A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy.
“Our goal is to build a universal AI employee,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview.
Accel, Section 32 and Prosus Ventures are co-leading, and Wipro Ventures, Venture Highway, AME Cloud Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Maum Group and Firebolt Ventures also participating.
He himself has some 40 patents to his name in areas like machine learning enterprise software and ad tech.
Most recently, he was VP of engineering at Okta where he oversaw data, machine learning and devices; and prior to that he was also at Google, where he was engineering lead for data and machine learning where he focused on privacy and safety.
Wet wipes are great for your tush, but awful for the environment.
For a few years, the startup Fohm had a solution: a specially formulated soap that can be dispensed onto toilet paper, turning them into wet wipes that can be disposed of safely in the toilet.
With a mission to provide an eco-friendly alternative to traditional wet wipes, Fohm, now rebranded as Saintly, has been bringing up the rear (ahem), in an effort to address the environmental and infrastructural issues caused by microplastic-based wet wipes.
By introducing a foam-based cleansing solution, Fohm offered a novel approach to personal hygiene that was both skin and eco-friendly.
The Saintly Dispenser Kit is $99 on subscription or $109 as a one-time purchase.
That’s why I am glad to announce that NFX’s James Currier is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 in Boston to discuss how to build MVPs into today’s startup world.
Currier is also a regular at our Early Stage event, thanks to his experience on both sides of the fundraising table.
If you want to get a head start on the get-together, TechCrunch has covered MVPs extensively over the years.
As with all sessions at Early Stage, Currier will present and then answer audience questions.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
Mill, a food waste startup, is releasing an entirely new design of its bin that grinds and dries scraps, turning it into compost-like grounds that can feed plants and chickens alike.
Now, the heating elements surround the entire bin and the fan blows hot air through the food waste as it’s being processed.
That program continues nationwide, and a standards body recently certified Mill’s feed product, which should help the startup speed adoption among interested farmers.
“We’ve actually closed the loop in Phoenix,” Rogers said.
Mill may have already diverted 1 million pounds of food waste from landfills (and the associated greenhouse gasses), but it’s not enough for him.
A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI can be used to help people process news and information.
The startup was founded last year by former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, who worked on products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and conversations, and who spearheaded the experimental app, twttr.
She had been at Twitter from 2015 through 2021, growing her position from software engineering to that of a senior director of product management.
The premise behind Particle, as Beykpour explained last month, is to make it easier to keep up with news using AI.
We’re hoping to talk in more detail about how Particle vets its sources closer to a public launch.
Paris-based cybersecurity startup Filigran is capitalizing on the success of OpenCTI to build a suite of open-source threat management products.
The company has already found some early traction with OpenCTI, its open-source threat intelligence platform.
It’s a threat intelligence platform that lets you gather threat data from multiple sources in a single interface.
OpenBAS can be used as a standalone product, but it works better if you’re already using OpenCTI as it can use the threat intelligence data in OpenCTI.
There will be another two products in Filigran’s eXtended Threat Management (XTM) product suite that focus on data-driven risk analysis and crisis management.
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.
A lot has changed at HTC in the decade since a small team broke off to form its mixed reality division.
These days, the mixed reality business comprises the “vast majority” of HTC’s global business, says Dan O’Brien.
Ultimately, however, the consumer business has shrunk dramatically relative to its enterprise offerings.
In recent years, Vive has expanded from a VR focus to mixed reality, utilizing passthrough technology similar to the kind found on the Vision Pro.
We’re not there yet, but we definitely see that helping to develop the virtual reality space.
That’s where Codified, an early stage startup that was nurtured last year inside venture capital firm Madrona Ventures, comes into the picture.
The company was built from the ground up from a data veteran with an eye toward solving the data compliance problem, and today it announced a $4 million seed round.
Company founder and CEO Yatharth Gupta sees that data is at the center of today’s technology, yet companies struggle to control access to it.
Both jobs, he says, were heavily involved in data and he saw the kinds of problems he’s trying to solve with Codified.
Investors in today’s round include Vine Ventures, Soma Capital and Madrona Venture Labs where Codified incubated last year.
At the time, it looked like it would be more than $50 million; in the end it ended up a little lower.
This latest round brings the total raised by the company, which was founded about four years ago, to $64 million.
Photoroom plans to use the funding to hire more people and to continue investing in its R&D and infrastructure.
Other features it offers includes AI-generated backgrounds, scene expansions, AI-generated images, and a plethora of image editing tools.
“Photoroom’s generative AI capabilities are unparalleled, and we have no doubt that they will continue to lead the way in this rapidly evolving landscape.”
