Capnamic Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Berlin and Cologne, is announcing the final closing of a new €115 million tech fund. The VC says it will invest in tech companies predominantly in the German-speaking region of Europe, with a focus on “B2B solutions, digital infrastructure, and digital transformation”. Read More
You wait all day for a multi-currency account and three come along at once. Give or take a month or so, that’s appears to be the case with news that Monese, the London fintech that offers a mobile banking app and current account, is adding support for Euro accounts. Read More
Volkswagen is working with Nvidia to expand its usage of its artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies beyond autonomous vehicles and into other areas of business, the two companies revealed today. VW set up its Munich-based data lab in 2014. Last year it pushed on with the hiring of Prof. Patrick van der Smagt to lead a dedicated AI team that is tasked with taking the… Read More
The U.K.’s Oxford University continues to be a hotbed of AI talent, fuelling not just academic research into AI but also the ambitions of startups and large technology companies alike. The latest Oxford-based AI startup to make headlines is Diffblue, a University of Oxford spin-out that is applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to software development. Read More
As AI slowly seeps into various sectors, it was fairly inevitable that we would start to see the “AI for X” startups begin to appear. Thus “AI for small business social media” is now a thing, in the shape of PromoRepublic, a US/Finnish/Ukrainian startup which has now raised a $1.2M investment round.
More specifically, they bill themselves as a “WIX for a small… Read More
Volvo is forming a new joint partnership with Autoliv, called Zenuity, with a focus on developing self-driving automotive software. The plan is to eventually get to the point where they can field self-driving cars for sale, based on Nvidia’s Drive PX in-car AI computing platform, by the not-so-distant target year of 2021. That’s a tall order, but Nvidia’s Drive PX is… Read More
Auto industry suppliers ZF and Hella are welcoming a third strategic partner to their effort to bring self-driving systems to market for OEM clients. Nvidia is joining the two to help incorporate its own in-car AI technology in a self-driving system that meets the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) certification for passenger vehicles, and to also address safety requirements for commercial… Read More
A few weeks ago we reported on LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s investment in social justice petitions site Change.org. Since then a few people with direct knowledge of the situation have told us that the funding round was actually a recap at a significantly lower valuation. In other words, there was a dramatic change to the ownership structure and most existing investors now own… Read More
Today’s Stories Binary Capital co-founder Justin Caldbeck quits as Matt Mazzeo steps away from the firm Pandora co-founder and CEO Tim Westergren will step down according to reports Houzz raises a huge $400M round at a $4B valuation Avis signs on to manage Waymo’s self-driving vehicle fleet in Phoenix MIT’s new drones switch between flying and driving for… Read More
In a move that is sure to stoke rumors about Apple’s future work in augmented and virtual reality technologies, Apple has acquired SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI), an eye-tracking firm. The German company has done significant work in eye-tracking research with proprietary eyeglass hardware while also working on consumer-focused applications like eye-tracking for virtual reality. Read More
Instacart CMO Cheryl Law is no longer at the company, TechCrunch has learned. Instacart confirmed the departure. We were tipped off about her departure a bit before the whole Amazon making a $13.7B bid for Whole Foods thing went down. Law joined Instacart at the beginning of the year and was previously the CMO of Prosper. Instacart’s challenges can change on a nearly daily basis… Read More
New York-based startup Stayawhile announced today that it’s scored $1.5 million in seed funding to provide travelers with what founder Janine Yorio refers to as “medium-term housing.” It’s a midway point between your standard hotel/Airbnb stay and a year-plus apartment lease, aimed at vacations and business travelers who’d like to spread out their stay in a new city… Read More
Sooner or later, our children will be raised by robots, so it’s natural that Disney, purveyor of both robots and child-related goods, would want to get ahead of that trend. A trio of studies from its Research division aim at understanding and improving how kids converse with and otherwise interact with robots and other reasonably smart machines. Read More
Amazon will officially release the Show in a few days, but in the meantime, the company is introducing a long-awaited intercom feature for existing Echo devices. The addition uses Drop-In, a teleconferencing feature introduced on the Show that lets close friends and family members call into one another’s device with little warning. I really didn’t like the feature when I tested… Read More
Autotalks has been developing technologies that allow vehicles to talk to anything — V2X, to the nerds in the know. It’s one of the technologies that will enable fully autonomous vehicles to roam our roads. But where does that leave motorcycles, which will still have riders who rely on interactions with human drivers? That’s where B2V, or bike to vehicle, technology comes in. Read More
If smartphone hardware rumors are on the money, and they are usually at least in the ballpark (with the exception of transparent, bendable phones; apparently forever doomed to be mocked up in Photoshop) — then a 3D depth sensor is coming to the front-facing camera of a handset near you in the not too distant future. Read More
Apple’s new mobile operating system iOS 11, which ships to the public in September, will give users a better understanding over how apps are using their location data. One notable change, which will be immediately obvious, is a more prominent blue status bar that appears when an app is actively using your location while running in the background. The change could impact apps that… Read More
Are you excited about trying out the new features coming up with iOS 11? If so, Apple just released the first public beta of iOS 11 now available to download for everyone. You don’t need to pay $99 for a developer account to download it. But remember, it is still a beta. While the company still plans to release the final version of iOS 11 this fall, Apple is going to release regular… Read More
I’ve been playing with a beta version of iOS 11 on a 10.5-inch iPad Pro for the past few weeks. While the final version of iOS 11 is not coming until later this fall, Apple just launched the public beta. Here’s a preview of what you can expect. If you’re using an iPad, get ready to be disoriented by the update because the iPad simply doesn’t work the same way. Apple… Read More
Kristy Tillman is the head of communication design at Slack. In our 20th episode, she talks about what it’s like building a team from scratch and how brand and communication design plays a role in an organization. She also explains why diversity is less about numbers and more about having the right perspectives present. Starting from nothing is not an easy task, but it’s one… Read More
