Start-ups

Electricity demand is booming on account of AI. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, as cloud service providers expand to meet the demand for AI infrastructure. Assuming the current trend holds, U.S. utilities will need to invest around $50 billion in power generation capacity to support all the upgraded — and new — AI-running data centers.

The amount of waste produced by the construction industry adds up to more than a third of the overall waste produced each year in the European Union. And it’s no better in the U.S. Stateside, the construction industry produces more than double the waste that households do each year. Sensorita wants to help the construction industry reduce its waste by fixing what Sensorita co-founder and CEO Ulrikke Lien considers to be the root of the

A group of senators has banded together to urge Synapse’s owners and bank and fintech partners to “immediately restore customers’ access to their money.” As part of their demands, the senators implicated both the partners and investors of the company as being responsible for missing customer funds. In a letter shared publicly on Monday, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, along with Senators Ron Wyden

Afloat, a gift delivery app that lets you shop from local stores and have gifts delivered to a loved one on the same day, is now available across the U.S. The startup announced on Monday that it is rolling out its service nationwide after previously only being available in select cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, Charleston, Fort Worth, Kansas City, Nashville and Wichita, among others. The startup was founded by Sarah-Allen Preston after she experienced the stress

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SmartHR, a cloud-based human resources and labor management software startup, said on Monday that it has raised $140 million in a funding round led by KKR and Teachers’ Ventures Growth, an investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, with participation from existing investors. The Series E round, which comes three years after the company raised a $142.5 million (15.6 billion JPY) Series D at a valuation of $1.6 billion, is the latest indicator that investors

When Til Klein and Jochen Beutgen came across Gaingels, the U.S.-based syndicate of angel investors backing LGBTQ+ founders, they wondered why there wasn’t a firm looking to do the same for the European LGBTQ+ startup community. Five years later, when a firm like that still didn’t exist, Klein and Beutgen decided they should try to launch one themselves. In 2023, the pair launched Identity.vc, a venture firm that invests in early-stage companies with at least

We live in a very different world since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. With global military expenditure reaching $2.4 trillion last year, startups are hoping to get a share of the pie, and formerly reluctant investors are keen to help them do so. The U.S. budget is by far the largest, with contracts worth $53 billion to major tech firms between 2019 and 2022. But the

Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the ecommerce giant. Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, along with Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot and other Adept employees. Adept isn’t closing up shop, however.

There are plenty of resources to learn English, but not so many for near-native speakers who still want to improve their fluency. That description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and this is what inspired them to create Fluently. Making use of AI, Fluently operates as a coach that gives users feedback and tips on their spoken English. This makes it akin to ELSA and its AI speech tutor, as well as online and offline