All posts tagged: 31M

£31m package unveiled to increase security for MPs | Politics News

£31m package unveiled to increase security for MPs | Politics News

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MPs will have a dedicated police contact for safety issues as part of a £31m package to boost security measures for elected politicians. Home Secretary James Cleverley said no MP should have to accept threats as “part of the job”, following fears some have been targeted by demonstrators demanding an end to fighting in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the home of Tory backbencher Tobias Ellwood earlier this month – with police warning his family to “stay away” as arriving could “antagonise” the situation. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player 0:24 Protesters descend on MP’s home It also comes after the House of Commons Speaker broke with precedent last week out of concern for MP safety during a vote related to the war in the Middle East. Announcing the new funding, Mr Cleverly said: “The government will take every possible step to safeguard the people, processes and institutions upon which our democracy relies. “I take the safety and security of all members of the House with the utmost seriousness. “None of …

Sydney-based generative AI art platform Leonardo.Ai raises M

Sydney-based generative AI art platform Leonardo.Ai raises $31M

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Sydney, Australia-based Leonardo.Ai is the one of the latest generative AI startups to raise funding. Today, the AI art production platform for consumers and enterprise users announced a $31 million USD round from investors including Blackbird, Side Stage Ventures, Smash Capital, TIRTA Ventures, Gaorong Capital and Samsung Next. Founded last year, Leonardo.Ai’s founders say that since December, it has hit seven million users, who have generated over 700 million images in total. It recently launched its enterprise version, which includes collaboration tools and allows hosting on a private cloud. Enterprise users also get access to APIs so they can build their own tech infrastructure on top of Leonard.Ai’s platform, starting with its production API. Aimed at people in creative industries including gaming, advertising, fashion and architecture, Leonardo.Ai lets users save, edit and build multiple assets in the same style so they can be reused. They can also build and train their own models for image generation. Some use cases include storyboards for people in video production, or mockups of gaming characters. CEO and co-founder J.J. …

Yahoo spin-out Vespa lands M investment from Blossom

Yahoo spin-out Vespa lands $31M investment from Blossom

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Vespa.ai, the big data serving engine that just a few weeks ago spun out from Yahoo (full disclosure: TechCrunch’s parent company) into an independent venture, has raised a new round of funds. Blossom Capital led a $31 million investment in Vespa — money that Vespa CEO Jon Bratseth says will be put toward growing Vespa as a standalone business, strengthening the company’s engineering functions and “delivering more features faster to all Vespa’s users.” “In particular, we’ll speed up the development of features that’ll make it easier for developers to create apps that combine AI models with proprietary data sets,” Bratseth told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Vespa has been around for over 20 years, and we’re set up to be around for a lot longer.” Yahoo created Vespa back in 2005 after acquiring paid search service provider Overture, and, through it, a Norwegian search engine called AlltheWeb.com. Working with the e-commerce division within Yahoo, the AllTheWeb team retooled its search tech into a more general-purpose tool that Yahoo developers could use internally to compute over …

Tuesday Capital, a Silicon Valley firm that moved to Austin during the pandemic, captures M for its newest seed-stage fund

Tuesday Capital, a Silicon Valley firm that moved to Austin during the pandemic, captures $31M for its newest seed-stage fund

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Austin seems to agree with Tuesday Capital. When the 12-year-old seed stage outfit — originally called CrunchFund  —  was co-founded by longtime Patrick Gallagher and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, it was interwoven with the Silicon Valley scene. In has since widened its net. Part of the shift owes to the pandemic, when many venture firms began meeting with far-flung founders online. Part of it owes to Prashant Fonseka, who joined Tuesday Capital as an associate in 2015, was promoted to partner in 2020, and who, by living like a “nomad” for much of that strange time, was able to connect in person with founders who Tuesday Capital might have missed otherwise. Indeed, Tuesday’s team ultimately decided to move the firm from San Francisco to Austin, where it has “definitely been easier to get to NY and other East Coast cities,” says Gallagher, who today feels “great about the decision” to pull up the firm’s Bay Area stakes. “We have a strong community of founders from our portfolio companies that are now based in Austin,” he …

Fernride nudges yard trucks towards full autonomy with M in new funds

Fernride nudges yard trucks towards full autonomy with $31M in new funds

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Fernride has figured out a way to launch a commercially viable autonomous, electric truck business today. The secret? Not driving on public roads. Most AV trucking companies are going after the moonshot: using self-driving freight trucks — typically 18-wheelers — to haul goods over long distances. Startups like Waymo, TuSimple, Kodiak Robotics and Aurora have all had commercial pilot projects and are actively testing on public highways in Texas, Arizona and other southern states. And none of them are operating without a human safety operator in the front seat; most are years away from commercialization. Fernride, a Munich-based startup founded in 2019, is in a different kind of trucks business. It’s focused on the yard trucks used to move trailers and containers around ports, terminals and distribution facilities. “We wanted to do things completely differently,” said Hendrik Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Fernride. “First, we wanted to focus on the use case that works today, specifically yards or geofenced areas on private sites where we can launch a product now. Then when we have launched …