As part of Salesforce’s massive tech conference, Dreamforce, taking place this week in San Francisco, its VC arm, Salesforce Ventures just announced a new $500 million fund dedicated to AI companies. This is significant for several reasons. First, in June 2023, Salesforce Ventures doubled its AI fund from $250 to $500, so the additional $500 million brings the AI fund to $1 billion. This compares to $5 billion total deployed in its first 15 years, since its 2009 launch.
Salesforce Ventures is also among the forces making San Francisco such a hot spot for AI companies that startups worldwide are relocating to the city. Like many VC firms, for example, the venture arm hosts dinners for its portfolio companies and Fortune 500 executives (aka prospective customers). Not surprisingly, perhaps, its AI portfolio is already notable, including Anthropic, Hugging Face, Runway, and Together AI, among others.
Salesforce Ventures just doubled its AI fund with another $500 million, and is helping San Francisco grow its attraction as the city for AI startups.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo to the company’s employees Monday morning, calling for a full return to office at the start of 2025. For the last fifteen months,…
Runway, one of several AI startups developing video-generating tech, today announced an API to allow devs and organizations to build the company’s generative AI models into third-party platforms, apps, and…
Gogoro, the Taiwanese electric scooter manufacturer and battery swapping giant, said its CEO and chairman Horace Luke has stepped down amid subsidy fraud allegations, according to a regulatory filing. Gogoro…
Apple’s newest software update, iOS 18, is rolling out today to all iPhone users. While AI technology was heavily hyped as a key part of this upgrade, Apple Intelligence features…
On Monday Apple released the new version of iOS, the company’s operating system for the iPhone. iOS 18 is a free download and it works with the iPhone XR &…
Speaking at an Oracle financial analysts meeting, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he expects AI to one day power massive law enforcement surveillance networks. “We’re going to have supervision,” he…
The Series A comes about a year after 11xAI raised a $2 million seed round led by Project A Ventures.
As TikTok heads to court on Monday to argue against a U.S. ban, parent company ByteDance’s newer social app, Lemon8, is once again surging to the top of the App…
This latest round of government sanctions land months after Intellexa’s founder Tal Dilian was sanctioned for selling the Predator spyware.
It’s been three years since Life360’s $205 million acquisition of AirTag competitor Tile. The company announced Monday its new lineup of lost-item Bluetooth trackers, featuring a sleeker redesign in new…
Typeface, a generative AI startup focused on enterprise use cases, has acquired a pair of companies just over a year after raising $165 million at a $1 billion valuation. Typeface…
Earlier this year, former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick launched his AI startup, Lumi. Kaepernick has had thousands of stories written about him, and he knows a…
IBM today launched the Qiskit Functions Catalog, a new set of services that aims to make programming quantum computers easier by abstracting away many of the complexities of working with…
Supermaven, an AI coding assistant, has raised $12 million in a funding round that had participation from OpenAI and Perplexity co-founders.
Arjun Vora and Tito Goldstein were working on the corporate side of Uber when they realized that HR software largely wasn’t built to manage hourly staff. Many hourly workers lacked…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Monday published approval for sleep apnea detection on the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Watch Ultra 2. The green light comes four…
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Apple AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation review
I can’t recall another consumer electronics product category becoming a commodity as quickly as Bluetooth earbuds. Apple’s AirPods played a key role in that growth, of course, recapturing a kind of excitement not seen in consumer music tech since the original iPod. AirPods’ fundamentals haven’t changed much in the eight…
Myntra, India’s largest fashion e-commerce platform, is trialing a four-hour delivery service in four Indian cities, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, a dramatic acceleration from its standard…
AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the very…
Insight Partners is reportedly on the cusp of closing on more than $10 billion in capital commitments for its 13th fund, per the FT. The FT report notes that two…
The Port of Seattle released a statement Friday confirming that it was targeted by a ransomware attack. The attack occurred on August 24, with the Port (which also operates the…
A decade after the wildly popular game Flappy Bird disappeared, an organization calling itself the Flappy Bird Foundation announced plans to “re-hatch the official Flappy Bird® game.” But this morning,…
Platforms to connect apps that wouldn’t normally talk to each other have been around for a minute (see: Zapier). But they have not gotten dramatically simpler to use if you’re…
Blockchain technology is all about decentralization and virtualization. So it’s a little ironic that humans love to come together in person at big blockchain events. Such was the case last…
I have a guilty pleasure, and it’s not that I just rewatched “Glee” in its entirety (yes, even the awful later seasons), or that I have read an ungodly amount…
It’s looking increasingly likely that OpenAI will soon alter its complex corporate structure. Reports earlier this week suggested that the AI company was in talks to raise $6.5 billion at…
Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies.
Netflix has never quite cracked the talk show formula, but maybe it can borrow an existing hit from YouTube. According to Bloomberg, the streamer is in talks with BuzzFeed to…
