Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure, as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised…
The term “endgame,” among keyboard enthusiasts, is sort of a running gag. Endgame is when you finally dial in your perfect layout, case, features, switches, and keycaps, so you can stop noodling around with parts and get on with whatever it is you actually use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a few months…
As robotics has advanced, industry has steadily adopted more robots to automate away many kinds of grunt work. More than 540,000 new industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2023, taking the number of total industrial robots active to above 4 million, per IFR. Industrial robots typically excel at repetitive tasks, but they find it challenging…
A few years ago, several startups with a specific focus on digital avatars appeared because of all the metaverse buzz. While that buzz died down, generative AI has given a new life to avatars as it is easier to spin up different virtual identities. Companies are trying out different use cases for avatars, including D-ID…
EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be…
Investors on the lookout for startups working at the frontiers of technology are casting their nets ever further into unchartered territory, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. In one of the latest examples, a startup called Karman+ with ambitions to build autonomous spacecraft that can travel to asteroids and then mine them for materials has…
When I visited my elderly mom in Germany recently, I realized it could be one of the last times I see her in the cozy little house she has called home for more than two decades. So I did what anyone would do: I busted out my phone and took lots of photos of the…
French startup Rounded believes AI voice agents are going to become the default way customers interact with companies, so instead of building AI voice agents that are ready to use, the company is building an orchestration platform that lets companies build their own voice agent. Rounded started off working on a web3 product before shifting…
Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year. But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for…
Devs expect tech vendors to supply software development kits, or SDKs, alongside their products to make it easier to create apps using those products. But many vendors only offer APIs, which are simply protocols that enable software components to communicate with each other. Alex Rattray, the founder of Stainless, thinks AI can assist, here. Stainless…