All posts tagged: platform

Cradle’s AI-powered protein programming platform levels up with $24M in new funding

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Biotech and AI startup Cradle is finding success with its generative approach to protein design, landing big customers and a hefty $24 million of new investment. The company exited stealth a little over a year ago, just as the hype around large language models was really heating up. Many AI companies in biotech train models to natively understand molecular structure; Cradle’s insight was that the long sequences of amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies are akin to “like an alien programming language.” It may not be possible for a person to learn that language, but an AI model could — and a person could work with that instead. While they still couldn’t just say “make a protein that does this,” they could ask which of 100 interesting proteins looks most likely to survive at room temperature or an acidic environment. The approach seems to have caught the eye of major drug development companies like Johnson & Johnson and Novozymes. Creating a useful and functional protein from scratch is generally a pretty …

DoorFeed raises another €7M for its platform allowing large-scale investors to hoover-up family homes

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Institutional real estate investors have historically struggled to buy up tonnes of family homes (the so-called ‘Single Family rental sector’) so they can turn us all into rental slaves and lock millions to a rentier economy. A few startups are trying to ease the ‘pain’ of these rapacious harbingers of hyper capitalism. Immo Capital, a platform for managing residential real estate portfolios has raised $90.7 million. Bricklane is another platform for rental housing (raised £6 million out of London). And Casafari in Spain/Portugal has raised $20.5 million. Into this market has launched DoorFeed, founded by James Kirimy, an early Uber UK employee. It’s secured a new funding round of €7 million Seed extension round led by Motive Ventures (backed by Private Equity firm Apollo, owners of Yahoo! and thus TechCrunch), with participation of Stride VC and Seedcamp. The firm previously raised a €3.5 million seed led by Stride and Seedcamp in 2021, and a €1.5 million debt financing by BPI France in 2022. In simple terms, DoorFeed provides the data platform and operations for investment …

Elon Musk says X will show headlines on the platform again

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Elon Musk said that X, formerly Twitter, will start showing headlines in preview cards with URLs on the platform again after removing titles last month. In a post on X, Musk said in an upcoming update, the company will overlay the title in the upper portion of the image of a URL Card. He didn’t mention any specific timeline for rollout or give an example of what might the card look like. In an upcoming release, ???? will overlay title in the upper potion of the image of a URL card — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2023 In August, the Tesla CEO said that X planned to stop showing titles with URLs in previews for “improved aesthetics.” The company stopped showing headlines in October after the announcement. Because of this change, users had to click or tap on the URL card to actually know the title or read the headline. To get around this change, publishers started to write their own headlines on images and post the link separately or include the headline in …

Toku’s AI platform predicts heart conditions by scanning inside your eye

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Ehsan Vaghefi, CEO and co-founder of Toku, grew up with a blind father who lost eyesight at the age of four due to congenital glaucoma. As a result of this, his dad was involved with the Blind Foundation in his home country of Iran. Vaghefi says most of his childhood friends were either blind or had a blind parent. Vahefi thought of becoming a clinician to help people who were in a similar boat as his father, but he also had an interest in seeing how technology could be used to help more people than any single clinician could handle. Changing course, health technology became his focus, and he founded Toku to explore ocular imaging and the diagnostic role it can play. “Early in life, I understood that if I became a clinician, I would be limited by the number of hours in my day, and [I] made it my mission to bring health to the masses through technology and innovation,” said Vaghefi, who is also an associate professor in Optometry and Vision Science at …

Morpheus Space developed a space mission design platform so intuitive even I could use it

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In-space propulsion developer Morpheus Space unveiled its first software product today, a mission simulation and design platform called Journey. The product has been under development for almost two years, Morpheus’ product manager Jim Gianakopoulos said in a recent interview (and a recent product walk-through). It was borne out of the typical thruster sales process: customers coming to Morpheus and asking whether the startup’s lineup of electric propulsion systems could meet their mission requirements. But that process is highly technical, disaggregated and manual. “We realized that that was an inhibiting factor,” Gianakopoulos said. “It can be empowering for our users to just give them the locus of control to actually simulate their entire mission themselves, analyze it and refine it and see what propulsion system meets [their] needs.” Journey aggregates all the data that’s typically spread out amongst Excel sheets, Python and other systems and rapidly spits out a mission and system design. In the software, customers can input custom system measurements, maneuvers, launch date, and other requirements. The software is designed to be friendly even …

Baton, a music collaboration platform for unreleased material, raises $4.2M

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Music startup Baton secured $4.2 million in funding, the company announced today. Baton will use the new capital to further develop its product, grow its team and roll out new features. Baton — founded by musician Gabe Warshaw — launched its private beta in 2022, allowing artists, producers, managers, A&Rs (reps responsible for talent scouting) and catalog administrators to share unreleased music, source new material, collaborate with others and ensure creators are properly credited and compensated for their work. Baton aims to provide musicians who have had their songs reused or repurposed without their knowledge with a way to always see what happens to their material. Whether it’s a finished song, a single sample or a pack, Baton shows creators who individually have viewed their material, so they’re never in the dark during the collaborative process. Additionally, the company is building a decentralized infrastructure so creators can upload songs without the risk of their IP being stolen. There’s also an automatic payout system. “Music has always been a part of my life. I was raised …

3D generative AI platform Atlas emerges from stealth with $6M to accelerate virtual worldbuilding

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Atlas, a 3D generative AI platform, is launching today after two years in stealth with $6 million in seed funding. The funding consists of two rounds: a $4.5M round led by 6th Man Ventures (6MV) and a $1.5M round led by Collab+Currency. The platform partners with game developers and brands to build virtual worlds in a fraction of the time it takes using traditional methods. Atlas allows developers to generate detailed 3D models from reference images and text. The Vienna-based startup was founded in early 2021 by Ben James, who is a self-taught coder and has a background in architecture. “I’ve worked a lot at the intersection of design and technology,” James told TechCrunch in an interview. “I’m a self taught coder and I thought that there would maybe be an interesting way to look at architecture through the guise of machine vision. 2D drawings like plans and sections and elevations are inherently embedded with three dimensional information through line weights, annotations, etc. And what we started playing around with at Atlas was if there …

CPG manufacturing platform Keychain raises $18 million

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Manufacturing platform Keychain announced an $18 million Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners this morning. Keychain seeks to use artificial intelligence to help brands find manufacturing partners. It was founded by Jordan Weitz, alongside Umang Dua and Oisin Hanrahan, who previously co-founded and ran the home software company Angi together. The group decided it was time for a new challenge and set their eyes on starting a new company: Keychain. Hanrahan said that finding the right manufacturing partner is a big issue for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. They want to create great products like healthy food and high-quality cosmetics, “but the process of finding the best manufacturing partner often gets in the way,” he told TechCrunch. “If we can take that process from months down to days, we think we can unlock innovation in product development for this whole industry. That, in turn, will result in healthier, more affordable products on our store shelves.” Right now, the CPG industry operates largely offline and is dominated by trade shows and vetting via brokers. Keychain …

Shekel Mobility, a B2B marketplace for auto dealers in Africa, raises $7M led by Ventures Platform and MaC VC

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The World Economic Forum states that Africa has an average annual demand for 2.4 million cars and 300,000 commercial vehicles. This demand is increasing because of a continent-wide increase in disposable income, strong middle-class growth and rapid urbanization. But while most cars meeting this demand are used, car ownership in Africa is less than 45 cars per 1000 people, in contrast to the global average of 203 cars per 1000 people. We’ve featured automotive industry startups, spotlighting notable players like Autochek and Moove, each addressing ownership by serving consumers and drivers, respectively. However, vehicle financing extends beyond the purview of consumers and drivers; a substantial opportunity exists to offer services tailored for dealers. Vehicle financing is crucial for small car dealers as it helps them with daily transactions and keeps costs down. When credit is affordable, it benefits customers, too, leading to more cars on the road in Africa. This highlights the need for affordable financing and business solutions for car dealers. Operating within this strategic domain is YC-backed Shekel Mobility. The B2B auto dealers …

YC-backed productivity app Superpowered pivots to become a voice API platform for bots

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Calendar apps are essential for productivity but it is hard to differentiate enough to have sustained growth from just the core usage. Y Combinator-backed Superpowered, which is an AI-powered notetaker for your meetings that doesn’t involve recording bots, hit this roadblock and is now pivoting to become Vapi, an API provider so anyone can easily create a natural-sounding voice-based AI-powered assistant. Superpowered was founded in 2020 by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta. But after three years of working on it, Dearsley said the team wanted to work on the more challenging product. The company is not shutting down the initial product as the startup said that Superpowered is profitable — it is in the process of bringing someone in to run it. Y Combinator said in June that more than 10,000 people were using the product weekly, but the company didn’t provide any updated numbers. Image Credits: Vapi To date, Superpowered/Vapi has raised $2.1 in seed money from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Abstract Ventures. Pivot to Vapi The company offers Vapi as an API …