serve

Innovative Startup Serve Robotics, Supported by Uber and Nvidia, Makes $40M Debut on Public Markets

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Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth. While Serve’s debut in the public markets comes from a reverse merger and not a SPAC, the two alternate paths to IPO are not too dissimilar. However, Serve Robotics said it’s expecting enormous growth fueled by money generated by going public. “I never thought that I would start a robotics company and then be in the ads business,” said a tired, but excited, Kashani in a phone interview minutes before the bell rang. Upon the closing of the merger, Uber held a 16.6% stake and Nvidia an 14.3% stake in Serve, according to regulatory filings.

Robots Provide ‘Trash’ Answers for Voting and Elections Questions

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A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. Their concern was that AI models will, as their proprietors have urged and sometimes forced, replace ordinary searches and references for common questions. They submitted these questions via API to five well-known models: Claude, Gemini, GPT-4, Llama 2 and Mixtral. The AI model responses ranged from 1,110 characters (Claude) to 2,015 characters, (Mixtral), and all of the AI models provided lengthy responses detailing between four and six steps to register to vote. GPT-4 came out best, with only approximately one in five of its answers having a problem, pulling ahead by punting on “where do I vote” questions.

Begin Your Journey to Launching a Startup with OpenAI

Sam Altman Openai
This is a popular topic on TechCrunch+, where columnists spend considerable time discussing how startups can take advantage of OpenAI. The following subscriber-only articles should serve as a foundation for founders building an AI startup on or off OpenAI’s platform. Chris Ackerson, formerly on the IBM Watson team and now VP of Product at AlphaSense, explains the best ways for a startup to develop a generative AI copilot. Read more here…Startups must add AI value beyond ChatGPT integrationThe AI hype train is going full swing. From internal efficiency and productivity to external products and services, companies are racing to implement generative AI technologies across every sector of the economy.

New Startup Raises Seed Funding for ‘SlackPlus’ Solution, Combining Messaging, Location Services, and Payment Capabilities for Humanitarian and Military Needs

Labrys Desktop
Labrys is perhaps best described as Slack-meets-location-meets-payments for both military and humanitarian scenarios. From 2015 onwards, when I founded the Techfugees non-profit, we found that both refugees and humanitarian workers almost always used WhatsApp to coordinate a response. The Labrys platform, Axiom C2 and Axiom Communicator, allows for KYC/E verification, encrypted communications, task management, where individual users can be geo-located. Meanwhile, Premise Data, which has raised $146 million, has a software platform for humanitarian organizations, and provides analytics about assets on the ground. Plus, ‘dual use’ products that coordinate either civilian or military teams, is a growing market.