Agentio raises $12M from Benchmark for its YouTube ad marketplace
Creator marketplace startup Agentio, which has built an automated platform for YouTubers to sell their ad slots to brands, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark with participation from returning investors Craft Ventures and AlleyCorp.
With the new funding, the startup aims to
Lightyear is on a mission to modernize network procurement
Dennis Thankachan isn’t someone you’d expect would launch a digital procurement startup.
After college, Thankachan went to work for Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. Two years later, he left for a hedge fund, PointState Capital, where he helped to manage equity investing.
Workbrew makes open source package manager Homebrew enterprise-friendly
A trio of former GitHub executives and engineers have founded a new startup that brings the benefits of one of the most popular open source package managers to the enterprise.
Workbrew, as the startup is called, emerges from stealth today with the mission of mitigating the risks of “shadow I
Itching to write a book? AI publisher Spines wants to make a deal
Generative AI has upended how we write things, or even if we write at all. Now a startup wants to be the main character in the next chapter of that story: AI that replaces the role of the publisher.
Spines is a self-publishing platform that claims that — thanks to being powered by artificial i
UK competition regulator clears Alphabet’s investment in Anthropic
The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has okayed Alphabet’s partnership and investment in AI rival Anthropic, concluding that it doesn’t qualify for investigation under current merger rules.
The announcement comes a month after the CMA revealed it was launching a forma
Instagram will soon let you reset your recommendation algorithm
Instagram is testing the ability for users to reset their recommendations, the company announced on Tuesday. By resetting your recommendations, you would be starting fresh and retraining the app's algorithm about the content you enjoy across your Explore page, home feed, and Reels tab.
The fea
In Mexico’s tense job market, Minu’s take on employee benefits includes financial wellness
In a tight labor market, the best way to attract and retain talent is to look after employee well-being. As Mexico is nearing full employment, this creates tailwinds for these endeavors, but with particular awareness that financial, physical, and mental health are interconnected.
“The main probl
Former basketball hopeful wants to prevent ACL tears with airbags for knees
You've heard of car airbags deploying within milliseconds to protect passengers. How about an airbag for your knee?
That's what former basketball hopeful Kylin Shaw is working on with his startup, Hippos Exoskeleton — a “knee sleeve” that measures stress on the knee joint an
Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement
One of India’s largest news agencies, Asian News International (ANI), has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world’s most populous nation.
Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on
Sagence is building analog chips to run AI
Graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips on which most AI models run, are energy-hungry beasts. As a consequence of the accelerating incorporation of GPUs in data centers, AI will drive a 160% uptick in electricity demand by 2030, Goldman Sachs estimates.
The trend isn’t sustainable, argu
Yuka, the app that rates food and makeup, now lets users complain to companies directly
Yuka is a popular health app that allows users to scan the barcodes of food items to quickly see a health ranking based on additives, sugar, saturated fat, and fiber. It also scans cosmetic products, highlighting any harmful substances like endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, allergens, and irritant
Socium doubles down on Francophone Africa after $5M seed round
Demand for HR tech solutions in Africa is growing, and Senegal's Socium is out to tap the opportunity in French-speaking countries on the continent.
Since 2021, Socium has built HR solutions that target users within the 21 countries of Francophone Africa and plans to continue narrowing its foc
Venture funding in Europe fell to $45B in 2024, says Atomico
Funding for European tech appears to have stabilized in 2024 after dropping precipitously in 2023, but the signs continue to point to more tough times ahead, according to the latest State of European Tech report.
The annual survey, produced by European VC firm Atomico, notes that startups in
ServiceTitan names LLMs from Microsoft, OpenAI as risk factors
Every IPO S-1 prospectus includes a section listing all kinds risk factors for why its stock may not be a good buy. Many of them are boilerplate warnings, cautions over financial performance, or acts of war and nature. But some of them are more specific to the company.
With ServiceTitan, a cloud