Backed by a16z and QED, Brazilian startup Carecode puts AI agents to work on healthcare

AI holds huge promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced machine learning-based systems can do a lot of good on adjacent tasks such as appointment scheduling and confirmations. Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers. It’s coming out of stealth with an ambition to reduce healthcare costs…

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LatAm startup Vambe sees ARR skyrocket after pivot to conversational AI

When Nicolás Camhi, Matías Pérez Pefaur and Diego Chahuán (pictured above, left to right) launched Vambe last year, they were building a CRM for debt collection. But despite gaining traction, they soon realized that their customers were not as interested in their debt collection product as the WhatsApp AI agents Vambe had built to facilitate…

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Indoor climbing tracking startup, Lizcore, sharpens its focus on safety as it pulls in pre-seed

Indoor climbing is a tricky sport to track. That’s why Spanish startup Lizcore caught TechCrunch’s eye at MWC earlier this year. The team of two co-founders — led by CEO Edgar Casanovas Lorente, a climbing instructor and guide turned entrepreneur — were showing off hardware they hope will see climbing gyms ushering in the kind of social gamification…

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The curious case of Nebius, the publicly traded AI infrastructure ‘startup’

On October 21, a new ticker opened to Nasdaq traders: NBIS, a truncation of Nebius, a fledgling player in the AI cloud infrastructure space. Casual observers could be forgiven for wondering where this company had come from, as there had been little in the way of the usual fanfare that surrounds most startups’ journey to…

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Norwegian startup Factiverse wants to fight disinformation with AI

In the wake of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, one fact became clear: Disinformation proliferated online at a startling rate, shaping Americans’ views about each candidate as well as a diverse set of topics, including public health, climate change, and immigration. Generative AI – with its ability to produce deepfakes in seconds and its propensity to…

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OpenAI at one point considered acquiring AI chip startup Cerebras

OpenAI was at one point considering acquiring Cerebras, an AI chipmaking company that’s in the process of going public, according to new legal filings. Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI has new exhibits that describe how OpenAI was contemplating snatching up Cerebras in or around 2017 — a year after Cerebras’ founding, and just a…

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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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How AI startup Conflixis is protecting hospitals from corrupt doctors 

After a career as an incident investigator with risk management firms like Kroll and FTI Consulting, Aaron Narva (pictured above) was working with a big international bank client at compliance software maker Exiger. He was responsible for monitoring that client’s legal compliance after it had made headlines a decade earlier for a money-laundering scandal. “While…

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Led by a founder who sold a video startup to Apple, Panjaya uses deepfake techniques to bite into video dubbing

There’s a big opportunity for generative AI in the world of translation, and a startup called Panjaya is taking the concept to the next level: a hyperrealistic, gen AI-based dubbing tool for videos that re-creates a person’s original voice speaking the new language, with the video and the speaker’s physical movements automatically modifying to match…

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This three-person robotics startup is working with designer Yves Béhar to bring humanoids home

It’s hard to know where to focus when speaking to Christoph Kohstall. The contents of his packed Palo Alto garage compete for attention. To his immediate right stands a tower of electrical components, dotted with flashing lights. To his left is a workbench and the tops of machining tools. A red industrial girder runs along…

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