Human Native AI is a London-based startup building a marketplace to broker such deals between the many companies building LLM projects and those willing to license data to them.
Human Native AI also helps rights holders prepare and price their content and monitors for any copyright infringements.
Human Native AI takes a cut of each deal and charges AI companies for its transaction and monitoring services.
Human Native AI announced a £2.8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, two British micro VCs, this week.
It is also a smart time for Human Native AI to launch.
Brendan Smith didn’t intend to be in the critical minerals business.
But Smith and Grossman’s company, SiTration, has a different proposal: use its equipment to treat the wastewater and harvest more minerals in the process.
To turn the wafers into filters, Smith and Grossman tweaked an existing chemical treatment to etch minute pores in them.
For a larger mining site, the company would use about as much silicon as a medium-size solar farm, Smith said.
Although SiTration is starting with mining waste, including a pilot project with Rio Tinto, it’s also pitching its filtration systems to battery recyclers and metal refiners.
It’s against this backdrop that Evolution Equity Partners, a growth capital investment firm based in NYC, on Tuesday launched a $1.1 billion cybersecurity and AI fund, the third such fund in Evolution’s history.
The fund, called Evolution Technology Fund III, was oversubscribed, with participation from existing and new endowments, sovereign investors, insurance companies, foundations, fund of funds, family offices and angels.
“The Evolution Technology Fund III has already backed fifteen leading cybersecurity companies, initiating its investment period over 12 months ago,” Seewald said.
“We believe that provides private markets investors with diversified exposure to cybersecurity opportunities.”ESG will be another factor, according to Seewald.
Evolution’s 30-person teams manages around $2 billion in assets and has backed 60 companies to date; its previous fund was $400 million.
Derek Smith, the founder of Plug In South LA, grew up in southern Los Angeles and saw first-hand the frustration that stems from lack of economic development.
And it’s why Smith’s ultimate goal for Plug In South LA is to smooth the way for Black and brown entrepreneurs looking to build tech startups and need help and guidance.
“We really want to support those founders and entrepreneurs who can build businesses that can scale broadly,” Smith told TechCrunch.
Smith sees a bevy of underutilized talent in areas like South LA.
Vaughn Blake, a partner at Blue Bear Ventures, says he met Smith right after he launched Plug In South LA and was asked to participate on a panel during one of the early demo days.
It also includes a commitment to let customers change cloud providers, or services within the cloud, if they choose to.
It also details a focus on building cybersecurity around AI services; attention to building data centers and other infrastructure in an environmentally-sound way; and education investments.
Brad Smith, the president and vice chair of Microsoft, announced the framework today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The announcement comes at the same time that Microsoft is coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny for its $13 billion investment in OpenAI, which currently gives it a 49% stake in the startup that is leading the charge for generative AI services globally.
In January, the European competition watchdog said that it was assessing whether the investment falls under antitrust rules.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.
According to reports on Mastodon, this fully-automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers.
