Two years ago, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a non-profit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech. In a move implying that the launch went well, JFFVentures today unveiled its second fund, JFFVentures Fund II, with a target of $50 million. $15 million has … Read more
Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform made by ex-Google employees, launched its beta version on the App Store. Today, the free iOS app is getting a big update that will bring a wave of new discovery-first features, including an activity feed, an explore page, the ability to browse by category, and more. Rooms … Read more
DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” One of the first building blocks for this was to bring vector search capabilities to its hosted Astra DB service last … Read more
Google is rolling out the April update to ChromeOS users with features like the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts and mouse button actions. The update also brings improved offline text-to-speech voice support. The ChromeOS M123 update is rolling out to users over the next few days. Let’s go through these new features. The main new … Read more
Data transformation and optimization — tasks that many, if not most, large enterprises deal with — aren’t easy. But thanks to the enormous growth of AI and cloud technologies, the challenges appears to be increasing. In a recent Gartner poll, fewer than half (44%) of data and analytics leaders said that their teams are effective … Read more
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform so that large companies can visualize their past financial performance and forecast upcoming quarters. This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few … Read more
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round. In 2009, the company started as a key-value store with a focus on the adtech industry; Aerospike has since diversified its offerings quite a bit. … Read more
Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal is in talks to raise capital for his new startup, Indian fintech Navi. Bansal is talking to investors to raise at a valuation of around $2 billion, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. One source said he is looking to raise between $200 million and $400 million. The Bengaluru-headquartered … Read more
Weeks before the national elections in India, Elon Musk-owned X said it is rolling out support for posting Community Notes — the company’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program. The company posted that the first set of contributors from India will start posting notes today and more will be accepted over time. Contributors typically post more context to … Read more
X is giving free blue checks to users who have more than 2500 “verified” followers (or, people that subscribe to X Premium). So, basically this means that if you are a popular poster, you will get a blue check. This also means that these lucky people are frantically posting to make it clear that they … Read more
