Silence wants to shake things up when it comes to climate tech investment.
This new angel-style VC firm has already raised $35 million and plans to make dozens of small investments in climate startups to help them apply the tech startup playbook.
He also founded Merlin, an hourly jobs marketplace in the U.S.With Silence, Borja wants to apply his experience to climate investment.
A silent partnerSince the first close of the fund in June 2022, Silence has already invested in 22 different companies.
So we told them ‘we’ll be your lead,’” Borja said.
AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win.
From this data — and the annotations provided by data labelers — the model learns to associate certain visual representations of actions, objects, and interactions.
AI agents trained on multiple games performed better on games they hadn’t been exposed to.
But of course many games involve specific and unique mechanics or terms that will stymie the best-prepared AI.
And simple improvised actions or interactions are also being simulated and tracked by AI in some really interesting research into agents.
Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents.
Backed by large language models (LLMs), these agents can then stand in for customer service agents in call centers and other customer-facing situations.
Deepgram’s Aura combines human-like voice models that render extremely fast (typically in well under half a second) and, as Stephenson noted repeatedly, does so at a low price.
“Everybody now is like: ‘hey, we need real-time voice AI bots that can perceive what is being said and that can understand and generate a response — and then they can speak back,'” he said.
The Aura model, just like all of the company’s other models, were trained in-house.
Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easier for business users to build custom AI agents.
“When I saw ChatGPT and other things, for me, it was just: how is this applicable in the enterprise?
Then he went to LinkedIn, where he headed up the AI trust team before leaving in late 2022 to join Wagh in founding Brevian as its CTO.
“Our vision was to enable business users in the enterprise to be able to use AI to simplify their daily tasks.
2024 is the year of AI apps — and we just felt like they were so far ahead,” he told me.
What does crypto smell like?
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Binance launched a splashy campaign to urge women to get into crypto through the power of… fragrance.
But even as more women enter the industry, the crypto sphere has struggled shake the stench of a men’s locker room.
Boston Consulting Group found that only 7% of web3 founders are women, and among top crypto startups, 27% of employees are women.
But the messaging gets confused such that the idea of crypto perfume can come across as patronizing moreso than funny.
Agility Robotics’ new CEO is ‘focused on the here and now’ The Digit-maker’s current and former CEOs discuss Amazon, Generative AI and last-mile deliveryThere was nothing else like Digit on the ProMat floor last year.
This week, Agility named Microsoft veteran Peggy Johnson its second-ever CEO.
They’re just focused on a handful of use cases that Digit can provide value for.”Perhaps the biggest difference between Agility and the growing army of humanoid robotics startups is its sizable head start.
The firm was founded in 2015 as a spinoff of Hurst’s work on legged robotics at Oregon State University.
While Agility isn’t explicitly looking to raise at the moment, the company says the possibility is always on the table.
However, harvesting stem cells is a controversial process, since a major method involves harvesting during pregnancy.
To date, most stem cells are harvested from adult stem cells or post-termination foetal tissue.
Cellcolabs will specialize in Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which are scarce and expensive.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Bernow said, “The promise of stem cells or what it holds, is really mind boggling.
“We’ve built this facility, which we believe is one of the world’s largest facilities, solely dedicated for production of this kind of stem cell.
Australian remote sensing startup Esper wants to capture hyperspectral imagery from space at a fraction of the price of its competitors.
Armed with just $1 million in pre-seed funding and assistance from the Australian government in their first mission, Esper is aiming to beat out its better-capitalized peers with lower-cost tech.
That’s what really separates us from all the other spectrometers and hyperspectral hardware that’s being put up there,” Esper CEO and co-founder Shoaib Iqbal said.
There’s a lot of software that really comes into play to make sure it works that way.
Esper is planning on launching a second demonstrator satellite with identical hardware later this spring with India’s ISRO.
Prior to this, she worked in biotech, using AI to find medical treatments for rare diseases.
She also co-founded a data science consultancy and is a founding trustee of DataKind UK, which helps British charities with data science support.
We ask this question a lot at the Ada Lovelace Institute, which aims to make data AI work for people and society.
How can investors better push for responsible AI?
By asking questions about their investments and their possible futures – for this AI system, what does it look like to work brilliantly and be responsible?
“More big partners kept coming and closing with us, pushing to get on our roadmap,” Betesh told TechCrunch.
Coverdash offers small businesses, e-commerce merchants and freelancers the ability to buy business insurance in areas like business owner’s policies, cyber and worker’s compensation.
Businesses then answer a few questions, select a policy and get coverage in minutes.
That comes with some requirements, like having liability insurance for board directors and company officers and other management, Betesh explained.
“It all kind of fell into place really quickly, and in over two weeks, we had offers from multiple firms.
