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Google makes robots smarter by teaching them about their limitations

If you’ve used a smart voice assistant such as Alexa, Siri and...

SAIC Mobility Robotaxi valued at $1B after $148M Series B

SAIC Mobility Robotaxi, an arm of state-owned Chinese automaker SAIC that aims...

Pliops lands $100M for chips that accelerate analytics in data centers

Analyzing data generated within the enterprise — for example, sales and...

Sync Computing rakes in $15.5M to automatically optimize cloud resources

After a pandemic-driven cloud adoption boom in the enterprise, costs are...

How Snipd is using AI to ‘unlock knowledge’ in podcasts

Podcasting has emerged as a major billion-dollar industry, with ad revenue in...

Upskilling platform GrowthSpace secures $25M to grow its global business

As the jobs market remains tight (mass layoffs and hiring freezes in tech aside), companies are laser-focused on retaining staff. One of the areas they’re investing in is upskilling, which aims to teach employees new...

TikTok rolls out a basic in-app, text-to-image AI generator

TikTok has rolled a new in-app text-to-image AI generator that lets users type in a prompt and receive an image that can be used as the background in their videos. The effect is called “AI greenscreen” and can be...

Mobot secures capital to grow its fleet of robots that bug-test mobile apps

Mobile apps have to be bug-tested across countless devices to ensure they work as intended. Users don’t look kindly on poor experiences — 88% say they’ll abandon apps based on minor glitches, according to software...

Daily Crunch: Samsung’s vice chairman receives presidential pardon for bribery conviction

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Last night was a full moon, somehow it’s already halfway through August, and did...

This startup is setting a DALL-E 2-like AI free, consequences be damned

DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a...

TrashBot uses AI to sort recyclables

There are a number of startups working to improve trash sorting with robots. AMP Robotics is near the top of the list, coupling a picker and a conveyor belt to sort materials in large, automated facilities. The...

Diagnostic Robotics has AI catching health problems before they take you to the ER

A stitch in time saves nine, they say — and a blood thinner in time saves a trip to the emergency room for a heart attack, as Diagnostic Robotics hopes to show. The company’s machine learning-powered preventative...

Hyundai announces $400M AI, robotics institute powered by Boston Dynamics

When Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics at the end of 2020, there were plenty of open questions. Chief among them was why we should assume this acquisition would be any different than the past few? The 30-year-old bleeding-edge robotics firm had been an uncomfortable fit for its last two owners, Google and SoftBank, but the Korean automotive giant insisted things would be different. The pairing has, thus far, been something of a mixed...

Amazon launches AWS Private 5G so companies can build their own 4G mobile networks

Amazon’s cash-cow cloud division AWS has launched a new service designed to help companies deploy their own private 5G networks — eventually, at least. AWS first announced AWS Private 5G in early preview late last year, but it’s now officially available to AWS customers starting in its U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. East (N. Virginia), and U.S. West (Oregon) regions, with plans to roll it out internationally “in the near future.” But...

A newsletter that’s mostly about Amazon and iRobot

Shortly after the Amazon/iRobot news was announced on Friday morning, a colleague asked me if I was surprised. The short answer is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the news dropped suddenly on what should have been a...

Meet Xiaomi’s new humanoid robot, CyberOne

Long gone are the days when a consumer electronics company could simply announce a phone and call it a day. At this morning’s big launch event in Beijing, Xiaomi followed up its foldable news by handing the stage over...

Conversational intelligence company Jiminny nabs $16.5M to unlock sales team insights

Jiminny, a U.K.-based conversational intelligence platform that companies use to record, transcribe and analyze communications from across sales and other customer-facing teams, today announced it has raised $16.5...

Aramco’s Prosperity7 powers AI drug firm Insilico’s $95M round

Hong Kong-based drug discovery and development company Insilico has secured fresh capital at a time that its CEO described as a “biotech winter.” The firm has raised $35 million on the heels of its last tranche in...

FullStory secures $25M to help companies spot issues in their apps and websites

FullStory, which sells analytics tools for apps and websites, secured $25 million in new equity financing, paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week shows. According to Crunchbase, the...

Nightfall raises cash for its AI that detects sensitive data across apps

Nightfall AI, a startup providing cloud data loss prevention services, today announced that it raised $40 million in Series B financing from investors including WestBridge Capital, Venrock, Bain Capital Ventures and —...

Expedock cinches Series A to grow its freight paperwork management platform

Since the start of the pandemic, the global supply chain has undergone — and is undergoing — immense strain. As of late last month, there were more than 300 ships in China waiting to load up and head to the U.S.,...

South Africa’s DataProphet closes $10M to scale its AI-as-a-service platform for manufacturers

Manufacturing plants or factories take raw material inputs and add value through a sequence of unit processes before shipping a product. Now, this process must follow a recipe. There are a series of instructions for products such as cars; in those instructions, a list of parameter values, specific temperature for iron melting, specific pressure for mold casting… and the list goes on. These factories, for instance, those in the...

iRobot announced a 10% staff cut the same day its Amazon news dropped

You’d be forgiven for missing this bit of news. I fully cop to not seeing it myself amid the buzz of last week’s Amazon acquisition news on Friday (knowing nod to Robot Report for pointing it out). Later that day, inside its quarterly earnings report, iRobot announced plans to cut 140 jobs — a figure that amounts to roughly 10% of its global workforce. Here’s the full note from the filing: To better align its cost structure...

Businesses including Stitch Fix are already experimenting with DALL-E 2

It’s been just a few weeks since OpenAI began allowing customers to commercially use images created by DALL-E 2, its remarkably powerful AI text-to-image system. But in spite of the current technical limitations and...

Copyright law is going to get real interesting, y’all

As millions of people are playing with AI-powered image-generation tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, new works of art are generated by the billions. Many of them are curiosities, some of them are legitimately incredible...