechCrunch) have all received reverse orders for user data.
Some companies choose not to store user data and others scramble the data so it can’t be accessed by anyone other than the user.
