How Paladin’s drones helped Asheville during Hurricane Helene
When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, North Carolina in September, the city’s police department reached out to public safety drone startup Paladin for help. The startup’s 30-member team jumped into action working nights and through the weekend to assist Asheville’s police departme
Lightmatter’s $400M round has AI hyperscalers hyped for photonic data centers
Photonic computing startup Lightmatter has raised $400 million to blow one of modern data centers’ bottlenecks wide open. The company’s optical interconnect layer allows hundreds of GPUs to work synchronously, streamlining the costly and complex job of training and running AI models.
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Treehouse uses AI to help electricians install tech like EV chargers and heat pumps more cheaply
The U.S. is facing a shortage of electricians, with unfilled jobs in the field expected to grow by 11% per year over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But because prospective electricians in the U.S. typically need to log 8,000 hours before they can get their license, th
Amazon Kindle finally gets color
It's a big week in Kindle land. Along with refreshes to the base Kindle, Paperwhite, and Scribe, the company is introducing something many of us never expected in a devoted e-reader: color.
Earlier this year, Amazon's chief e-reader competitor, Kobo, introduced the $220 Libra Colour, which
Amazon revamps Kindle line with faster page turns, AI, and a new green color
Amazon's Kindle line seems to go longer and longer between updates. While e-readers aren't quite the consumer electronics darlings they once were, the retail giant is still invested in the category. After all, according to estimates, Amazon controls more than 80% of the U.S. market.
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Fable adds cognitive and hearing impairments to its accessibility tools with $25M round
Fable has gained a reputation as the go-to startup for helping companies build digital products that are more accessible to people with disabilities. After raising $25 million in new funding, the Toronto-based startup is now expanding the communities it supports and working to make AI training data
Elon Musk’s X dodges EU’s DMA as bloc decides platform isn’t important enough for fairness controls
Elon Musk’s X won’t be regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) the Commission decided Wednesday, despite the social media platform hitting usage thresholds earlier this year.
The decision means X won’t be subject to the DMA’s list of operationa
Airbnb launches a network that lets hosts hire other hosts
Airbnb hosting has become a complicated business, from setting up a listing and managing the property to understanding price dynamics, communicating with customers, and tracking earnings. The tricky part is that the more properties hosts manage, the harder it becomes for them to juggle everything.
This LLM framework takes a first stab at benchmarking Big AI’s compliance with the EU AI Act
While most countries’ lawmakers are still discussing how to put guardrails around artificial intelligence, the European Union is ahead of the pack, having passed a risk-based framework for regulating AI apps earlier this year.
The law came into force in August, although full details of the p
Kenya’s Octavia gets $3.9M seed to remove carbon from air
As calls for urgent climate action persist, technologies to help remove the heat-trapping greenhouse gases from the atmosphere are also emerging globally.
In Africa, Octavia Carbon, a Direct Air Capture (DAC) startup, is leading the efforts. Octavia, founded in Kenya two years ago, builds DAC mach
Long careers in luxury fashion led to a $17M raise for this supply chain platform
The retail sector needs inventory planning to maintain margins and meet demand. This is getting harder because there are now many distribution channels, more complex supply chains, and shorter sales cycles. Mid-market retailers and premium brands have less firepower than the retail giants and tend
Support automation firm Capacity grows with new cash and acquisitions
David Karandish has been busy.
Capacity, his support automation company, was planning a $5 million “bridge round” to help the company reach the break-even point. But TVC Capital, Toloka.vc, and the venture’s other backers had something grander in mind. So they threw in an additio
Storio is helping other businesses unlock more value from solar energy
Meet Storio, a French startup that’s focused on providing smart energy storage for commercial and industrial customers. Founded in 2023, the startup raised a €5 million seed round earlier this year (around $5.5 million at current exchange rates) and has signed its first client.
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Former Palantir CISO Dane Stuckey joins OpenAI to lead security
Dane Stuckey, the former CISO of analytics firm Palantir, has joined OpenAI as its newest CISO, serving alongside OpenAI head of security Matt Knight.
Stuckey announced the move in a post on X Tuesday evening.
“Security is germane to OpenAI’s mission,” he said.