Runlayer, a startup that offers a secure Model Context Protocol gateway, a standard to allow AI models and agents to securely obtain external data and tools, has filed a lawsuit against human resources software startup Rippling, according to the complaint seen by TechCrunch. The lawsuit is a warning to anyone selling AI infrastructure to enterprise
It’s not just you: AI startups are receiving a lot of seed funding and, in the process, making things difficult for anyone seeking funding, even at a pre-seed stage. We’ve covered the trend in detail, and at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, we want to help pre-seed founders who are now locked into early-stage expectations.
Andrew Dai left Google DeepMind knowing that visual AI was the frontier he wanted to push into. It achieved breakneck fundraising that resulted in a more aggressive valuation-to-equity ratio than Thinking Machines, which raised one of the largest rounds in US history. In this episode of Build Mode, host and Startup Battlefield lead Isabelle Johannessen
Uber has spent the last year quietly moving beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There’s ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time on the app and you’ll now find Expedia-powered hotel bookings, “buy for me” concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe. Under the hood, so to speak, there’s a lot
The days of Nvidia’s unparalleled market dominance are not over, but challenges and options are emerging from all directions. ZML, a popular French AI startup backed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has released inference performance software that enables running a variety of large open source language models on a variety of chips, including Nvidia,
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jiaona Zhang, the CPO at the AI software company, Laurel. She previously worked in product at Airbnb, WeWork, and Linktree. Since 2018, she has taught an annual graduate-level class in product management fundamentals at Stanford, in-person and online. She is in her late 30s and lives