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Sam's Club's AI-powered exit tech reaches 20% of stores | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 8:59 PM0


Amazon may be scaling back its AI-powered Just Walk Out checkout-free tech in its stores in favor of smart shopping carts, but Walmart-owned Sam’s Club says it’s turning to AI to speed up its own exit technology. Instead of requiring store staff to check members’ purchases against their receipts when leaving the store, Sam’s Club customers who pay either at a register or through the Scan & Go mobile app can now walk out of the store without having their purchases double-checked.

The technology, first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, has now been deployed at over 120 clubs across the U.S., which is 20% of the total number of Sam’s Club locations. Since rolling out, the company claims that it’s significantly sped up exits, as members leave the store 23% faster. The retailer plans to expand the tech to all its stores by year-end.

The system works via a combination of computer vision and digital tech that captures images of customers’ carts and then verifies payment for the items in their basket. Sam’s Club says AI is used in the background to speed up the process. The AI also learns and improves over time as thousands of exit transactions across locations are analyzed.

Before the technology was put into place, Sam’s Club members would have to queue up at the store’s exit to wait to have their receipts checked. The new solution keeps them moving along and frees up store staff to focus on other tasks.

The company also took a subtle shot at rival Amazon in announcing the expansion, noting that its technology arrives as “other retailers have struggled to deploy similar technology at scale, with some abandoning efforts” — a clear reference to Amazon’s pullback on Just Walk Out. In addition, Amazon had to fend off criticism that its AI tech had relied on human workers to review transactions. Amazon said machine learning had powered its technology and that contractors were only annotating the AI and shopping data to improve the system.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Copilot Workspace is GitHub's take on AI-powered software engineering | TechCrunch

April 29, 2024 9:42 PM0


Is the future of software development an AI-powered IDE? GitHub’s floating the idea.

At its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco on Monday, GitHub announced Copilot Workspace, a dev environment that taps what GitHub describes as “Copilot-powered agents” to help developers brainstorm, plan, build, test and run code in natural language.

Jonathan Carter, head of GitHub Next, GitHub’s software R&D team, pitches Workspace as somewhat of an evolution of GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant Copilot into a more general tool, building on recently introduced capabilities like Copilot Chat, which lets developers ask questions about code in natural language.

“Through research, we found that, for many tasks, the biggest point of friction for developers was in getting started, and in particular knowing how to approach a [coding] problem, knowing which files to edit and knowing how to consider multiple solutions and their trade-offs,” Carter said. “So we wanted to build an AI assistant that could meet developers at the inception of an idea or task, reduce the activation energy needed to begin and then collaborate with them on making the necessary edits across the entire corebase.”

At last count, Copilot had over 1.8 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers. But Carter envisions a far larger base, drawn in by feature expansions with broad appeal, like Workspace.

“Since developers spend a lot of their time working on [coding issues], we believe we can help empower developers every day through a ‘thought partnership’ with AI,” Carter said. “You can think of Copilot Workspace as a companion experience and dev environment that complements existing tools and workflows and enables simplifying a class of developer tasks … We believe there’s a lot of value that can be delivered in an AI-native developer environment that isn’t constrained by existing workflows.”

There’s certainly internal pressure to make Copilot profitable.

Copilot loses an average of $20 a month per user, according to a Wall Street Journal report, with some customers costing GitHub as much as $80 a month. And the number of rival services continues to grow. There’s Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, which the company made free to individual developers late last year. There are also startups, like Magic, Tabnine, Codegen and Laredo.

Given a GitHub repo or a specific bug within a repo, Workspace — underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model — can build a plan to (attempt to) squash the bug or implement a new feature, drawing on an understanding of the repo’s comments, issue replies and larger codebase. Developers get suggested code for the bug fix or new feature, along with a list of the things they need to validate and test that code, plus controls to edit, save, refactor or undo it.

Image Credits: GitHub

The suggested code can be run directly in Workspace and shared among team members via an external link. Those team members, once in Workspace, can refine and tinker with the code as they see fit.

Perhaps the most obvious way to launch Workspace is from the new “Open in Workspace” button to the left of issues and pull requests in GitHub repos. Clicking on it opens a field to describe the software engineering task to be completed in natural language, like, “Add documentation for the changes in this pull request,” which, once submitted, gets added to a list of “sessions” within the new dedicated Workspace view.

Image Credits: GitHub

Workspace executes requests systematically step by step, creating a specification, generating a plan and then implementing that plan. Developers can dive into any of these steps to get a granular view of the suggested code and changes and delete, re-run or re-order the steps as necessary.

“If you ask any developer where they tend to get stuck with a new project, you’ll often hear them say it’s knowing where to start,” Carter said. “Copilot Workspace lifts that burden and gives developers a plan to start iterating from.”

Image Credits: GitHub

Workspace enters technical preview on Monday, optimized for a range of devices including mobile.

Importantly, because it’s in preview, Workspace isn’t covered by GitHub’s IP indemnification policy, which promises to assist with the legal fees of customers facing third-party claims alleging that the AI-generated code they’re using infringes on IP. (Generative AI models notoriously regurgitate their training data sets, and GPT-4 Turbo was trained partly on copyrighted code.)

GitHub says that it hasn’t determined how it’s going to productize Workspace, but that it’ll use the preview to “learn more about the value it delivers and how developers use it.”

I think the more important question is: Will Workspace fix the existential issues surrounding Copilot and other AI-powered coding tools?

An analysis of over 150 million lines of code committed to project repos over the past several years by GitClear, the developer of the code analysis tool of the same name, found that Copilot was resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases and more code being re-added as opposed to reused and streamlined, creating headaches for code maintainers.

Elsewhere, security researchers have warned that Copilot and similar tools can amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept suggestions from AI-powered coding assistants tend to produce less secure code. (GitHub stressed to me that it uses an AI-based vulnerability prevention system to try to block insecure code in addition to an optional code duplication filter to detect regurgitations of public code.)

Yet devs aren’t shying away from AI.

In a StackOverflow poll from June 2023, 44% of developers said that they use AI tools in their development process now, and 26% plan to soon. Gartner predicts that 75% of enterprise software engineers will employ AI code assistants by 2028.

By emphasizing human review, perhaps Workspace can indeed help clean up some of the mess introduced by AI-generated code. We’ll find out soon enough as Workspace makes its way into developers’ hands.

“Our primary goal with Copilot Workspace is to leverage AI to reduce complexity so developers can express their creativity and explore more freely,” Carter said. “We truly believe the combination of human plus AI is always going to be superior to one or the other alone, and that’s what we’re betting on with Copilot Workspace.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Webflow acquires Intellimize to add AI-powered webpage personalization | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 6:39 PM0


Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that’s raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization.

Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that the purchase price was in the “eight-figure” range.

The majority of the Intellimize team — around 50 people — will join Webflow. But some staffers either took outplacement packages or were let go and given severance; Webflow wouldn’t say how many.

Vlad Magdalin, the CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow’s first-ever acquisition because its product meets a need many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their websites.

“The common thread among our many customer segments is that they’re building professional websites that are meant not only to look great, but ultimately to drive business results — and tons of our customers and partners have been asking us to help them improve how well their websites are able to bring them new customers beyond the initial build phase,” Magdalin said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a really impressive product in this space that many marketing and growth leaders raved about — and it soon became very evident that combining the forces of our respective products and our teams can create a much more powerful combination.”

Guy Yalif, former head of vertical marketing at Twitter, co-founded Intellimize in 2016 with Brian Webb and Jin Lim. While in a previous exec role at Yahoo, Yalif worked with Lim, Yahoo’s VP of engineering at the time, and Webb, who was an architect on Yahoo’s personalized content recommendation team. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is TechCrunch’s corporate parent.)

With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim — drawing on their combined marketing know-how — set out to build a platform that could generate personalized webpages for visitors on demand.

The motivation? Seventy-four percent of customers feel frustrated when a website’s content isn’t customized, according to stats cited by Porch Group Media. Companies that do personalize report not only increased revenue, but more efficient marketing spend.

Intellimize taps AI to generate pages, automatically making adjustments in response to how users behave (and where they’re coming from). Companies create a website template, then Intellimize’s AI runs experiments, fiddling with various knobs and dials is it were before delivering the top-performing results to visitors.

Now, Intellimize isn’t the only one doing this.

Amazon’s Personalize can drive tailored product and search recommendations on the web. Sstartups such as Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely automate certain forms of A/B web testing with algorithms. That’s not to mention generative AI-driven platforms like Adobe’s GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny and Blend, which are hastening in new and novel forms of experience personalization.

But Intellimize — whether on the strength of its tech, partnerships or advertising — manage to establish a sizeable foothold in the market for AI-powered marketing.

At the time of the acquisition, Intellimize — which had raised over $50 million from investors like Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners and Homebrew — had several tentpole customers including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.

“The Intellimize team had already built most of the personalization and optimization tools that we were considering building in-house, and had an impressive roster of enterprise customers using their solution,” Magdalin said. “Their team and product demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and AI to power website personalization and conversion rate optimization, which we believe would be a very powerful addition to Webflow’s existing platform.”

So what changes can Intellimize customers expect as the company joins the Webflow fold? Not many disruptive ones, Yalif stressed. Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but it’ll increasingly link to — and integrate with — Webflow services. Yalif, meanwhile, will join Webflow as “head of personalization,” guiding — what else? — personalization product efforts at Webflow.

“Joining Webflow allows us to scale and significantly accelerate our forward momentum,” Yalif said. “Webflow is building out its integrated solution for website building, design and optimization. Intellimize is the foundation of the personalization and optimization pieces of that vision. Together, we can take on larger, much more expensive, harder-to-use players in the digital experience space.”

Here’s Magdalin’s take:

“Integrating Intellimize expands our primary audience beyond designers and developers … For the initial phase [of the merger], we’re focusing on natively integrating both of our products together — so customers should expect the best of Webflow and the best of Intellimize to be available as one unified product experience later this year.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Google brings AI-powered editing tools, like Magic Editor, to all Google Photos users for free | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 5:41 AM0


Google Photos is getting an AI upgrade. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free. This expansion also includes Google’s Magic Eraser, which removes unwanted items from photos; Photo Unblur, which uses machine learning to sharpen blurry photos; Portrait Light, which lets you change the light source on photos after the fact, and others.

The editing tools have historically been a selling point for Google’s high-end devices, the Pixel phones, as well as a draw for Google’s cloud storage subscription product, Google One. But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.

Image Credits: Google

There are some caveats to this expansion, however.

For starters, the tools will only start rolling out on May 15 and it will take weeks for them to make it to all Google Photos users.

In addition, there are some hardware device requirements to be able to use them. On ChromeOS, for instance, the device must be a Chromebook Plus with ChromeOS version 118+ or have at least 3GB RAM. On mobile, the device must run Android 8.0 or higher or iOS 15 or higher.

The company notes that Pixel tablets will now be supported, as well.

Magic Editor is the most notable feature of the group. Introduced last year with the launch of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, this editing tool uses generative AI to do more complicated photo edits — like filling in gaps in a photo, repositioning the subject and other edits to the foreground or background of a photo. With Magic Editor, you can change a gray sky to blue, remove people from the background of a photo, recenter the photo subject while filling in gaps, remove other clutter and more.

Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect. And those edits would be more manual, not automated via AI.

Image Credits: Google

With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month. To go beyond that, they’ll still need to buy a Premium Google One plan — meaning 2TB of storage and above.

The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required. The full set of features that will become available includes Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Sky suggestions, Color pop, HDR effect for photos and videos, Portrait Blur, Portrait Light (plus the add light/balance light features in the tool), Cinematic Photos, Styles in the Collage Editor and Video Effects.

Other features like the AI-powered Best Take — which merges similar photos to create a single best shot where everyone is smiling — will continue to be available only to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

a16z-backed Rewind pivots to build AI-powered pendant to record your conversations | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 6:19 AM0


In 2022, Rewind had just raised $10 million from a16z and was building a personal data recording service that promised to privately record your activity and let you search through your own history. But that was before OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

Today, generative AI can make what Rewind had built previously — a searchable record of your activity — far more useful. It’s not so surprising, then, to see the startup pivoting to integrate AI more deeply into its product. The company has rebranded to “Limitless,” and is now offering an AI-powered meeting suite and a hardware pendant that can record your conversations.

Company co-founder Dan Siroker first posted the idea of a conversation-recording pendant last October and started accepting orders at $59. In January, he posted that the company had finalized a design and aims to ship the product in Q4 2024.

Siroker posted the final design this week, along with the news of the company’s pivot. The $99 pendant was posted on X earlier this week. The company is accepting preorders and aims to ship the first batch in August. Siroker said that the company plans to honor the initial preorders at $59. Earlier on Wednesday, he posted that the startup has already received more than 10,000 preorders for the product.

Product features and the pivot

The Limitless pendant can easily attach to your shirt like a wireless mic, or tie it like a necklace with a string and record conversations. The primary use case is recording and transcribing meetings, so you don’t have to take notes. The company claims that the device is weather-proof, has a 100-hour battery life and can be charged easily through a USB-C port.

The hardware also has a “consent mode,” which doesn’t record the other person in the conversation unless they expressly agree to be recorded. It’s not clear if this mode would be on by default.

While the company is a few months away from shipping the hardware product, it has already released an app — available on the web, Mac and Windows — to record meetings. The app uses system audio and a microphone to record, so there is no need for a bot to join these meetings.

The app has features we have seen in meeting tools like Otter, Zoom, TimeOS and TLDV. Siroker told TechCrunch that the company aims to differentiate with tools like real-time automated notes and automatically generated meeting briefs based on the participants and previous meetings.

The app is free and comes with unlimited audio storage and 10 hours per month of AI features like transcription, summary and notes. Unlimited AI features are $29 per month, or $19 per month if paid annually.

Image Credits: Limitless

Siroker said one of the major differentiators is the company’s new confidential cloud product that stores data in an encrypted format. While Rewind was largely a local product, the new cloud feature allows users to access data anywhere.

Siroker said the company had Leviathan Security Group perform a third-party audit on its solution to measure security.

“Confidential Cloud might sound like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. It is private by design. Unlike the traditional cloud, your employer, us as a software provider and the government cannot decrypt your data without your permission, even if given a subpoena. Only you control the decryption of your data,” he told TechCrunch.

The way ahead

On its website, Rewind says it has raised more than $33 million in funding from backers, including a16z, First Round Capital and NEA. The company said it hadn’t used any money from last year’s unusual Series A round — where it called for investors by posting a video on X — so it doesn’t plan to raise any new money.

The company said it will continue to support Rewind in its current state but will not actively add new features. This means the startup won’t ship the Windows app it had promised to build last year.

“We don’t have any plans to shut down or merge Rewind into Limitless. We plan to reimplement many of our users’ favorite Rewind features directly into Limitless,” Siroker said.

“Users can even use both products side-by-side and decide which one they like better. We hope that over time, they will agree with us that the Limitless approach is better and that they will use that exclusively.”

The company has said that the hardware product will answer questions through an AI-powered bot based on meeting recordings, connections with personal accounts and information on the web. It will also offer a platform for developers to build apps or experiences surrounding the product.

But Limitless’ larger vision is to build AI agents to do things on your behalf. This seems to be the trend for startups working with AI. Hardware startups like Humane and Rabbit are trying to make devices with AI tools in them that promise to be powerful enough to take care of some tasks for you.

Browsers like The Browser Company’s Arc and YC-backed SigmaOS are also building agents to browse the web for you. However, there are a lot of unknowns as output by AI bots is still full of errors, and at times, it is hard to make AI understand the context and intentions of your query. AI-powered agents doing some work on behalf of you sure sounds dreamy, but we might have to wait for a while to get there.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

eBay adds an AI-powered 'shop the look' feature to its iOS app | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 3:13 AM0


eBay on Tuesday launched a new generative AI-powered feature to appeal to fashion enthusiasts: a “shop the look” section within its iOS mobile app that will suggest a carousel of images and ideas, based on the customer’s shopping history. The company says its recommendations will be personalized to the end user and will evolve as the customer shops more. The idea is to introduce how other fashion items may complement their current wardrobe.

To do so, “shop the look” will include interactive hotspots that, when tapped, will reveal similar items and outfit inspirations, with the resulting looks including both preowned and luxury items that match the user’s personal style. The feature is powered by eBay.ai, and was developed in collaboration with the company’s Responsible AI team and RAI Principles, eBay notes.

Image Credits: eBay

“Shop the look” will appear to any eBay shopper who has viewed at least 10 fashion items over the past 180 days, the company notes. It will display both on the eBay homepage and the fashion landing page.

For eBay, the addition offers a way to showcase its wide expanse of inventory available for sale differently than before — and one that could potentially encourage more sales, if successful. eBay says it plans to explore expansions to other categories over time and will continue adding more personalization elements to the feature over the new year.

eBay isn’t the only one exploring how AI can improve the fashion shopping experience. Google last summer introduced a way for consumers to virtually try on clothes using a new AI shopping feature, for example. Amazon has also turned to AI to help customers find clothes that fit when shopping online. In those cases, the AI features were meant to help customers find the right fit or size, whereas eBay’s new feature is more focused on fashion inspiration — meaning finding the right style. That can be harder to do, given that personal style is subjective.

“Shop the look” will initially be available on iOS in the U.S. and U.K., with support for Android coming later this year.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: Spotify rolls out an AI-powered playlist feature

April 18, 2024 12:37 AM0


Spotify is building on its AI DJ feature, adding a new AI-powered playlist feature. No, this is not merely asking Spotify to spit out, say, metalcore classics from the 2010s, but instead something more of a “my dog is sad and I love the color purple please make me a list of songs“ sort of thing. You can prompt it, and Spotify will come up with a list of tunes for you. How far you can push it remains to be seen, but I do intend to test its guardrails when I get the chance.

Spotify’s AI work nests into its other efforts to differentiate its service from rivals like Apple Music and offerings from Amazon. The European tech giant has also pushed into audiobooks, podcasting and even edtech in recent years.

Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time. How long it will take to reach your hands is not clear, if you, like myself, are not located in the feature’s launch countries. Some Spotify users have complained that the rollout of new products can take longer than they want to reach their home market, it’s worth noting.

Spotify tests video courses to teach everything from music production to Excel

The AI wave crashing into the world of music has yet to make artistry obsolete, but it does appear to be working toward finding a place in how we discover and consume art itself. Perhaps that’s a good working compromise.

By now you may be a little tired of hearing about AI all day, every day. Not that there’s anything wrong with AI news per se; lots of tech companies are working hard to infuse new AI tech into their products and services. It’s a big business story at a minimum. Then there’s the consumer angle, where AI comes closer to our daily lives. But for those of us who aren’t mega-ChatGPT users, AI can seem ever so slightly remote from our regular existence. Tools like Spotify’s latest can bring AI more into how we do our regular, mundane tasks like queueing up new tunes. Or not-so-new tunes, at least according to some users who view Spotify’s playlist work as part of a recurring effort to promote the same songs time and again.

Hit play, let’s have some fun!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Snap plans to add watermarks to images created with its AI-powered tools | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 3:13 PM0


Social media company Snap said Tuesday that it plans to add watermarks to AI-generated images on its platform.

The platform is adding a logo of a small ghost with a sparkle icon to denote an AI-generated image. The company said the watermark would appear when the image is exported or saved to the camera roll.

Snap plans to show a Ghost logo with sparkle on AI-generated images using its tools. Image Credits: Snap

On its support page, the company said removing Snap’s Ghost with sparkles watermark violates its terms. It’s unclear how Snap plans to detect the watermark removal. We have asked the company for more details and will update the story when we hear back.

Other tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google have also taken steps to label or identify images created with AI-powered tools.

Currently, Snap allows users to create or edit AI-generated images with Snap AI for paid users and a selfie-focused feature called Dreams.

In its blog post outlining its safety and transparency practices around AI, the company explained that it shows gen-AI powered features such as Lenses with visual markers like a sparkling logo.

Snap lists indicators for features powered by generative AI. Image credits: Snap

The company also added context cards with AI-generated images from tools like Dream selfies to better inform the user.

In February, Snap partnered with HackerOne to stress its AI image-generation tools by adapting a bug bounty program. The company said it has also created a review process to remove problematic problems when AI-powered lenses are in development.

“We want Snapchatters from all walks of life to have equitable access and expectations when using all features within our app, particularly our AI-powered experiences. With this in mind, we’re implementing additional testing to minimize potentially biased AI results,” the company said on its blog.

Snapchat landed in hot water soon after introducing the “My AI” chatbot last year. A Washington Post report noted the bot was returning inappropriate responses to users. Later, the company rolled out controls in the Family Center for parents and guardians to monitor and restrict their teen’s interactions with AI.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

StealthMole raises $7M Series A for its AI-powered dark web intelligence platform  | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 11:37 AM0


StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round.

The Singapore-headquartered startup with an R&D office in South Korea will use the fresh capital to establish additional R&D centers and support more commercial uses of its technology in the B2B sector and geographical expansion.

“Having an R&D office in South Korea allows us to gain critical insights into how hackers from East Asia operate,” Simon Choi, chief technology officer (CTO) at StealthMole, told TechCrunch. “Similarly, having researchers from various backgrounds in Singapore for Southeast Asia, or in other unique locations, will aid us in analyzing data related to neighboring countries.”

StealthMole was co-founded in 2022 by Louis Hur (CEO), an enterprise IT security expert and serial entrepreneur in cybersecurity, and Choi (CTO), a threat investigator and open source intelligence (OSINT) profiler who previously worked as an adviser for the National Intelligence Service South Korea, the National Police Agency, and the Ministry of National Defense in South Korea.

The startup serves over 50 clients across 17 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Its current customer base mostly includes government and law enforcement agencies for national security and cybersecurity teams within enterprises, which manage cybersecurity incidents, analyze threats, and provide cybersecurity guidance and support.

“StealthMole came about from a critical market gap I encountered while working in cybersecurity and white-hat hacking: a severe lack of data points and information networks, specifically within Asia,” Hur said in the company’s statement. “At the same time, data leaks, anonymized transactions, and all manner of cybercrimes were spiking — both due to malicious intent and human error. To better understand digital threats, it’s crucial for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, corporate security teams, and cybersecurity experts to analyse regional contexts and their impact on illicit activities.”

The outfit says it traces criminals using 255 billion analyzed data points from the dark web, deep web and various hidden sources, including leaked databases, cybercriminals’ blogs and Telegram.

One differentiator from its competitors in the cybersecurity industry is its unique expertise in Asia-related threats, Kevin Yoo, chief operating officer (COO) at StealthMole, told TechCrunch. According to a report by Check Point Research, Asia witnessed the highest year-on-year surge in weekly cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2023 due to rapid digital transformation; the rise of the hybrid workforce and Asia’s manufacturing industry, like semiconductors that hold intellectual property, could be a target for cyber espionage.

“The high demand for Asia-oriented threat information underscores the uniqueness and value of our dataset for customers worldwide, within and beyond Asia,” Yoo said. 

Korea Investment Partners led the Series A round with participation from Hibiscus Fund (a joint venture between RHL Ventures, Penjana Kapital and KB Investment) and Smilegate Investment.

ZeroFox acquires dark web threat intelligence company Vigilante

Sixgill raises $15M to expand its dark web intelligence platform


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Orchard vision system turns farm equipment into AI-powered data collectors | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 5:01 AM0


Agricultural robotics are not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen systems that pick apples and berries, kill weeds, plant trees, transport produce and more. But while these functions are understood to be the core features of automated systems, the same thing is true here as it is across technology: It’s all about the data. A huge piece of any of these products’ value prop is the amount of actionable information their on-board sensors collect.

In a sense, Orchard Robotics’ system is cutting out the middle man. That’s not to say that there isn’t still a ton of potential value in automating these tasks during labor shortages, but the young startup’s system is lowering the barrier of entry with a sensing module that attaches to existing hardware like tractors and other farm vehicles.

While plenty of farmers are happy to embrace technologies that can potentially increase their yield and fill in roles that have been difficult to keep staffed, fully automated robotic systems can be too cost prohibitive to warrant taking the first step.

As the name suggests, Orchard is starting with a focus on apple crops. The system’s cameras can capture up to 100 images a second, recording information about every tree they pass. Then the Orchard OS software utilizes AI to build maps with the data collected. That includes every bud/fruit spotted on every tree, their distribution and even the hue of the apple.

“Our cameras image trees from bud to bloom to harvest, and use advanced computer vision and machine learning models we’ve developed to collect precise data about hundreds of millions of fruit,” says founder and CEO Charlie Wu. “This is a monumental step forward from traditional methods, which rely on manually collected samples of maybe 100 fruits.”

Mapped out courtesy of on-board GPS, farmers get a fuller picture of their crops’ success rate, down to the location and size of the tree, within a couple of inches. The firm was founded at Cornell University in 2022. Despite its young age, it has already begun testing the technology with farmers. Last season’s field testing has apparently been successful enough to drum up real investor interest.

This week, the Seattle-based firm is announcing a $3.2 million seed round, led by General Catalyst. Humba Ventures, Soma Capital, Correlation Ventures, VU Venture Partners and Genius Ventures also participated in the raise, which follows a previously unannounced pre-seed of $600,000.

Funding will go toward increasing headcount, R&D and accelerating Orchard’s go-to-market efforts.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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