February 17, 2025

Are your noise-canceling headphones messing with your head?

We all know headphones can be bad for your hearing if you listen to sounds too loudly in such close proximity to your ears. But a BBC report suggests that a new health scare could be emerging around the noise-canceling feature that’s hugely popular in modern earphones. The article considers whether the technology could essentially […]

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October 2023

Gradient raises $10M to let companies deploy and fine-tune multiple LLMs

October 5, 2023
Gradient, a startup that allows developers to build and customize AI apps in the cloud using large language models (LLMs), today emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding led by Wing VC with participation from Mango Capital, Tokyo Black, The New Normal Fund, Secure Octane and Global Founders Capital. Chris Change, Gradient’s CEO, co-founded […]

Observability platform Observe raises $50M in debt, launches gen AI features

October 5, 2023
Venture investors see potential in observability software — i.e. software that gives teams the ability to monitor, measure and understand the state of a system or app. And that’s not surprising. The observability market is forecasted to reach $2 billion by 2026, climbing from $278 million in 2022, according to 650 Group. The growth is […]

Consumer brand accelerator SuperOrdinary gets $58M Series B at $800M valuation

October 5, 2023
The average shopper probably hasn’t heard of SuperOrdinary, but if they are a beauty or skincare fan, they’ve definitely heard of some of the brands the startup works with: Olaplex, Farmacy and Biossance, to name a few. The Los Angeles-headquartered company works behind the scenes to help American and European consumer brands scale on marketplaces […]

Vera wants to use AI to cull generative models’ worst behaviors

October 5, 2023
Liz O’Sullivan is on a mission to make AI “a little bit safer,” in her own words. A member of the National AI Advisory Committee, which drafts recommendations to the White House and Congress on how to foster AI adoption while regulating its risks, O’Sullivan spent 12 years on the business side of AI startups […]

The Download: the 15 ClimateTech Companies to Watch

October 5, 2023
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The 15 ClimateTech Companies to Watch It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and terrified in the face of an ever-worsening climate crisis. But the glimmer of good news is that, for the most part,…

Qakbot hackers are still spamming victims despite FBI takedown

October 5, 2023
The hackers behind Qakbot, a notorious malware operation that was recently “dismantled” by the FBI, are still active and continue to target new victims, researchers say. The FBI announced in August that it had successfully “disrupted and dismantled” the infrastructure of the long-running Qakbot malware, which had infected more than 700,000 machines worldwide to cause […]