Numbers Station, a startup that is using large language models (LLMs) to power its data analytics platform, is launching its first cloud-based product today: the aptly named Numbers Station Cloud, which is now in early access.
With this service, virtually any user in an enterprise can analyze their internal data using Numbers Station’s chat interface.
As Numbers Station co-founder and CEO Chris Aberger told me, he’s somewhat tired of talking about how the service allows users to “chat with their data,” because there is so much noise around that.
Numbers Stations’ research shows that its approach results in significantly improved precision compared to more traditional text-to-SQL pipelines.
“Numbers Station is at the cutting edge of enterprise AI for structured data,” said Sharad Rastogi, the CEO of Work Dynamics Technology from Jones Lang LaSalle.
Startups typically operate under tight budget constraints, and spending significant time and money on pitch deck design may not be the best use of limited resources.
Your mileage may vary, but your pitch deck does need to be machine-readable.
For reference, my AI-powered pitch deck tool gave this deck a 16.9% chance at raising funding.
“The stellar early customer traction, with some marquee logos, certainly helped!”The full pitch deckIf you want your own pitch deck teardown featured on TechCrunch, here’s more information.
Also, check out all our Pitch Deck Teardowns all collected in one handy place for you!
That’s where customer success software comes into play.
Two customer success companies, Totango and Catalyst, on Wednesday announced they are merging in an effort to take on the market leader, Gainsight.
“Everyone feels very excited about the potential of these two companies,” Catalyst CEO and co-founder Edward Chiu told TechCrunch.
“The deep customer success expertise and enterprise capabilities of Totango combined with the intuitive design and forward-thinking vision of Catalyst create a powerhouse to redefine customer success and how businesses maximize customer lifetime value.”Jessica Lin, co-founder and general partner at Work-Bench, whose firm invested in Catalyst early on, sees a similar opportunity.
“Our goal is for this combined entity to own the customer success market and have an even bigger outcome than Gainsight (which exited in late 2020 for $1.1 billion).
More specifically, it’s a foldable concept device from Lenovo/Motorola showcased on the floor at this year’s MWC.
The company walked us through a demo of a device that’s another terrific example of its ability to get weird with design.
ItHighlights that there’s absolutely zero guarantee the device will ever become a product and Points to why the company is being a bit stingy with demos.
Lenovo says rollable has multiple batteries – though it won’t disclose how many.
Compared to the competition, the Chinese company is fearless when it comes to getting weird with product design – something I’m fully in favor of.
This “deepened” partnership will focus on commercial self-driving Ram delivery vans, a target that was first announced in 2020 and promptly faded from public view.
Discussions on this “improved” deal have focused, in part, on a crux around driverless delivery: how does the package get from the vehicle to the customer?
Waymo, which is owned by Google parent-company Alphabet, currently doesn’t operate a commercial delivery service using its self-driving vehicles.
That deal did include a future plan to include delivery via Uber Eats, but as of today, it has not launched, according to a Waymo spokesperson.
Under the deal, Fiat Chrysler — now known as Stellantis — would handle the manufacturing and provide Waymo with minivans that built in redundancies designed for autonomous driving.
First-generation products from new startups are notoriously so, regardless of how much money and excitement you’ve managed to drum up.
Given all that, it’s likely few are too surprised that Humane’s upcoming Ai Pin has been pushed back a bit, from March to “mid-April,” per a new video from the Bay Area startup’s Head of Media, Sam Sheffer.
The Ai Pin was finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco back in early November, where we were able to spend a little controlled hands-on time with the wearable.
Humane is positioning its product as the next step for a space that’s been stuck on the smartphone form factor for more than a decade.
The Ai Pin is currently available for preorder at $699.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, in which we talk through the week’s leading startup and venture capital news.
This is a short week, but there’s still a lot to talk about:We’ll be back Friday morning!
Rashida Richardson, senior counsel, AI at MastercardBriefly, how did you get your start in AI?
On the second point, law and policy regarding AI development and use is evolving.
How can investors better push for responsible AI?
Investors can do a better job at defining or at least clarifying what constitutes responsible AI development or use, and taking action when AI actor’s practices do not align.
Currently, “responsible” or “trustworthy” AI are effectively marketing terms because there are no clear standards to evaluate AI actor practices.
Cover slide Funding timeline slide Problem slide Solution slide Product slide Strategy slide Product portfolio slide Market size slide How it works slide U.S. market opportunity slide Global market opportunity slide Vision slide Team slide (?)
But it’s interesting to see Doola take a different tack to arrive at a potential market size of $4.5 billion per year.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a vast amount of information missing from this pitch deck.
So much, in fact, that it is essentially useless as a traditional pitch deck.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Doola could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
According to Stanford’s 2021 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, the number of new AI Ph.D. graduates in North America entering the AI industry post-graduation grew from 44.4% in 2010 to around 48% in 2019.
By contrast, the share of new AI Ph.D.s entering academia dropped by 44% from 42.1% in 2010 to 23.7% in 2019.
Private industry’s willingness to pay top dollar for AI talent is likely a contributing factor.
While AI graduates are no doubt welcoming the trend — who wouldn’t kill for a starting salary that high?
Between 2004 and 2019, Carnegie Mellon alone saw 16 AI faculty members depart, and the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Washington lost roughly a dozen each, the study found.
