November 21, 2024

China’s complicated role in climate change

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. “Well, what about China?” This is a comment I get all the time on the topic of climate change, both in conversations and on whatever social media site is currently en vogue.…

September 2023

Onchain leverage trading platform Avantis Labs raises $4M seed round led by Pantera Capital

September 26, 2023
Avantis Labs, a decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives ecosystem, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Pantera Capital, the company’s co-founder and CEO Sehaj Singh exclusively told TechCrunch. Founders Fund, Coinbase’s Base Ecosystem Fund and Modular Capital also invested in the round. The capital will be used to grow its flagship product […]

Erudit raises $10M to monitor workplaces for ‘misalignment’

September 26, 2023
Employee surveillance is on the rise. According to one poll, searches for staff monitoring software rose by 75% in March 2020 compared with the 2019 monthly average — and demand remained strong in 2021 and 2022. It’s a spike mostly attributable to the shift during the pandemic to hybrid work. A 2022 Microsoft survey found […]

What’s changed since the “pause AI” letter six months ago?

September 26, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last Friday marked six months since the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit focusing on existential risks surrounding artificial intelligence, shared an open letter signed by famous people such as Elon Musk,…

Sequoia backs PartyKit to power real-time multiplayer collaboration for any app

September 26, 2023
If a company wants to offer in-app messaging or voice calls, they don’t have to develop the infrastructure themselves when there’s something like Twilio at their disposal. Likewise, if they want to support payments there’s Stripe, or for maps there’s the mighty Google. But what if a developer is tasked with building real-time multiplayer collaboration […]

Uber Eats and Getir ink tie-up in Europe for speedy grocery deliveries

September 26, 2023
Uber Eats and quick commerce player Getir have inked a grocery delivery partnership, starting in the UK. The tie-up, which expands the range of groceries on tap for Uber Eats’ users, is slated to cover other markets where the pair operate in Europe in the coming weeks — so presumably it’ll launch in Germany and […]

AI chip company Kneron raises $49M to scale up its commercial efforts

September 26, 2023
Kneron, which is developing AI chips to power self-driving cars, among other autonomous machines, today announced that it raised $49 million in an extension to its Series B round from investors including Foxconn, Alltek, Horizon Ventures, Liteon Technology Corp, Adata and Palpilot. Kneron’s CEO, Albert Liu, says that the new tranche, which brings Kneron’s total […]