February 7, 2025

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Technology

Snap introduces ray tracing technology for its AR lenses to enhance realism

February 15, 2023

Snap has introduced ray tracing technology to its AR Lens Studio for developers around the world, the company announced on Wednesday. Ray tracing is a technical capability that allows for realistic renderings of light and shine on AR artifacts. Snap has partnered with Tiffany & Co to launch the first Lens built with ray tracing. […]

Snap introduces ray tracing technology for its AR lenses to enhance realism by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Superplastic, a creator of ‘synthetic’ influencers, raises $20M led by Amazon in deal to make TV shows and more

February 15, 2023

Janky and Guggimon, ‘synthetic’ celebrities conceived in a studio and big on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where they exist as influencers with millions of followers, hyping up other brands, music acts and themselves, are soon coming to a streaming screen, and maybe a Whole Foods, near you. Superplastic, the startup that created and […]

Superplastic, a creator of ‘synthetic’ influencers, raises $20M led by Amazon in deal to make TV shows and more by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Caretakers, ageism and other topics venture needs to stop overlooking

February 15, 2023

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha interviewed Elana Berkowitz, founding partner at Springbank Collective and […]

Caretakers, ageism and other topics venture needs to stop overlooking by Theresa Loconsolo originally published on TechCrunch

You.com takes aim at Google and Microsoft with multimodal chat search

February 15, 2023

You.com founder Richard Socher knows that his company has always been a David going after the Goliath in search, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company built search based on generative AI in December, several months before the other giant search players made their announcements. Today, the […]

You.com takes aim at Google and Microsoft with multimodal chat search by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

The Download: mitigating methane emissions, and testing AI-developed drugs

February 15, 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. These startups hope to spray iron particles above the ocean to fight climate change A Palo Alto–based startup wants to begin releasing iron particles into the exhaust stream of a shipping vessel crossing…

Passwordless authentication startup Descope lands whopping $53M seed round

February 15, 2023

Capital might be harder to come by than it once was in startup land, but some firms are bucking the trend — hard. Take Descope, for example, which today announced that it raised a whopping $53 million in seed funding for its “developer-first” authentication and user management platform. The money came from Lightspeed Venture Partners […]

Passwordless authentication startup Descope lands whopping $53M seed round by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Yext hops on the generative AI train with Yext Chat, an enterprise-focused chatbot

February 15, 2023

Looking to cash in on the generative AI craze, Yext, the platform for online brand management, today announced an AI-powered chatbot called Yext Chat. Taking inspiration from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Yext Chat is designed for enterprise use cases — and differentiated, Yext claims, by a partly proprietary back end. “ChatGPT has shown the world that large […]

Yext hops on the generative AI train with Yext Chat, an enterprise-focused chatbot by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Oligo raises $28M to secure open-source libraries at runtime

February 15, 2023

Oligo Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that focuses on runtime application security and observability to detect and prevent open-source vulnerabilities, is coming out of stealth today and announcing that it has raised a total of $28 million in seed and Series A funding. The company’s investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ballistic Ventures and TLV Partners, […]

Oligo raises $28M to secure open-source libraries at runtime by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Inside the ChatGPT race in China

February 15, 2023
Every once in a while, there’s one thing that gets everybody obsessed. In the Chinese tech world last week, it was ChatGPT. Maybe it was because of the holiday season, or maybe it was because ChatGPT is not currently available in China, but it took more than two months for the natural-language-processing chatbot to finally…