It’s not just instant-delivery startups that are struggling. Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year. Oda, which has…
Google’s newest startup program, announced on Wednesday, aims to bring AI technology to the public sector. The newly launched “Google for Startups AI Academy: American Infrastructure” will offer participants hands-on training from AI experts and other support for companies solving problems in areas like agriculture, energy, education, public safety, healthcare, telecommunications, transportation, urban development, and…
French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers and enterprises fine-tune its generative models for particular use cases. The first is self-service. Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetune, for fine-tuning its models on workstations, servers and small datacenter nodes. In the readme for…
Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, has raised $30 million and let employees sell $100 million worth of equity to new and existing investors, including Khosla Ventures. The round brings the nine-year-old company’s valuation to $3 billion, a 50% increase from the $2 billion value it garnered in its Series D in November 2021. The…
Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you eventually do select, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your HQ. It’s exactly as complex as it sounds – but it…
Newsletter platform Substack is introducing the ability for writers to send videos to their subscribers via Chat, its private community feature, the company announced on Wednesday. The rollout of video in Chat comes two months after the newsletter platform brought videos to Notes, its X/Twitter copycat that lets users share short-form content. Substack continues to…
WndrCo, the holding company and technology investment firm started by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, raised its first venture capital fund, closing on over $460 million in capital commitments. Katzenberg is well-known for being the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. Jaswa was a principal at New Enterprise…
Popular AI chatbot service ChatGPT faced multiple outages today. OpenAI had to work for hours on these issues to make the service available to users again. According to the company’s service status tracker, the company started working on the first issue at 12:21 AM PDT on June 4. OpenAI said it fixed this issue at…
New York City, home to over 60,000 gig delivery workers, has been cracking down on cheap, uncertified e-bikes that have resulted in battery fires across the city. Some e-bike providers may see such regulations as a problem for business. But e-bike subscription startup Whizz sees it as an opportunity. “I think the market is moving…
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week promises to be a pivotal moment in the iPhone maker’s history. Though the Vision Pro debuted at last year’s event, don’t expect hardware to be the main attraction at WWDC 2024, which kicks off Monday at 10 a.m. PT. WWDC is for developers, and much of the focus will…
