News about Silicon Valley business almost everyday.
ChatGPT has released its newest model called GPT-4o. GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with […]
Beginning on April 25, 2023, a series of violent armed robberies began occurring in the city of San Francisco. The robberies followed a similar modus operandi (M.O) in which the suspect listed an item for sale on an online marketplace, usually a vehicle for under $5,000, and arranged to meet with an interested buyer who […]
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office is investigating an armed robbery that occurred Tuesday afternoon outside of a gas station in unincorporated Redwood City. On Tuesday, May 14 at around 4:15 p.m., Sheriff’s deputies responded to the ARCO gas station located in the 1800 block of Woodside Rd. on a report of an armed robbery […]
CAMPBELL – WekaIO (WEKA), an AI-native data platform company, has raised $140 million in an oversubscribed Series E funding round comprised of a combined primary and secondary transaction led by Valor Equity Partners, a previous investor in the company. Under the terms of the deal, Valor’s founder, CEO and Chief Investment Officer, Antonio Gracias, will […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Harness, operator of a software delivery platform, has raised $150 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a division of First Citizens Bank, and Hercules Capital, Inc. (NYSE: HTGC). The investment will be used strategically to support the expansion of the Harness platform, including the addition of new modules, further integrating generative AI into […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Vercel, operator of a Frontend Cloud platform, has secured $250 million in Series E funding at a valuation of $3.25 billion. The investment round was led by existing investor Accel, with participation from other existing investors including CRV, GV, Notable Capital (previously GGV Capital), Bedrock, Geodesic Capital, Tiger Global, 8VC, and SV […]
Emily Reuter has been promoted at Instacart from VP of Finance to be the new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Reuter has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Yale and an MBA from Stanford. Instacart CEO talked about Emily’s promotion in a company memo: Before Instacart, Emily spent nearly a decade at Uber, where she […]
Apple and Google are working together to create an industry specification — Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers — for Bluetooth tracking devices that makes it possible to alert users across both iOS and Android if such a device is unknowingly being used to track them. This will help mitigate the misuse of devices designed to help keep […]
PALO ALTO, CA – Police arrested two suspects this weekend after they committed robberies of United States Postal Service mail carriers in Belmont and Palo Alto, and then led officers on a vehicle pursuit in a stolen car before crashing into a tree and fleeing on foot. Police recovered two airsoft pistols and the stolen property. The […]
ATLANTA – Barbara Furlow-Smiles, a former diversity program manager at Facebook and Nike, has been sentenced for stealing more than $5 million based on an elaborate scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fictitious paperwork, and cash kickbacks. “Furlow-Smiles shamelessly violated her position of trust as a DEI executive at Facebook to steal millions from the company utilizing […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Sigma, a cloud analytics solution, has raised $200 million in Series D financing to continue transforming BI through its innovations in AI infrastructure, data application development, enterprise-wide collaboration, and business user adoption. Spark Capital and Avenir Growth Capital co-led the round with additional investments from new investor NewView Capital. All previous investors participated […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Gorgias, a customer experience (CX) platform used by more than 15,000 ecommerce brands, announced $29 million in Series C-2 funding from existing investors. The new funding was led by SaaStr and Alven, with participation from Horsley Bridge, Amplify, Shopify, Sapphire, CRV and Transpose Platform. Sunil Dhaliwal from Amplify has also been added […]