Prezent, a startup empowering customers to build slide decks using generative AI, has raised $20 million as it further develops and refines its AI models for different use cases and expands into new markets. AI has many different applications — one of which is generating decks for business presentations, as it turns out. Off-the-shelf models
The U.S. Department of Labor has dropped its investigation into Scale AI’s compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), according to a source directly familiar with the matter. The FLSA is a federal law that regulates misclassification of employees as independent contractors and unpaid wages. TechCrunch first reported that Scale was the subject of
Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious image model that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a respected industry benchmark last year, has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Accel, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Based in San Francisco, Recraft previously raised a $12
As an AI engineer at Meta, Boris Valkov helped build PyTorch, one of the world’s largest machine learning libraries. During his time there, Valkov realized that artificial intelligence “was about to unlock capabilities…in the application layer in the software stack.” He left Meta in late 2021 to start Lace AI, a startup that has developed
Rippling’s lawsuit efforts to serve Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz have been significantly complicated by the fact that Bouaziz and his lawyer are now in Dubai, according to internal correspondence seen by TechCrunch. The UAE is a country with a reputation of being a safe haven for those wanting to avoid extradition. Rippling is trying to
New $5M deep tech fund aims to lure founders from universities. Spend time at a university, and inevitably you’ll come across someone who has a plan to save the world, or at least make some small part of it better. It might be merely the optimism of youth, but sometimes they’re actually on to something.
Coreshell : The electric vehicle transition is really a story about China. There, subsidies have helped juice not just automakers, but the entire battery supply chain behind them. Those incentives, plus decades of industrial policy focused on controlled critical mineral supply chains, has left American and European automakers flat-footed. Take graphite, for example. Every lithium-ion
Artificial intelligence continues stirring things up in chemistry. To wit: Y Combinator-backed Cambridge, U.K.-based ReactWise is using AI to speed up chemical manufacturing — a key step in bringing new drugs to market. Once a promising drug has been identified in the lab, pharma firms need to be able to produce much larger amounts of
For someone who wants solar panels, the question is often: “How many?” And for a heat pump, it’s “how big?” Answering those questions typically requires a contractor to set foot on your property. Yet over the last decade, solar installers have trimmed that time-consuming process considerably. Some, like Tesla, have eliminated it entirely. The secret
After Employer.com acquired bankrupt accounting startup Bench in a fire-sale late last year, CEO Jesse Tinsley pledged on LinkedIn and elsewhere to honor past customer payments. “We’re honoring all prepaid Bench services even though we will not have the revenue from that directly ourselves,” Tinsley said in an interview with founder and investor Julian Weisser.
