OpenAI-backed legal tech startup Harvey raises $100M

Harvey, a startup building what it describes as an AI-powered “copilot” for lawyers, has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by GV, Google’s corporate venture arm. The tranche, which also had participation from heavy-hitting angels and VCs OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia

Meta releases its biggest ‘open’ AI model yet

Meta’s latest open source AI model is its biggest yet. Today, Meta said it is releasing Llama 3.1 405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with

QA Wolf secures $36M to grow its app QA-testing suite

Quality assurance in the app development world is a necessary, but often resource-draining, undertaking. According to Statista, 23% of companies’ annual IT budgets are allocated to in-house or third-party contracted QA and testing. The stakes are high. In a survey by QA software-testing compa

TigerBeetle is building database software optimized for financial transactions

After doing some consulting for Microsoft to develop protections against zero-day exploits, software engineer Joran Dirk Greef worked with Coil, a web monetization startup in San Francisco, to help build its payments infrastructure. At the time, Coil was using a traditional database to store and pr

Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. The round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, va

Linx emerges from stealth with $33M to lock down the new security perimeter: Identity

Identity management is one of the most common fulcrums around which security breaches have pivoted in the last several years. One of the main reasons it has become the gift that keeps on giving to malicious hackers is that it's a nightmare for organizations to track. A security startup founded

CrowdStrike’s rivals stand to benefit from its update fail debacle

The CrowdStrike debacle — a bug in the company’s Windows software that had the disastrous effect of rendering PCs unusable — has disrupted flights, canceled elective medical treatments, and left many an office worker twiddling their thumbs for hours. Unsurprisingly, it’s also tanked

Deel acquires Hofy to build its own IT device management service

Fast-growing payroll provider Deel is making a sizable acquisition, its third this year. Deel announced on Thursday that it acquired Hofy, a London-based company that delivers and helps manage office equipment for remote hires. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but a source familiar with t

Test automation platform Tricentis acquires SeaLights

Tricentis, the well-funded test automation platform that helps developers find bugs in their code (now with the help of AI, of course), today announced that it has acquired SeaLights, a startup that makes the automated testing process more efficient by focusing only on the code that has changed. T

Boston VCs are pleased that HubSpot will remain an independent company

For months, rumors persisted that Google, and perhaps others, were interested in buying HubSpot, a Boston-based CRM and marketing software company. HubSpot's market cap ballooned as the rumors persisted, eventually reaching over $30 billion. But this week, Bloomberg might have finally put an en

AWS App Studio promises to generate enterprise apps from a written prompt

Generative AI is everywhere these days, but Amazon Web Services has been perceived in some circles as being late to the game. In reality it's still early, and the market is still shaking out. On Wednesday, AWS might have raised its generative AI street cred with a new tool called App Studio. A

Microsoft settles with European cloud trade body over antitrust complaints

Microsoft has reached an agreement with Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), nearly two years after the European not-for-profit trade association filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission (EC) alleging that Microsoft was using its market dominance in the busi

Anthropic’s Claude adds a prompt playground to quickly improve your AI apps

Prompt engineering became a hot job last year in the AI industry, but it seems Anthropic is now developing tools to at least partially automate it. Anthropic released several new features on Tuesday to help developers create more useful applications with the startup’s language model, Claude,

OpenAI Startup Fund backs AI healthcare venture with Arianna Huffington

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are throwing their weight behind a new venture, Thrive AI Health, that aims to build AI-powered assistant tech to promote healthier lifestyles. Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startu