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Robotic Automations

Devastated by his image being posted to a porn site, this founder hit on an AI startup idea | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 3:42 PM0


Realising that a former partner had, unbeknownst to him, put previously private, intimate videos of them onto a porn site, tech founder Dan Purcell felt devastated. He resolved to come up with a solution to help prevent such violations happening again. His Ceartas startup has now raised $4.5 million in a Seed round from European VC Earlybird, as well as Upside VC, a fund established by The Sidemen, the YouTube influencer group.

Ceartas DMCA, was founded in 2021 by Purcell (CEO) and Jonny Smyth (CTO), to apply AI to brand protection and anti-piracy services for content creators and brands.

It does this by de-indexing content and automatically issuing legal notices for pirated content.

Leveraging it’s own proprietary AI platform, the company scans digital platforms to identify and eliminate unauthorised content, including deepfakes.

The platform claims to significantly the problematic content’s visibility on Google by 98%. It also claims to be able to tackle deepfakes.

Based out of Dublin and Berlin, the company plans to open an office in Los Angeles office and ha now signed partnerships with platforms such as OnlyFans and Fanfix, (a content monetization platform for creators),

Over a call, Purcell told me: “I was dating a girl who was in the tech industry, and she asked me if I wanted to make some personal videos with her. About four or five years later, they all ended up on the internet, and I was the last one to find out,” he told me. “My then girlfriend slide her phone across the counter to me with the videos on the phone. It was pretty horrible.”

He looked into services that could help but most were aimed at large enterprises rather than creators.

“There wasn’t really anything out there to help individuals. So being an engineer, I built something myself… It will then send a legal copyright notice under the DMCA. So that’s how it started us inception back in 2020. A year later, the content creator economy was booming and the app took off.”

He told me that right now it’s aimed at YouTubers and Instagramers, but “as we move into enterprise we will be facilitating the service to take care of physical goods, such as counterfeit merchandise. We’ve used the content creators to build out that model, essentially, build up a data set.”

“Our service is fully automated. It’s powered by AI. And when we look at the Google transparency reports, which I believe was forwarded over to you, you can see [other platforms] have a much lower success rate overall. This can put the content creator into a difficult legal situation because you can get into trouble by sending the wrong DMCA notices.

He added that the firm has a provisional patent on the model as it doesn’t rely on any third party technology.

As well as working with influencer like the Sidemen, they are also working with physical goods brands that put their content onto social media.

The startup chose to work with Earlybird, said Purcell, because it had been pro-actively looking for a company in this brand protection space. : “We didn’t actually go out and pitch them they actually found us.. They’d been researching this since 2019. And they couldn’t find anybody who could scale it monetize it.. So when we pitched them, they pitched us back. We really felt that these guys understood the problem, because they’re very technical and data focused.

Andre Retterath, Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, added in a statement: “Across media and the entertainment industry, individuals and enterprises alike are facing unprecedented piracy challenges… Training modern AI large language models (LLM) also opened the floodgates for the use and dissemination of unauthorised content.”

However, Ceartas is not the only player in this space. It has four main competitors in the brand protection space:

Rulta is a platform for protecting digital content and brand copyright infringements, which is used by Twitch, OnlyFans, Twitter/X and Patreon, among others. BranditScan is another which offers similar services.

In the B2B brand protection space space, Red Points out of Barcelona has raised $106.6 million, while Vobile, which caters to large enterprises in movies and TV content, has raised $181.6M.

All companies which submit DMCA notices, especially to Google, are publicly identified and scored based on the accuracy of the removal. This information is part of a public repository called the Google Transparency Report, and also the Lumen Database. On Google Web (they don’t score image removals), Ceartas is listed as attaing 90 to 100% of URLs delisted.

On Google’s transparency index, Rulta is at 63%, BranditScan at 54%, Red Points at 31%, and Vobile at 42%.

These numbers suggest that the AI-driven approach is likely to take over from older de-listing methods in the near future.

Ceartas’ claim is that it automates the de-listing process and can identify deepfakes quickly.

Purcell said: “We’ve essentially built out our own dataset using ML. The AI is contextually aware… The AI will go look at the page. It’ll use things like optical character recognition to look at watermarks, face recognition… are people leaving disparaging comments or sexualized comments. If it’s above 90%, it will automatically send a legal notice. If it’s under 90%. It goes to a copyright specialist for a manual review….The legal notices are written by lawyers. We work with a law firm in LA called Morrison Cooper.”

The recent funding round also draws backing from new angels: Thomas Hesse (former President of Sony Music), Andrej Henkler (10x Founders), Michele Attisani & Niccolo Maisto (Faceit), and Ryan Morrison (Evolved Talent/Morrisson Cooper), among others from the gaming, content creation, music, and television sectors.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: How Headspin's founder fraudsters almost get away with lying to investors | TechCrunch

April 23, 2024 11:07 PM0


News that the former founder of HeadSpin is headed to prison for fraud was further evidence that the last boom in the paired worlds of startup and venture capital led to more than just a little bit of fraud. Manish Lachwani, founder in question, is getting prison time and a massive fine for lying to investors, lies that allowed his company to raise nine-figures worth of funding.

The company persists, and would likely prefer to let the entire situation fade from the public eye. Fair enough, but the tale of Lachwani — the New York Times reports that Lachwani inflated “HeadSpin’s revenue nearly fourfold, making false claims about its customers and creating fake invoices to cover it up” — is not an isolated case.

Even past the somewhat dated frauds at Theranos and Rothenberg Ventures, there’s been a lot to cover lately. From investor complaints about Bolt’s fundraising, to BloomTech, Nikola, Binance, and FTX, we’ve seen a lot of financial shenanigans. Why are we seeing so much fraud and related behavior from upstart tech companies?

Pace, in a sense. A historically abnormal period of low interest rates, capital hungry for yield flooded into the venture capital world. As a result, investors got very busy with their checkbooks and sometimes spent less time on diligence. Recall that many very young startups are more ideas and potential than hard assets and historical cash flows, so what counts as diligence for a PE firm looking to buy, say, gas stations, is different than doing diligence on a Seed-stage startup. But capital poured into late-stage startups too, leading to a lot of capital moving very quickly. Mistakes were made, or, put another way, some founders saw the boom time as a period in which they could bend the rules.

One thing to keep in mind is that as a market reaches its peak, you will often see fraud explode. Consider it a top warning. Hit play, let’s talk about it!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

A humanoid robot is on its way from Mobileye founder | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 4:31 PM0


Mentee Robotics hasn’t been in stealth, exactly. The Israeli firm caught a small wave of press at the tail end of 2022, following Tesla’s initial humanoid robotics announcement. As that was the year of the startup’s founding, it didn’t have much to show off at the time. Even so, the firm caught some headlines because its co-founder and chair, Amnon Shashua, founded Mobileye and the well-funded AI firm, AI21 Labs.

On Wednesday, however, the company offered up a glimpse of Menteebot, its own stab at the rapidly growing humanoid category. In its current form, the system certainly represents a dramatically different approach than others on the market. In fact, this is one of those spots where the precise definition of what constitutes a humanoid system gets blurred.

It’s worth noting here that the robot on display is very much a prototype — albeit one its creators believe has made sufficient progress to justify a public debut after two years in stealth. Given Shashua’s resume, two things are predictably front and center with Menteebot: computer vision and generative AI.

“We are on the cusp of a convergence of computer vision, natural language understanding, strong and detailed simulators, and methodologies on and for transferring from simulation to the real world,” the founder says in a release. “At Mentee Robotics we see this convergence as the starting point for designing the future general-purpose bi-pedal robot that can move everywhere (as a human) with the brains to perform household tasks and learn through imitation tasks it was not previously trained for.”

Image Credits: Mentee Robotics

Undoubtedly, perception and reasoning are two key pillars that are going to drive the evolution of the category, and Mentee has a lot going for it, with regard to pedigree. In addition to Shashua, the founding team is rounded out by CEO and former Facebook AI Research director Lior Wolf and Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and current Mobileye CTO. That team, in part, has helped the firm raise $17 million, thus far, led by Ahren Innovation Capital.

Mentee looks to be casting a very wide net to start, looking at both the industrial and home markets. Makers of humanoids will generally tell you that the home is somewhere way down the road map. Warehouse and factories are the first stop, given the need for additional labor, and the fact that they’ve got deeper pockets than most consumers and the more structured environments offered by industrial settings.

For now, the company is showcasing how AI models can help the system work through tasks.

Mentee notes:

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for interpreting commands and “thinking through” the required steps for completing the task. An emphasis is placed on the ability to integrate locomotion and dexterity, i.e., dynamically balancing the robot when carrying weights or reaching out with the hands.

Mentee expects to release a production-ready prototype toward the beginning of 2025.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

SOSV founder says climate investing is a 'war effort' as firm closes $306M fund | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 7:06 PM0


For the firm that calls itself “the first check in deep tech,” the last check for SOSV’s latest $306 million fund took a bit longer than founder Sean O’Sullivan would have liked. That’s probably less a reflection on the firm than an indictment of the macroeconomic environment: Ask any VC, and they’ll tell you the last couple years haven’t been the best time to fundraise.

“Given our track record, our rates of return, the proven successes, all the unicorns that have come out of SOSV in the past, you’d imagine we’d have closed it in three months,” O’Sullivan told TechCrunch in a recent interview. Instead, it took about a year and a half, with the most concerted effort occurring in the last six months, according to O’Sullivan.

“The caution that’s out there in the marketplace is the highest we’ve ever seen,” he said.

Despite the arduous and lengthy process, SOSV still managed to hit a new milestone:

At $306 million, the new fund makes it one of the largest pools of early stage deep tech venture capital to be raised in recent years.

“We’re concentrating and double doubling down on deep tech,” O’Sullivan said. “That concentration allows us to deal with an ever-expanding opportunity set inside of climate because there are so many industries in climate.”

The market’s caution is a reality of high interest rates, but to O’Sullivan, it’s also a sign that deep tech investing isn’t moving fast enough. Many investors have realized that the economy-wide effects of climate change present a range of opportunities. For O’Sullivan, investing in the sector is an imperative as well.

“This is really a war effort. We have to stop pretending this is just another investment theme of the day. This is an existential crisis for the planet,” he said. “So we’re treating it with that intensity, and with that velocity, that we think the rest of the industry needs.”

Velocity and intensity could mean placing more bets than before, as some firms and accelerators are doing. O’Sullivan is taking the “less is more” approach.

“We see other people heading in a different direction, where they try to cover all the landscape with like 200 companies in a cohort,” he said. “Instead of the accelerator origin point, we’re more like a studio these days. We’re doing a fewer number of companies, more like 80 deep tech companies per year. And we’re concentrating more capital and more attention and more service on them.”

Continued focus on biology

O’Sullivan said that over a decade ago, during the days in which SOSV was more like an accelerator, only about 20% to 30% of the startups in its programs were able to find follow-on funding. That bothered him, and over the years he’s changed the firm’s approach, including opening the Hax and IndieBio programs, two SOSV programs that nurture deep tech startups by providing them space to build and experiment in addition to operational support.

The result, O’Sullivan said, is that 60% to 70% of companies now find funding after SOSV’s initial pre-seed checks, which range from $250,000 to $500,000. In general, every $100 million the firm invests in startups attracts around $2 billion in follow-on capital, he added.

SOSV’s new fund will continue the firm’s focus on human and planetary health, an emerging trend among deep tech investors who have recognized that the two areas are closely intertwined. O’Sullivan said that SOSV intends to invest about 70% of the funds in climate tech companies, 25% in health tech, and the remaining 5% will be reserved for opportunistic investments.

The limited partners who are involved in the new fund include a mix of family offices, institutional investors and corporate venture capital, the latter of which contributed 25% of the total capital.

“The reason it’s so high is because so many corporations are the ones that need these decarbonization technologies,” O’Sullivan said.

The firm will continue to search for startups with a range of technologies, from robotics to minerals and biomaterials to biomanufacturing. SOSV will still put a focus on those that are using biology to tackle climate change. O’Sullivan believes that, in many cases, biological processes will win out. “Biology can be 30 to 300 times — even 3,000 times — more efficient than chemistry in terms of reducing the greenhouse gas production of these systems.”

Climate “is really a physical world problem. To tackle that, you need a greater level of efficiency in your means of production,” O’Sullivan said. “We have a special place to serve because we do deep tech, because we do get into the biology, we do get into the chemistry, the physics and the electronics. And that is all necessary to change the means of production.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Byju's founder makes last-ditch attempt to placate disgruntled investors | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 12:22 PM0


Byju Raveendran, the founder of embattled edtech group Byju’s, has made a last-ditch attempt to placate the company’s disgruntled investors, who include Prosus Ventures. The company’s board is weighing an offer of renounced shares — shares that a group of investors chose not to buy recently in protest — to prevent the dilution of the investors’ holdings ahead of validating a recent rights issue that cuts the Indian startup’s valuation by 99%.

At stake is the future of Byju’s, once the most valuable startup in India and the face of the local ecosystem. The dispute between the Bengaluru-based startup and its investors stems from a rights issue that the startup initiated in late January, following a year-long struggle to raise funds.

Rights issues allow companies to raise capital by giving shareholders the opportunity to purchase additional shares at a discount, in proportion to their current stake. By not participating in the rights issue, the investors are risking getting their holdings in Byju’s diluted down to almost nothing.

Investors Prosus, Peak XV, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative didn’t participate in the rights issue, and are currently in a legal battle to remove Raveendran from the firm and invalidate the $200 million it raised through the rights issue. The investors reached an Indian company court earlier this year that ordered Byju’s to move the $200 million to an escrow account until the matters are resolved.

In an email to shareholders on Friday morning, a copy of which TechCrunch has reviewed, Raveendran said the startup’s board is contemplating making the offer to disgruntled investors despite the “animosity” they have displayed and their “uncalled for legal actions.”

Raveendran also informed the shareholders that the startup has already received over 50% of the votes required to increase the authorized share capital in the startup to bring into effect the fully-subscribed $200 million rights issue. Byju’s held an extraordinary general meeting on Friday, where it attempted to pass the resolution over the rights issue. The result of the rights issue won’t emerge until April 6, and the two parties are set to appear before the Indian company court again on April 4.

Byju’s is running against time even though it has slashed costs in recent quarters. Byju’s needs the capital raised from the rights issue to sustain its business operations. Resolving the ongoing dispute with its investors is also crucial for the company to initiate future fundraising efforts and maintain its financial stability.

“I have always built Byju’s with a spirit of equality and equity, and it has never been my intention to leave any investor behind, regardless of their shareholding size,” Raveendran wrote in the Friday email. “From the very inception of this company, my vision has been to take everyone along, from one milestone to another. And it has always been my conviction that we will overcome our challenges together.”

Prosus, Peak XV and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative abruptly resigned from Byju’s board last year over its governance practices, and Deloitte dropped the startup’s account. Prosus said last year that Byju’s did not “evolve sufficiently for a company of that scale,” and the Indian firm “disregarded advice and recommendations” from its backers.

Byju’s is still reeling from the consequences of its aggressive expansion strategy during the pandemic. The startup, which had amassed a valuation of $22 billion by early March 2022, spent more than $2.5 billion to acquire nearly a dozen startups around the world in a span of just two years. The company had grand ambitions of going public at a valuation exceeding $40 billion, but its plans were disrupted by the dramatic reversal in market sentiment following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Raveendran, for his part, has admitted that he made “mistakes” and is seeking another chance from his backers to correct course. “Even my critics know that I have invested my everything, and even more, into this company,” he wrote Friday. “So, I hope that you will see the value in continuing with Byju’s in the same spirit with which you first joined our journey.”

The story was updated with additional details.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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