Innovius Capital and Threshold Ventures led CloudZero’s $32 million Series B funding round. CEO Erik Peterson says the tranche will expand CloudZero’s platform and scale its go-to-market efforts, focusing on savings insights and self-service analytics. “The pandemic accelerated digital transformation for many companies, which increased software development and spend in …
Read More »Meta appeals court ruling declaring content moderators employees
Meta will appeal Kenya’s court ruling that it is the main employer of sub-Saharan African moderators. Meta appealed the March orders ruling last week. 184 moderators sued it and its content review partner in sub-Saharan Africa, Sama, for unlawful contract termination. The moderators also say Meta ordered Majorel, the social …
Read More »Popular third-party Reddit app Reddit’s new API pricing forced Apollo’s closure
Apollo, a popular third-party Reddit app, will close on June 30, 2023, due to Reddit’s new API pricing plans, which would cost Apollo $20 million per year to operate. This is unsustainable for an indie developer. Christian Selig, the app’s creator, was one of the first to point out that …
Read More »Enterprise Firefly from Adobe
Adobe announced today that enterprise customers can customize its Firefly generative image generator with their own branded assets. In addition, enterprise users will be able to access Firefly from Adobe Express, formerly Adobe Spark. “Enterprise leaders expect content demands to increase by five-fold over the next two years, making it …
Read More »Green Coffee Co. invests $25M in Colombia and alcohol
“Colombia’s largest coffee producer” Green Coffee Company raised $25 million in Series C equity funding. Coffee is worth $493 billion worldwide. Smaller coffee companies have emerged alongside legacy brands. I recently reported on Chamberlain Coffee raising venture capital, joining Fellow, Blank Street, and many celebrity coffee brands. Compound Foods and …
Read More »LinkedIn will offer AI-powered ad copy tools next
LinkedIn launched its own ad suggestion tool weeks after Meta launched a suite of generative AI-based tools to help advertisers create different campaigns. The company suggests ad introductory text based on a marketer’s LinkedIn page and Campaign Manager settings like objective, targeting criteria, and audience. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn uses OpenAI models …
Read More »Instabase receives $45M to automate document processing
Instabase, a startup that develops apps to understand and analyze “unstructured” data, raised $45 million in a Series C round led by Tribe Capital and including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), New Enterprise Associates, and Spark Capital. Instabase’s valuation doubled to $2 billion as it invested more in generative AI. “At Instabase, …
Read More »If Apple’s Vision Pro wasn’t for you, we’d feel terrible
Never met. Never spoke. The Vision Pro isn’t for you, I’m sure. It’s a gamble. It’s not for most people, like you. The headset costs $3,500. Most people know a product’s price, so it’s probably too expensive. Vision Pro is The media, including us, reported it. Apple sells consumer goods. …
Read More »Byju’s AI-focused transformer models
On Wednesday, Byju’s unveiled three transformer models to improve service quality and streamline student learning and personalization as the edtech giant bets big on AI to transform its business. Badri, a predictive AI model, predicts when students may struggle with certain concepts. This model proactively suggests ways to fill knowledge …
Read More »Large language models get private data from LlamaIndex
Last fall, former Uber research scientist Jerry Liu found “limitations” in OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating AI model, the predecessor to GPT-4. LlamaIndex, his open-source project, unlocks the capabilities and use cases of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4. “LLMs offer incredible capabilities for knowledge extraction and reasoning—they can perform …
Read More »