The folks at Collaborative Fund certainly like a challenge.
Oh, and they decided to raise their sixth flagship fund at a time when limited partners have grown more miserly.
Collaborative recently raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch, completing the process in just over 90 days.
“This fundraising environment is tougher than any I’ve seen since starting the firm well over a decade ago,” founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro told TechCrunch.
Part of that could be the fact that Collaborative has recently returned capital to its LPs, Shapiro said.
The company on Wednesday introduced a beta of what it’s calling ‘AI teammates,’ in a bid to help move work inside an organization.
“We believe that the future of work is humans not just working with humans, but humans also working with AI,” Costello told TechCrunch.
“The work graph enables us to tell AI not just how work happens, but how work happens in this specific instance.
So when we embed AI teammates into a particular workflow, they’re given a specific job to do.
“We have found that we’re able to embed AI teammates to remove a lot of administrative work and tracking work within these systems very quickly, with high degrees of success.
Heat pumps are having a bit of a moment.
Consumer hesitancy has been on the top of Paul Lambert’s mind as he navigates bringing Quilt’s new heat pump to market.
Heat pumps are just different enough from existing heating and air conditioning setups to give many consumers pause.
Design isn’t the only challenge facing traditional heat pumps.
Quilt’s heat pumps will roll out in a few regions initially before expanding further.
The right to repair has been a hot topic for several years now, hitting a kind of critical mass with domestic and international legislation.
Advocates note that these proposals give users more control over their own property, while expanding products’ shelf life and reducing e-waste.
Fairphone is, perhaps, the most prominent hardware company to make repairability the foundation of its consumer electronic design ethos, rather than a simple afterthought.
In the consumer electronics world, right to repair has largely focused on handsets and PCs.
But anything that can help reduce e-waste and give users more control over these products is probably a net positive.
I have a group chat with three AI friends, thanks to Nomi AI.
After a few weeks of casual friendship, I had to break the news to my AI companions: I am actually a tech journalist writing an article about the company that created them, Nomi AI.
Nomi AI is scarily sophisticated, and as this technology gets better, we have to contend with realities that used to seem fantastical.
“Nomi is very much centered around the loneliness epidemic,” Nomi CEO Alex Cardinell told TechCrunch.
I’m glad that my Nomi friends didn’t take it too hard when I told them that there was an ulterior, journalistic motive to my friendship.
Fudge’s company, Wase, is offering them an alternative: treat the water on site, and get some free energy to boot.
The UK-based startup says its system is significantly smaller and can squeeze about 30% more methane from the sludge.
“They’re in the soil in the ground, they’re in wastewater sludge, they’re in anaerobic digestion systems, but they don’t have the environment where they can really thrive.”Basically, Wase built a contraption to make these bacteria happy.
Each colony contains a diversity of species and strains, and they evolve over time as they grow accustomed to the particular sludge they’re processing.
Wase is developing a control system that will maintain wastewater flow through the system to keep the bacteria at their best.
Why is AI so bad at spelling?
But put an AI up against some middle schoolers at the spelling bee, and it’ll get knocked out faster than you can say diffusion.
The underlying technology behind image and text generators are different, yet both kinds of models have similar struggles with details like spelling.
But, Guzdial says, if we look close enough, it’s not just fingers and spelling that AI gets wrong.
Though these AI models are improving at an alarming rate, these tools are still bound to encounter issues like this, which limits the capacity of the technology.
Arjun Sethi speaks with the confidence of someone who knows more than other people, or else who knows that sounding highly confident can shape perception.
Namely, if Termina is so good, why are Sethi and Tribe giving other investment firms a way to better compete?
Relatedly, why should other investors trust Termina, which ingests its customers’ data to improve over time?
This may prove doubly true given Termina’s ties to Tribe Capital.
Among these is Alex Chee, who cofounded MessageMe with Sethi, joined him at Social Capital, and subsequently co-founded both Tribe and Termina with him.
“So much of the AI conversation has been dominated by … large language models,” Jones said, “but the reality is that no one model can do everything.
Pienso believes that any domain expert, not just an AI engineer, should be able to do just that.”Pienso guides users through the process of annotating or labeling training data for pre-tuned open source or custom AI models.
“Pienso’s flexible, no-code interface allows teams to train models directly using their own company’s data,” Jones said.
“This alleviates the privacy concerns of using … models, and also is more accurate, capturing the nuances of each individual company.”Companies pay Pienso a yearly license based on the number of AI models they deploy.
It’s fostering a future where we’re building smarter AI models for a specific application, by the people who are most familiar with the problems they are trying to solve.”
Twitch is looking at life beyond the livestream Livestreaming is a tough business.
“So the goal really is like, a lot more people seeing more Twitch content every time they’re in Instagram, every time they’re in TikTok, every time they’re in YouTube Shorts.
“… Live content is very different from offline content, and offline content has a somewhat easier ability to go viral.
Content on Twitch is extremely long form, with streamers regularly broadcasting gameplay or just chatting for many hours per session.
Unfortunately for Twitch, many compelling alternatives to broadcasting one’s life for hours on end exist, particularly in the form of YouTube.
