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This generative AI startup is strapping cameras to people’s backs

A startup is training an AI system that it claims will enable creators to generate cinematic worlds, with complete control over the scenery, characters, lighting, and motion. How? By having humans strap cameras to their backs and hike around the world. Odyssey, founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke (Cameron was previously the […]

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Leland lands $12 million to grow its coaching platform

Coaching platform Leland has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from GSV ventures to grow its platform geared toward matching coaches and aspirants to fulfill goals ranging from getting into a university to passing an entrance exam and excelling at product management. The company aims to build better […]

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After spending three years working on SMS verification at Zenly, Prelude founders want to fix SMS onboarding

Prelude is a relatively new French startup that focuses on SMS verification; it’s announcing new funding from Singular and Seedcamp on Wednesday. The two founders met when they were working for Zenly, a popular location-sharing app with tens of millions of users that was acquired by Snap (and later shut down). While you might not […]

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LocalStack raises $25M to help developers emulate and test cloud apps locally

Knowing how your cloud application will behave in production usually requires significant development and testing in the environment in which it will be deployed, be that AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or wherever. But this can be a resource-intensive endeavor, particularly with issues relating to latency (the time it takes to constantly send data) and the […]

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Generative AI startup Writer raises $200M at a $1.9B valuation

Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-focused generative AI platform. The Series C round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures and Workday Ventures. Writer CEO May Habib says the new cash, […]

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General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures back data mapping startup Lume

Data integration is a necessary part of many workflows from onboarding customer data to exercising payroll, but for many data sets the process is long and manual. Data is siloed into databases and SaaS applications that each keep the information in different formats, which makes it difficult to move information from one database to another. […]

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How two brothers went from growing up on a sailboat to making underwater military vehicles 

Vatn Systems founders Nelson and Freddie Mills spent their childhood cruising over turquoise waters, doing their homework on a sailboat off the coast of Caribbean islands. While their surroundings were idyllic, their vessel of choice was decidedly not. “The first boat I remember, I think our parents bought it for like five, ten grand,” Freddie […]

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PointFive snaps up $20M for breakthrough tech to track usage across multiple clouds

Enterprise spending on cloud services continues to go up, up, up — to the tune of $675 billion this year — thanks to organizations’ firm embrace of software-as-a-service, the popularity of distributed working, and the arrival of compute-intensive tech like AI. A startup called PointFive that believes it has found a better way to get […]

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Conduktor looks to gatekeep ‘bad data’ out of company’s apps

It was 2020, and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux and Stéphane Maarek were beyond frustrated with Apache Kafka. The tool for handling real-time data streams simply couldn’t keep up with the trio’s engineering needs — particularly during the pandemic, when companies were rushing to embrace cloud services. “Many companies were finding it difficult to scale their […]

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Germany’s Klim raises $22M to take its regenerative farming platform international

Global food production generates at least a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than 80% of which comes from agriculture. But addressing that impact is easier said than done since there are simply so many moving parts to address. “Regenerative” farming is often touted as one way to make progress towards several sustainability goals, as it offers […]

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Agicap secures $48 million for its cash flow management platform

On average, Agicap’s clients manage 15 different bank accounts each. So the chief financial officers (CFOs) working for these companies sometimes struggle to make sure that there will be enough money in the right bank account to pay employees and suppliers across different subsidiaries, countries and currencies. That’s also why they turn to Agicap to […]

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From self-driving cars to AI that writes enterprise software: Cogna founder raises $15M

A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own. Cogna — as the U.K.-based startup is called — is led by Ben Peters, the technical co-founder of FiveAI, a […]

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Brazilian fintech Tako emerges from stealth with sizable seed round led by a16z and Ribbit Capital

Running payroll is hard in any country, but perhaps especially so in Brazil thanks to consistently changing laws and extremely influential unions that make it significantly harder to get it right. Fernando Gadotti struggled with this as the co-founder of DogHero, LatAm’s version of Rover. When Gadotti left the company in 2022, after selling it […]

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Open source projects draw equity-free funding from corporates, startups, and even VCs

A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms. Last year, Bloomberg launched its FOSS (free and open source software) fund, committing up to $90,000 per year to various projects. And in October, Indian financial services company Zerodha launched […]

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