Vantage raises $21M Series A to help bring down cloud costs

Vantage, a startup that helps businesses better understand their cloud infrastructure spend (and automate their savings), today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from by Andreessen Horowitz, which led its seed round,

Why this unicorn chose to take a credit facility

The venture capital fundraising environment has been a challenging one over the past year. In the U.S., venture capital deal value in the third quarter of 2022 was $43 billion, a nine-quarter low, according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. Though we've talked a lot abo

Forethought aims to build more accurate chatbots with constrained generative AI models

Forethought has been building chatbots since 2017 with increasing levels of sophistication, intelligence and automation. Today, the startup announced the next phase in their development. It's bringing generative AI to the platform with a beta release of a new tool called SupportGPT. The product

Consensus raises $110M to inject automation into SaaS product demos

Garin Hess, a tech entrepreneur based in Utah, experienced what he calls the “demo bottleneck” at a previous software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup while pitching to potential customers. He theorized that a self-directed interactive demo, personalized to each stakeholder, could not only s

Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, is betting the next big thing in AI is proving you are human

Fake virtual identities are nothing new. The ability to so easily create them has been both a boon for social media platforms — more “users” — and a scourge, tied as they are to the spread of conspiracy theories, distorted discourse and other societal ills. Still, Twitter bo

Is $12.4B a fair price for Qualtrics?

When the news hit Monday that Qualtrics was being acquired, it wasn't exactly surprising. SAP never seemed enamored with the company in spite of spending a hefty $8 billion to buy it in 2018. It took the German software giant just two years before it decided to spin Qualtrics out again as a sep

Microsoft’s computer vision model will generate alt text for Reddit images

Two years ago, Microsoft announced Florence, an AI system that it pitched as a “complete rethinking” of modern computer vision models. Unlike most vision models at the time, Florence was both “unified” and “multimodal,” meaning it could (1) understand language as

Salesforce plans to incorporate generative AI across the platform

Salesforce has been in the news for a lot of non-product reasons of late, so it would be understandable that the company wants to bring the focus back to the business of selling software and away from the machinations of activist investors. Today at the TrailblazerDX developer conference, the compa

Atlassian cuts 5% of its workforce

Atlassian, the company behind tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello, today announced that, after a reorg a month ago, it is now laying off about 500 employees. That’s about 5% of its total workforce. Atlassian co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar note in today’

Qualtrics has $12B offer on the table to go private

Qualtrics was once a hot startup before SAP bought the company in 2018 for $8 billion. It was a fine exit, making the founders rich, but it never was really a good fit. SAP spun out the company just two years later, before taking it public in 2021. On Sunday, the company filed an 8-K form with the

Microsoft brings an AI-powered Copilot to its business app suite

Microsoft today introduced what it’s calling the “next generation” of AI product updates across its business apps portfolio. They touch on both Power Platform, Microsoft’s set of low-code tools for building apps and workflows, and Dynamics 365, the company’s suite of e

Will one good quarter appease the activist investors dogging Salesforce?

Salesforce is dealing with five powerful activist investors. One way to get these firms off your back is performing well, which drives up stock prices. Salesforce checked that box with a stellar quarterly report this week, beating street expectations by a wide margin. That could buy some time for t

Enterprise SaaS companies continue to navigate a complex economic environment

It's been a tough time for enterprise SaaS companies. These organizations raked in profits and growth during the pandemic when offices shuttered and employees moved en masse to work from home. But as the economy turned last year and more workers returned to the office, their numbers slipped. At

Amazon pauses HQ2 construction after nationwide battle royale over location

Remember when Amazon turned the United States into Thunderdome, making every state battle over the right to host the company’s next big headquarters and 25,000 jobs? Well, after laying off more than half that number, Amazon is tapping the brakes on HQ2 in Virginia, putting off construction of