January 2024

How African startups raised funding in 2023

January 23, 2024

After defying the global funding slowdown of 2022, VC investments in African startups dropped considerably last year, mirroring the situation in other regions where capital taps were significantly turned off. The drop, however, was not unexpected as deals had become infrequent, and investors began to pull away in the months preceding the year. Data trackers […]

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What’s next for robotaxis in 2024

January 23, 2024
In 2023, it almost felt as if the promise of robotaxis was soon to be fulfilled. Hailing a robotaxi had briefly become the new trendy thing to do in San Francisco, as simple and everyday as ordering a delivery via app. However, that dream crashed and burned in October, when a fatal accident in downtown…

The Ins and Outs of Final Salary Pensions

January 23, 2024
How do you envision your golden years? For many, it means traveling or just relaxing on sun-kissed beaches, free of the daily grind. Financial security, however, is crucial to a…

Sequoia backs Coana to help companies prioritise vulnerabilities using ‘code aware’ software analysi

January 23, 2024

Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) juggernaut Sequoia is backing a fledgling Danish startup to build a next-gen software composition analysis (SCA) tool, one that promises to help companies filter through the noise and identify vulnerabilities that are a genuine threat. For context, most software contains at least some open source components, many of which are […]

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This town’s mining battle reveals the contentious path to a cleaner future

January 23, 2024
Minnesota’s Highway 210 threads through the tiny towns of Aitkin County, a poor and sparsely populated stretch of forests, lakes, and wetlands that reaches just into the northeastern corner of the state. A short drive off the highway, due south past the Tamarack Church, delivers you to Jackson’s Hole, the last remaining business in the…

Why does AI being good at math matter?

January 23, 2024
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 week the AI world was buzzing over a new paper in Nature from Google DeepMind, in which the lab managed to create an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems.…

Open source vector database startup Qdrant raises $28M

January 23, 2024

Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital. Founded in 2021, Berlin-based Qdrant is seeking to capitalize on the burgeoning AI revolution, targeting developers with an open source vector search engine and database — an integral part of […]

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Byju’s seeks new funding at less than $2 billion valuation, a 90% drop

January 23, 2024

Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is willing to cut its valuation to below $2 billion as it hunts for new funding, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, once India’s most valuable, is looking to raise $100 million to $300 million in new funding and edtech group’s chief executive Byju […]

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Telegram is rolling out ‘view-once’ voice and video messages

January 23, 2024

Telegram is rolling out a bunch of upgrades as part of its January feature drop including “view-once” video and audio messages, the ability to pause recording while sending a video or an audio message, and new read-time controls. The app introduced “view-once” photos and videos in one-on-one chat in September 2023. Now, the company is […]

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Germany’s Instagrid, which uses software to supercharge portable batteries, raises $95M

January 23, 2024

Energy supply is one of the bigger issues impacting how technology will evolve over time — a challenge that might be feel closer to home when you consider the batteries of objects like mobile phones or electric vehicles but is definitely not constrained just to consumer tech. A startup called Instagrid is using software to […]

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