The round also includes existing investors, Notable Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and PLUS Capital.
“To have over 2 million workers on Homebase, which is over 2% of the workforce, is impressive for a private company,” Richards said.
In 2021, sources told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden that the company’s valuation was between $500 million and $600 million.
“We are using technology to give workers superpowers and in fact, make the work more human, not less,” Waldmann said.
Small businesses have always provided that, and this, to me, is why our mission is so important to make these jobs even better.”
And they’re calling their company… The Mobile-First Company.
Too many companies that offer B2B tools treat mobile apps as companion apps and second-class citizens.
Small companies don’t need a complicated enterprise software solution.
While Siel Brunet is more experienced with the needs of large companies, he has also seen how B2B apps don’t work well with small businesses.
Many small companies simply rely on consumer apps to fill their needs.
Even when some or all of those are addressed, there remains the question of what happens when a system makes an inevitable mistake.
We can’t, however, expect consumers to learn to program or hire someone who can help any time an issue arrives.
Thankfully, this is a great use case for LLMs (large language models) in the robotics space, as exemplified by new research from MIT.
“LLMs have a way to tell you how to do each step of a task, in natural language.
It’s a simple, repeatable task for humans, but for robots, it’s a combination of various small tasks.
Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war?
Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience with some small updates to the poking feature.
Plus, Facebook added the ability to poke a friend when you search for them on the social network.
Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking in the past month.
Facebook never defined what the idea behind poking was, and left it up to users’ interpretation, with some choosing to use it a way to flirt.
The House voted on Wednesday in favor of a bill to require TikTok to sever its connection with parent company ByteDance or face a ban, moving the legislation forward with surprising speed.
President Joe Biden has already said that he would support the legislation, but TikTok faces an uncertain fate as the bill heads to the Senate.
“Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump said.
The bill’s quick progress out of committee last week to a full House vote appears to have caught TikTok by surprise.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew also headed to Capitol Hill to drum up opposition to the bill before Wednesday’s vote.
When electric-vehicle startup Telo Trucks announced its pint-sized pickup, people predictably went nuts.
Fleet customers went nuts, too.
“There’s this unspoken thing where fleet companies that do work in cities can no longer buy small trucks,” Jason Marks, Telo Truck’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
“We will still want to address the early users, and we want to intermingle that with delivering to bigger fleet customers at the same time.”With that opportunity comes more funding.
Rivian is notably similar in that it’s chasing both consumers and fleet customers, though its production ramp is radically different.
For a country with some very sunny regions, Mexico has strikingly little solar power.
In Mexico, the solar market is still nascent, which means customers are not very familiar with the technology and the market remains highly fragmented.
Then they went to South Korea to revamp CloudKitchens’ operations there before moving to Mexico for another CloudKitchens project.
Sales cycles in solar tend to be long in Mexico, Dellepaine said.
To find customers, Niko is courting large corporations to offer their service as an employee benefit, and banks that might want to improve the environmental sustainability of their mortgage portfolios.
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff.
Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees.
San Francisco-based Inscribe.ai confirmed the headcount reduction to TechCrunch, noting that the AI advances in the financial services industry necessitated a pivot to a new product and direction for the company.
“2023 was a year of change for our customers and Inscribe,” explained Inscribe CEO and co-founder, Ronan Burke.
At the time, the company forecast it would double its then 50-person workforce over the coming 12 to 18 months.
When you think about commerce platforms, chances are the first names that come to mind are big names like Adobe Commerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
That’s why a French startup called Catalog wants to build a software-as-a-service product that seamlessly manages B2B sales across several sales channels.
But these tools don’t necessarily work well for B2B companies.
This way, the company hopes it can handle the majority of B2B orders for companies that have decided to use Catalog.
By focusing on small and medium businesses, Catalog could start offering a wide range of services that are specifically tailored for these small manufacturing and commerce companies.
But it’s a fragmented market with different streaming apps, channels and live sports leagues.
But even if you remove the big names, there are quite a few different ad-supported streaming services, such as FAST (free advertising-supported streaming television) services like Pluto, big OTT platforms like Fubo, and of course broadcasters themselves like Paramount, Warner Bros., CNN, etc.
We have Benjamin Antier on the board — he’s the founder of Publica, the biggest ad server for streaming apps.
Using Vibe’s ad platform is pretty straightforward.
After picking the streaming apps and channels where you want to show your ads, you can select a geographical area and an audience based on various interests.
