Los Angeles-based K2 Space is accelerating its path to orbit with fresh venture funding, new defense contracts and a satellite architecture that will be capable of delivering staggering power levels in a single launch. The company is taking what cofounder and CEO Karan Kunjur described in a recent interview as a “pretty significant contrarian bet…
Ever since BeReal became popular among Gen Zers, giving them a platform to be their true selves rather than scrolling through heavily edited content, there’s been a rise in social apps that cater to this craving for authenticity and connection. Swsh is a social app founded by Gen Zers, for Gen Zers that wants to…
Nearly a year ago, developers Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros released a hobby project called Riffusion that could generate music using not audio but images of audio. It sounds counterintuitive (no pun intended), but it worked — my colleague Devin Coldewey got the rundown here. While their approach had its limitations, Riffusion netted Forsgren and…
Nirvana Insurance — an insurance startup taking a new approach to insurance products for commercial fleets using artificial intelligence, telematics, internet-of-things technology and 15 billion miles of trucking data to calculate risk models — is taking on something else: new funding. The startup has raised an all-equity Series B of $57 million, money that it…
Everyone more or less agrees that 2023 is going to be effectively written off in VC-land, as the feeding frenzy of the last few years leaves everyone exhausted, valuations flattened or crashed, and exit market remain more or less closed. VCs appear to be using this period to get their house in order for the…
Amazon has quietly rolled out support for passkeys as it becomes the latest tech giant to join the passwordless future. But you still might have to hold onto your Amazon password for a little while longer. The option to set up a passkey is now available on the e-commerce giant’s website, allowing users to log…
Roughly eight years ago, a little-known startup called Procurify raised $4 million for its platform that hosts tools to take some of the pain out of enterprise procurement. The company never became buzzy, exactly. But Procurify grew steadily over the subsequent years, going on to raise $20 million in its Series B and today closing…
Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to attempt to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by DCVC with participation from Comcast Ventures, Ex/ante, Parameter Ventures and Nat Friedman’s AI Grant. The proceeds will be put toward doubling Reality Defender’s…
Moving from one country to another is difficult in many ways, not the least of which involves starting over financially. Nova Credit, which started out as a graduate research project out of Stanford University about seven years ago, was founded to help immigrants overcome the obstacles of applying for things like apartments or loans with…
Sometimes, following instructions too precisely can land you in hot water — if you’re a large language model, that is. That’s the conclusion reached by a new, Microsoft-affiliated scientific paper that looked at the “trustworthiness” — and toxicity — of large language models (LLMs) including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, GPT-4’s predecessor. The co-authors write that,…