LogicStar is building AI agents for app maintenance

February 4, 2025

Swiss startup LogicStar is bent on joining the AI agent game. The summer 2024-founded startup has bagged $3 million in pre-seed funding to bring tools to the developer market that can do autonomous maintenance of software applications, rather than the more typical AI agent use-case of code co-development. LogicStar CEO and co-founder Boris Paskalev suggests […]

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Two space startups have merged to create the next generation of telescopes

February 4, 2025

On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected. He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do.  But when they […]

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Four Chinese AI startups to watch beyond DeepSeek

February 4, 2025
The meteoric rise of DeepSeek—the Chinese AI startup now challenging global giants—has stunned observers and put the spotlight on China’s AI sector. Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the country’s tech ecosystem has been in relentless pursuit of homegrown alternatives, giving rise to a wave of startups and billion-dollar bets.  Today, the race is dominated by…

Spotify reports its first full year of profitability, adds 35M monthly active users

February 4, 2025

On Tuesday morning, Spotify announced its fourth-quarter earnings, marking its first full year of profitability since its inception 17 years ago. The operating income for the quarter reached a record €477 million ($509.48 million) and amounted to €1.4 billion ($1.495 billion) for the 2024 fiscal year. Spotify also reported an addition of 35 million monthly […]

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OpenAI’s Operator agent helped me move, but I had to help it, too

February 4, 2025

OpenAI gave me one week to test its new AI agent, Operator, a system that can independently do tasks for you on the internet. Operator is the closest thing I’ve seen to the tech industry’s vision of AI agents — systems that can automate the boring parts of life, freeing us up to do the […]

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Sotira lands $2M to help brands offload and monetize their surplus inventory

February 4, 2025

An estimated 20% to 30% of all inventory in the U.S. is surplus, with much of it ending up in landfills. A startup called Sotira wants to help address this problem: It leverages AI to help companies offload and monetize their surplus inventory. Sotira partners with brands to offload millions of pounds of surplus grocery, […]

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Snap unveils AI text-to-image model for mobile devices

February 4, 2025

Snap has unveiled an AI text-to-image model for mobile devices that will power some of Snapchat’s features in the coming months. The company said on Tuesday that the model can produce high-resolution images in around 1.4 seconds on an iPhone 16 Pro Max.  The new diffusion model runs entirely on the device, which reduces computational […]

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Team behind Twitterrific launches a multi-feed app called Tapestry

February 4, 2025

After Elon Musk took over Twitter, the company blocked third-party clients in 2023, including ones like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, and Fenix. Iconfactory, the company behind Twitterrifc, finally launched its multi-feed app called Tapestry on Tuesday, which allows you to add sources like RSS, YouTube, Bluesky, Podcasts, Mastodon, Reddit, Tumblr, Micro.blog, GO Comics, and more to unified […]

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