There have been many attempts at open source AI-powered voice assistants (see Rhasspy, Mycroft and Jasper, to name a few) — all established with the goal of creating privacy-preserving, offline experiences that don’t compromise on functionality. But development’s proven to be extraordinarily slow. That’s because, in addition to all the usual challenges attendant with open…
Leveraging resources such as virtual data rooms and shared labs makes it easier for biotech startups to grow. This is good news: We need more companies attacking cancer from novel angles, including AI-enabled early detection. And who knows, maybe one of these will become a trillion-dollar company? — Anna Scaling early cancer detection Y Combinator’s…
Tech companies are pledging to fight election-related deepfakes as policymakers amp up pressure. Today at the Munich Security Conference, vendors including Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Adobe and IBM signed an accord signaling their intention to adopt a common framework for responding to AI-generated deepfakes intended to mislead voters. Thirteen other companies, including AI startups OpenAI,…
Few joys in this cold world can match cracking open a new comic on a lazy Sunday morning. Nothing to do, nowhere to be — just you, a mug of coffee and some sequential art. Not much has fundamentally changed about the American comic book since publishers began collecting newspaper strips as bound volumes in…
Seal Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup founded by a group of former members of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $7.4 million seed funding round led by Vertex Ventures Israel, with participation from Crew Capital, PayPal Alumni Fund and Cyber Club London. Ever since the Log4j vulnerability…
Karen Serfaty and Gianina Rossi, both engineers from Argentina, worked for U.S.-based companies over the past 10 years, and the same issue kept coming up: how to manage taxes while being a contractor in another country. Joining with San Francisco-based Josefina Van Thienen, who had worked at Microsoft building strategic partnerships with tech companies focusing…
Epic Games is preparing to return to iOS in Europe, as a result of the EU regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company has now confirmed. The Fortnite maker says it will offer both the game and the Epic Games Stores on mobile in Europe, it shared in a blog post that looked at…
The former founder of a to-do lists app which sold for as much as $200 million, comes back, nine years later, with yet another app to do the same thing. Really? It’s a story that would be hard to make up, but it’s happening. I guess you can’t keep a good founder down. After selling…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I’m having one of those weeks where I’m just constantly, very slowly shaking my head at people. As I sat down to read all the stories…
Over the past few decades, extreme weather events have not only become more severe, but are also occurring more frequently. Neara is focused on enabling utility companies and energy providers to create models of their power networks and anything that might affect them, like wildfires or flooding. The Redfern, New South Wales, Australia-based startup recently…
