Pendulum’s AI-driven platform helps enterprises better predict supply and demand

Supply chains have had a tumultuous few years, beginning in 2020, when COVID-19 upended legacy global supply chains. More recently, the “TikTok-ification” of retail has companies like Shein and Temu creating new products constantly as consumer demands change at the same rapid pace. Pen

Lyft's new AI customer assistant is powered by Anthropic's Claude

Ride-hail giant Lyft has partnered with AI startup Anthropic to build an AI assistant that handles initial intake for customer service inquiries for both riders and drivers.  It's the first phase of a broader collaboration between the two companies to use Anthropic's services to resea

Fizz brings on TikTok alum to help build out its marketplace and recommendation engine

Fizz, the college social app, is looking for ways to enhance and expand its platform, and a recent new hire is poised to help drive these ambitions. The company has brought on David Vasquez, who previously served as TikTok's head of creator monetization and a product lead for TikTok Shop, as Fi

Intel Capital fuels TrueFoundry’s $19M funding to help boost AI deployments at scale

TrueFoundry, a startup run by a group of former Meta engineers to help enterprises deploy AI systems at scale, has raised $19 million in fresh investment led by Intel Capital. With GenAI’s emergence following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, enterprises of all sizes have looked at way

Shein gets more questions from EU about DSA compliance

A day after the European Union dialed up its scrutiny of fast-fashion giant Shein, the bloc’s executive branch said that it has sent a fresh request for information (RFI) to the e-commerce platform under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The European Commission oversees larger platforms’

Could this startup’s compact nuclear reactors revolutionize cancer detection?

As cancer rates in the West, and globally, tack upwards due to lifestyle and environmental pollution, so does the need for the nuclear isotopes used in detecting those cancers in a medical setting. But with many reactors built in the 70s and 80s scheduled for shutdown, the materials used are becomi

Presto is building Stripe for EV charging

Charging an electric vehicle in public can be the best of times or the worst of times.  An EV driver can be charged and back on the road in a smooth 20 minutes, but they might also encounter broken chargers, unresponsive touchscreens, and blocked stalls, all of which can make for a frust

Comstruct raises $13M to simplify the procurement process for construction firms

When you think about platforms in the construction industry, chances are the concrete slabs designed to support steel beams and tall pillars will come first to your mind. Munich-based startup Comstruct wants to design a different kind of platform for the construction industry — a software platfo

Avelios nabs $31M led by Sequoia to fix the ailing world of healthcare IT

The race is on to build a new generation of healthcare software to replace legacy hospital systems that in some cases may not have been updated in decades. A startup out of Munich, Germany, called Avelios has ambitions to build a new kind of end-to-end operating system, leaning into more modern too

European VC firm Emblem raises $85M for its initial fund

Emblem, a relatively new European VC firm based in Paris, is announcing the final closing of its first fund. Eighteen months after the first closing, the Emblem team managed to secure €80 million in total (around $85 million at current exchange rates). This is no small feat in the current fundin

Aiming to accelerate product design with AI, Trace.Space raises a seed round

Modern product engineering requires the production of highly accurate digital simulations, allowing engineers to create prototypes and understand the real-world performance of materials. Currently, legacy software platforms from companies like IBM and Dassault are generally deployed, but now startu

Boston Dynamics joins forces with its former CEO to speed the learning of its Atlas humanoid robot

Boston Dynamics Wednesday announced a partnership designed to bring improved reinforcement learning to its electric Atlas humanoid robot. The tie-up is with the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI Institute), earlier known as The Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Both organizations were founded by Marc R

SoftBank could soon buy Renee James’ Ampere chip company for about $6.5B

Ampere, the semiconductor business founded by former Intel exec Renee James, is reportedly on the cusp of selling itself to SoftBank — the latest in an ongoing saga over the company’s future ownership. The deal could value Ampere at about $6.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. That’s a pri

Researchers created an open rival to OpenAI’s o1 ‘reasoning’ model for under $50

AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according to a new research paper released last Friday. The model, known as s1, performs similarly to cutting-edge reasoning models, such as Op