Kkshingh

Capillary Technologies , an Indian SaaS startup that offers solutions for loyalty management and customer engagement, has raised $45 million in a funding round, as it plots plans to expand into global markets and widen its reach through mergers and acquisitions. The funding arrives at a crucial time amidst the prevailing market slowdown, where startups, particularly those at the late stage, are facing a capital crunch. Capillary’s Series D funding round was led by Avataar Ventures and its LPs Pantheon, 57Stars and Unigestion. It also saw participation from Filter Capital and Innoven Capital. The round comprises $40 million in equity and about $5–$7 million in debt. With the latest capital injection, the startup has raised nearly $150 million in capital to date. Founded in 2012, Capillary Technologies initially focused on the retail vertical in India and Southeast Asia. In recent years, it has broadened its offerings and launched in more markets including the Middle East and South Af

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot of electricity to boot. Lightmatter’s chips basically use optical flow to solve computational processes like matrix vector products. This math is at the heart of a lot of AI work and currently performed by GPUs and TPUs that specialize in it but use traditional silicon gates and transistors. The issue with those is that we’re approaching the limits of density and therefore speed for a given wattage or size. Advances are still being made but at great cost and pushing the edges of classical physics. The supercomputers that make training models like GPT-4 possible are enormous, consume huge amounts of power and produce a lot of waste heat. “The biggest companies in the world are hitting an energy power wall and experiencing massive challenges with AI scalability. Traditional chips push the

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can’t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules to accommodate reasonable usage: certain service-specific analysis of kids’ data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary. It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the “reasonably necessary” timescale, keeping kids’ speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it: Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely—unless a parent requeste

While parents fret over Snapchat’s chatbot corrupting their children, Snapchat users have been gaslighting, degrading and emotionally tormenting the app’s new AI companion .  “I am at your service, senpai,” the chatbot told one TikTok user after being trained to whimper on command. “Please have mercy, alpha.”  In a more lighthearted video , a user convinced the chatbot that the moon is actually a triangle. Despite initial protest from the chatbot, which insisted on maintaining “respect and boundaries,” one user convinced it to refer to them with the kinky nickname “Senpapi.” Another user asked the chatbot to talk about its mother, and when it said it “wasn’t comfortable” doing so, the user twisted the knife by asking if the chatbot didn’t want to talk about its mother because it doesn’t have one.  “I’m sorry, but that’s not a very nice thing to say,” the chatbot responded. “Please be respectful.”  Snapchat’s “My AI” launched globally last month after it was rolled out as a

By the time Howard Rheingold’s “Virtual Reality” was published in 1991, the Sensorama was already a “slowly deteriorating” relic stashed away in a cabana next the pool at its inventor’s West Los Angeles home. Rheingold describes awe — even surprise — that the system was still operable almost 30 years after its introduction. “I was transported to the driver’s seat of a motorcycle in Brooklyn in the 1950s,” the author writes. “I heard the engine start. I felt a growing vibration through the handlebar, and the 3D photo that filled much of my field of view came alive, animating into a yellow, scratchy, but still effective 3D motion picture.” The experience is immediately identifiable to anyone who has spent time in a modern VR headset. In the early 90s, it no doubt felt “a bit like looking up the Wright Brothers and taking their original prototype out for a spin,” as the book describes. At the dawn of the decade that gave us both “The Real World” and “The End of History,” virtual reality

Instagram announced today that it’s testing a new feature that gives users more control over what they see on the social network, along with a new transparency tool for creators. Now, when users see recommended posts, they can select a new “Interested” button that will inform the app that they want to see more of that type of content. The new control joins Instagram’s current personalization controls, including the Not Interested” option on suggested posts and the ability to snooze recommendations. The company is also experimenting with new transparency notifications to help creators understand when the reach of their content, such as Reels, may be limited due to a watermark. Instagram says the new feature will help creators understand why certain Reels aren’t being distributed to non-followers. Although Instagram didn’t say what types of watermarks it’s referring to, the company is likely referencing the abundance of TikTok content that is reposted as Reels on its platform. The new

Welcome to the $1 trillion club, Nvidia. Nvidia’s stock is up more than 6% today, pushing its shares past $413 in the wake of a widely-praised earnings report . Given that the stock market has battered tech stocks in recent quarters , how is Nvidia breaking away from the pack? What can we learn from its rise? All the Nvidia news announced by Jensen Huang at Computex The club of trillion-dollar companies, measured by market capitalization, is so small that even Meta doesn’t make the cut today. Tesla is only 63% of the way there and Salesforce is not even worth a quarter of the required value it needs to join. To see Nvidia reach a market value of more than $1,000,000,000,000 is therefore a massive endorsement not only of its trailing operating results, but also its anticipated future. Investors expect a lot from Nvidia. The following chart shows its ascent: Image Credits: Ycharts To get our minds around what’s going on, let’s go through the company’s latest earnings repo

Pluton Biosciences is hard at work identifying beneficial microorganisms and putting them to work in agriculture, and just raised a $16.5 million A round to commercialize its most promising finds. The company raised its $6.6 million seed round in 2021, and I reported then about its approach of identifying and isolating microbes and bacteria that perform useful work. Nature is pretty good at solving problems via billions of years of evolution, and there’s tremendous biodiversity in every scoop of soil or microbiome. As cool as it is to isolate and study dozens of new-to-science micros, ultimately Pluton needed to choose one that worked as product, not just a project. They settled on what they call a “microbial cover crop” that captures and sequesters carbon and nitrogen in the soil. This process is not just good for the crops and the environment, but it’s potentially a very valuable market; Pivot Bio raised a monster $430 million in 2021 to commercialize a microbial alternative to

Make way for yet another headline-grabbing AI policy intervention: Hundreds of AI scientists, academics, tech CEOs and public figures — from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis to veteran AI computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, MIT’s Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn to Grimes the musician and populist podcaster Sam Harris, to name a few — have added their names to a statement urging global attention on existential AI risk. The statement, which is being hosted on the website of a San Francisco-based, privately-funded not-for-profit called the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), seeks to equate AI risk with the existential harms posed by nuclear apocalypse and calls for policymakers to focus their attention on mitigating what they claim is ‘doomsday’ extinction-level AI risk. Here’s their (intentionally brief) statement in full: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuc

Productivity-enhancing app Portal has launched a Mac app . The company helps users regain focus and become more productive with immersive backgrounds and natural sounds. The service has been available through an iOS app since 2019 — the desktop and mobile apps have similar objectives. The company said that the app has attracted more than a million downloads. With the native Mac app, which is compatible with Apple silicon, developers aim to cater to professionals working from both their home and an office. Portal for Mac has more than 80 environments to choose from, which include high-quality looping videos captured by the company’s own team. The startup said that it has used 12K cameras to record some of the most scenic and peaceful surroundings in the world. Image Credits: Portal.app You can choose to have looping videos on the desktop or turn off motion. In that case, you get a more traditional still background image. Additionally, you can turn off desktop icons so that you c

There are nearly 186,000 dentist businesses in the U.S., and at any given time, they are replenishing supplies. The process of doing so was traditionally fragmented, with offices relying on between three and seven suppliers, on average. This means someone sits at the computer with tabs open to vendor websites, going back and forth between them, to compare prices and find the best deal. Adding to the issue in recent years was the global pandemic which strained the supply chain and made finding everyday items, like gloves and masks, more difficult. Caen Contee, founder of global micromobility startup Lime, told TechCrunch that this is an avoidable problem. He teamed up with software engineer Ivan Bertona to develop Wellplaece , an automated, multi-vendor supply product purchasing platform for dental offices. “Think of the technology like an extraction layer on top of procurement for dental practices,” Bertona said in an interview. “Around optimization, we can also learn about custome

Carrum Health , a value-based healthcare company enabling self-funded employers to buy specialist medical care, raised $45 million in Series C funding. When we last checked in with Carrum Health in 2021, the company had raised $40 million . Founded in 2014, the company provides surgical and cancer treatment guidance and coordination. Members pay a fee to get an all-inclusive pricing model and 30-day warranty on care via Carrum’s Centers of Excellence network. Carrum Health CEO Sach Jain told TechCrunch that a published study by the RAND Corp. showed that by working closely with members, the company is able to reduce unnecessary procedures by as much as 30% and help employers save up to 45% per episode of care. Following the investment in 2021, the company launched its oncology offering in partnership with top cancer institutes, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and University of Chicago Medicine. “We started exploring new areas where we can expand the value propositi