A year after securing $24.5 million in Series A capital, ingredient company Elo Life Systems is back with a $20.5 million Series A extension from existing investors.
This new cash infusion gives Elo Life $45 million in venture-backed capital to date.
North Carolina-based Elo Life was founded in 2021 and is focused on a number of technologies from developing plant-based sweeteners to crop protection.
Its first product, launching in 2026, will be a natural, monk fruit-derived sweetener that Elo Life touts is 300 times sweeter than sugar without the calories.
Simply put, it uses plants as “biofactories” to produce the monk fruit sweetener in other easier-to grow-crops, like watermelons and sugar beets.
Google announced today that Gemini, its family of multimodal large language models, now powers the conversational experience within the Google Ads platform.
With this new update, it will be easier for advertisers to quickly build and scale Search ad campaigns.
The conversational experience is designed to help build Search campaigns through a chat-based tool.
The tool uses your website URL to create Search campaigns by generating relevant ad content, including assets and keywords.
“We observed that it helps them build higher quality Search campaigns with less effort.”The new tool will join Google’s other AI-powered tools for advertisers.
We haven’t heard much from the edtech sector ever since the pandemic forced students out of the classrooms and in front of their computers.
But, as Anna Heim writes in the intro of our most recent survey of edtech investors, “we found that with AI in the picture, edtech startups have been as quietly busy as a subterranean network of moles in fall.”Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members.
Just tacking AI onto a product isn’t enough, and investors are hoping that the technology will lead to more innovation in the space.
Check out Anna’s story on the future of edtech in emerging markets as well as the opportunities that AI can bring.
“There are ways companies can better understand their customers’ pain points to develop the right products that solve the right problems at the right time.”Get the TechCrunch+ Roundup newsletter in your inbox!
This week, we’re taking a look at a pitch deck from Rypplzz (pronounced “ripples”), a spatial technology startup that recently raised $3 million.
As a rule, a pitch deck should never exceed 20MB because many email servers don’t like big attachments.
While this slide explains what the product is and its capabilities, it falls short of being a comprehensive product slide.
Enhancing a product slide with these details can elevate the pitch and make it more compelling.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Rypplzz could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
Anyone mad enough to launch a new product already knows the stats surrounding product failure.
There are ways companies can better understand their customers’ pain points to develop the right products that solve the right problems at the right time.
Make sure you’re solving the right problemThere are ways companies can better understand their customers’ pain points to develop the right products that solve the right problems at the right time.
Regarding product design and development, solving the right problem might seem obvious.
You build a product or solution to solve that problem, but it doesn’t work out as planned.
Now it’s building out its suite of AI products with the launch of its AI assistant CoPilot.
PatSnap CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Tiong tells TechCrunch that PatSnap exists to remove friction in the innovation process for its customers, both within IP and R&D teams, and between them.
IP teams can use PatSnap’s AI tools to analyze their markets and protect inventions at scale, says Tiong.
What CoPilot does is build further onto PatSnap’s AI products.
It enables IP and R&D teams to find what they need more quickly within patents, non-patent literature and technical news.
The upgrade, dubbed Reencle Gravity, is due out by around September of this year.
If the upcoming composter works as advertised, it’ll help households reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, while generating nutrient-rich fertilizer for gardens.
However, the Gravity composter may also digest a good chunk of your income, thanks to its expected $649 price tag.
Still, many of these tools demand outdoor space, time and some elbow grease in order to turn food waste into fertilizer.
Reencle also says the Gravity composter can handle up to 3.3 pounds of food waste per day, or 50% more than the Prime model.
Yet another series of layoffs has hit Google, this time at its video-sharing platform, YouTube.
The company will eliminate 100 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
Last week, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers across several divisions, including engineering, services and voice-activated product Google Assistant.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesperson said in a provided statement.
“We’re continuing to support any impacted employees as they look for new roles here at Google and beyond,” the spokesperson added.
Look at your startup’s CAC to decide if you should launch another productUntil recently, it was widely accepted that startups, constrained by limited resources, should primarily concentrate on a single product.
Investing in customer acquisition is justified when the net present value of the profits from the acquisition exceeds the customer’s customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Customer acquisition and product development stand out as a startup’s most important investments.
Customer acquisition and product development stand out as a startup’s most important investments.
With the rise in CAC, the relative value of customer acquisition remains the same compared to new product development.
But in this world of exploding innovation in the AI industry, a great name paired with a great product will make your technology rise above.
Should you use “AI” in your product or company name?
In this world of exploding innovation in the AI industry, a great name paired with a great product will make your technology rise above.
The acronym AI is used in many of the new names in the market, from established frontrunner OpenAI to Elon Musk’s newly launched xAI.
Incorporating “AI” into your technology or company name can be done in a few different ways.
