SynthBee has raised $20 million in funding to develop a new kind of “computing intelligence”, Dean Takahashi reports for VentureBeat. The round was led by Crosspoint Capital Partners. SynthBee plans to use the money to expand its team and proprietary computing intelligence platform. SynthBee’s founder, Rony Abovitz, is known for previous successful startups including Mako …
Strella, a startup using AI for market research, has raised $4 million in seed funding, reports VentureBeat. The company, founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, employs artificial intelligence to automate and accelerate customer interviews. According to the founders, the platform can deliver insights up to ten times faster and at half the cost of …
Gladia, an AI-powered transcription and audio intelligence provider, has secured $16 million in funding. The Paris-based company plans to develop a new real-time transcription and analytics engine with this investment. CEO Jean-Louis Quéguiner told VentureBeat he founded the company out of frustration with existing services’ poor accent recognition. Gladia’s new engine can transcribe over 100 …
Chinese AI start-ups are targeting the US market to boost revenue growth, inspired by TikTok’s international success amid a challenging domestic landscape. Companies like MiniMax, ByteDance, and 01.ai are launching AI products overseas, particularly focusing on the lucrative US user base, reports the Financial Times. MiniMax, backed by major investors, projects $70 million in sales …
Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator, addresses recent criticisms directed at the start-up PearAI regarding its handling of open source practices, particularly in relation to the company Continue. Initially, Tan supported PearAI without fully understanding the situation, but he later recognized the validity of the criticism, he writes. He collaborated with PearAI’s founders …
Hailuo AI, a product of Chinese startup MiniMax, has launched a new image-to-video conversion feature. The tool allows creators to transform static images into dynamic video content. As reported by Carl Franzen in VentureBeat, Hailuo AI now offers a competitive platform that combines both text and image inputs. The company, backed by tech giants Alibaba …
A new AI service enables real-time conversations with digital twins at a latency of less than one second. Startup Tavus has developed this technology, as founders Hassaan and Quinn report on HackerNews. Their goal was to enable the most natural communication possible between humans and computers. Numerous technical challenges had to be overcome to achieve …
Character.ai is changing its strategy following a $2.7 billion deal with Google. As new interim CEO Dominic Perella told the Financial Times, the company is abandoning the costly development of its own AI models. Instead, Character.ai will focus on improving its popular chatbot products that simulate conversations with various characters and celebrities. After the Google …
A MIT spin-off called Liquid AI has unveiled new AI models that are not based on the usual transformer architecture. According to the company, these “Liquid Foundation Models” (LFMs) already outperform comparable transformer-based models in performance and efficiency. Liquid AI announced this in a statement. Instead of transformers, the developers used approaches from the theory …
Y Combinator faces criticism for backing AI startup PearAI that copied an existing open-source project and released it under a more restrictive license. As reported by Julie Bort, PearAI founder Duke Pan admitted to cloning the code from the Continue project. The issue arose when PearAI initially used its own license, created with ChatGPT, and …