Author: Becky Anderson
Poe, Quora’s chatbot app, launched one of its most affordable subscription options on Monday, priced at just $5 per month. In addition, the company introduced its highest-priced plan at $250 per month, designed for users who need to send a large volume of messages on Poe. Poe allows users to utilize several AI-powered bots– including DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, o3-mini, ElevenLabs, and more– in one place. It operates on a point system, enabling users to spend points across different models, with each bot having its own point cost per message. Under the new $5/month plan, users can spend up…
As the year of the AI agent takes shape, a new trend is emerging: startups offering the picks and shovels that help employers build a workforce of bots. Manny Medina, best known as the founder and former CEO of the $4.4 billion valued sales automation company Outreach, just launched one such startup called Paid, he told TechCrunch exclusively.Paid doesn’t make AI agents. It offers a platform that makes sure they get paid, profitably. Paid announced Monday that it raised €10 million (about $11 million) in a pre-seed investment from European powerhouse EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund. Medina came up with the…
When Sam Weaver was vice president of product management at Unqork, he realized that the company needed a better way to manage its sprawling network of Kubernetes clusters — which are groups of computing nodes. When Unqork couldn’t find anything off the shelf, it assembled a 15-person team to build a Kubernetes management product. Despite the multi-million-dollar expense, Weaver said the resulting platform was just okay. “I’m thinking to myself, there’s got to be a better way of doing this,” Weaver told TechCrunch. “I mean, what we had built was sufficient, but it was not by any means complete, and…
OpenAI released updates Monday for Advanced Voice Mode, its AI voice feature that enables real-time conversations in ChatGPT, to make the AI assistant more personable and interrupt users less frequently. Manuka Stratta, an OpenAI post-training researcher, announced the changes in a video posted Monday to the company’s official social media channels. OpenAI’s latest update aims to address a frequent problem with AI voice assistants, which will interrupt users when they pause to think or take a deep breath. Free users of ChatGPT now have access to a new version of Advanced Voice Mode that lets users pause, without being interrupted,…
The Arc Prize Foundation, a nonprofit co-founded by prominent AI researcher François Chollet, announced in a blog post on Monday that it has created a new, challenging test to measure the general intelligence of leading AI models. So far, the new test, called ARC-AGI-2, has stumped most models. “Reasoning” AI models like OpenAI’s o1-pro and DeepSeek’s R1 score between 1% and 1.3% on ARC-AGI-2, according to the Arc Prize leaderboard. Powerful non-reasoning models including GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash score around 1%. The ARC-AGI tests consist of puzzle-like problems where an AI has to identify visual patterns…
Last year, AI-powered sales automation startup 11x appeared to be on an explosive growth trajectory. However, nearly two dozen sources — including investors and current and former employees — told TechCrunch that the company has experienced financial struggles, largely of its own making. Numerous people in the U.S. and U.K. told TechCrunch that the situation has become so tenuous that 11x’s lead Series B investor, Andreessen Horowitz, may even be considering legal action. However, a spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz emphatically denied such rumblings, telling TechCrunch that a16z is not suing. 11x offers an AI bot for outbound cold sales duties, including…
Developer tooling is changing rapidly with AI. So companies that are making it easier to adopt AI in their workflows are seeing a boom of attention. After a startup called n8n (pronounced “enay-ten”) pivoted its workflow automation platform to become more AI-friendly in 2022, it said it saw its revenues increase 5X, doubling in the last two months alone. Now on the back of that growth, TechCrunch has confirmed that n8n has raised €55 million ($60 million) in funding on a valuation sources close to the company tell us is in the region of €250 million ($270 million). Berlin-based n8n…
Arcade, a generative AI marketplace for designing jewelry, is expanding its offerings to include home goods, starting with rugs. The company on Monday also introduced a new feature called “Match My Room,” which allows users to upload a photo of their room so their design complements the existing colors and style. Alongside this expansion, Arcade announced its $25 million Series A funding round, bringing the total amount raised to $42 million. Similar to Arcade’s jewelry design generator, the rug creation tool leverages Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Users select the rug material and then enter a text prompt to describe the…
Calling all tech innovators, startup fanatics, marketing gurus, and emerging VCs — this is your moment! You’ve waited long enough, and now the time has come to step into the spotlight at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, taking place October 27–29 in San Francisco. Share your expertise with over 10,000 eager attendees and make an impact by hosting a roundtable or breakout session. Apply to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 We’re curating a diverse group of industry experts to lead interactive breakout sessions and roundtable discussions, covering the key topics that matter most to startup founders and entrepreneurs. Think you’ve got what…
FuriosaAI, a South Korean startup that makes chips for AI applications, has rejected an $800 million acquisition offer from Meta, opting instead to focus on developing and producing its AI chips, according to a local media report. Disagreements over post-acquisition business strategy and organizational structure, rather than price issues, caused the negotiations to break down, the report said. Along with other tech companies building large language models (LLMs) for various AI applications, Meta has been trying to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for chips that are specialized for training and building LLMs. The tech giant last year unveiled its custom…