Category: Startup

Vestwell secures $125M in funding to assist companies in enhancing workplace savings plans.

Vestwell, a provider of workplace savings program infrastructure, recently secured $125 million in a funding round termed “preempted.” Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the funding round included both returning investors, like Fin Capital and Primary Venture Partners, and newcomers Blue Owl and HarbourVest. While the New York-based fintech company chose not to disclose its valuation, it’s notable that Justin Overdorff from Lightspeed has joined Vestwell’s board as part of the investment.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Aaron Schumm, Vestwell launched its cloud-native platform in 2017 and has since accumulated $227.5 million in total funding. Schumm, without specifying exact revenue, revealed substantial growth to TechCrunch, highlighting a 1000% revenue increase over three years and plans to double annual recurring revenue and volume in 2023.

Vestwell, serving over a million users across 300,000 businesses, facilitates savings programs through partnerships with financial institutions, state governments, and payroll companies, profiting from monthly fees. The company offers a broad range of savings solutions, including retirement and health programs, and has notably become a dominant force in state auto-IRA savings programs, powering the majority in the US.

The recent funding will fuel further expansion of state savings initiatives, product enhancements, and potential acquisitions, as evidenced by their recent acquisition of Gradifi from Morgan Stanley. With a team that has grown significantly over the past year, Vestwell continues to build its market position, backed by its investors’ confidence and recognition as a leading innovator in the savings sector.

Medallion, a platform dedicated to enabling artists to engage directly with their audience, secures $13.7 million in funding

Medallion is carving out a niche as a comprehensive digital platform tailored for artists, providing them with a dedicated hub to promote albums, tours, merchandise, and exclusive content. The intent is to cultivate deeper connections with fans by offering a suite of tools for managing digital collectibles, early access to content, and direct engagement opportunities. The company announced a significant milestone, securing $13.7 million in Series A funding, co-led by notable firms Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, which underscores the industry’s recognition of the platform’s potential to revolutionize artist-fan interactions.

The platform is designed to address a growing need among artists for more autonomy and direct ownership over their relationships with fans, circumventing the complexities and limitations of third-party platforms. Medallion’s artist-centric approach is evident in its features that allow for selling of exclusive digital and physical merchandise, including innovative offerings like “Digital Deluxe” albums. This particular feature, available in the U.K., Australia, and Germany, allows artists to sell digital versions of albums complete with embedded players and exclusive media. As a blockchain-based platform, Medallion offers security and ease of use, allowing sign-ins through various wallet providers and offering a customizable, white-label space for artists to make their own.

Medallion’s strategy is not just about technology but also community building. The platform is currently used by a select group of 20 artists, including names like Greta Van Fleet and Disclosure, and is focused on expanding its reach. The team, comprised of veterans from across the tech, e-commerce, and music industries, is dedicated to refining the platform’s features and ensuring it meets the evolving needs of artists and fans alike. The company’s gradual expansion plan indicates a commitment to quality and sustainable growth, with wider availability projected for the coming years.

In sum, Medallion represents a significant shift in the music industry, positioning artists at the forefront of their digital strategy and offering fans more immersive and interactive ways to support and engage with their favorite musicians. With its recent funding and ambitious plans for expansion, Medallion is poised to play a critical role in shaping the future of artist-to-fan connections.

The AI-powered NotebookLM note-taking application from Google is now accessible to users residing in the United States.

Google has officially made its AI note-taking app accessible to all users in the United States who are at least 18 years old, as disclosed by the company on Friday. This experimental app is also undergoing significant enhancements and now leverages Gemini Pro, Google’s new extensive language model, to assist with document comprehension and logical reasoning.

Upon uploading documents to NotebookLM, the application can automatically generate summaries and propose follow-up inquiries regarding the document’s content. Unlike conventional chatbots that draw from vast and unrelated information sources, NotebookLM concentrates solely on the documents it receives.

Google is now introducing additional functionalities to the product, moving beyond just producing summaries and suggesting queries. NotebookLM is equipped with new tools aimed at aiding users in structuring their curated notes into organized writing projects. For instance, users can select a group of notes and instruct NotebookLM to create something fresh, like a script outline, an email newsletter, or a marketing plan draft.

Furthermore, NotebookLM can now propose actions based on your ongoing tasks. For instance, if you’ve highlighted a passage while reading a source, NotebookLM will proactively offer to summarize the selected text into a new note or help you grasp the content’s meaning. In another scenario, if you’re composing a note, NotebookLM will offer to refine your writing or suggest related ideas from your sources based on your current content.

To enhance user experience, Google is introducing a new noteboard space where you can conveniently pin quotes from your conversations or your self-authored notes. This addition was in response to user requests for the ability to save interactions with NotebookLM as notes.

Google is also implementing some minor adjustments to the product. When adding a note, NotebookLM will now create an independent new note instead of adding it to a single notepad. Additionally, clicking on a citation number in a chat response or saved note will instantly take you to the original quote in the source.

For users who prefer a focused note-taking experience, NotebookLM allows you to hide the source. If you wish to direct NotebookLM’s AI towards specific sources, you can engage with a chosen set of sources individually in the source sidebar. Furthermore, Google is introducing support for PDFs and copied text, enabling users to copy and paste text to create a new source and edit its title once it’s generated.

In addition to these new features, Google is extending the product’s capabilities, allowing notebooks to include up to 20 sources and a source to accommodate up to 200,000 words.

This announcement follows approximately five months after Google initially introduced NotebookLM to a select group of users. Initially showcased as Project Tailwind during Google I/O earlier in the year, Google marketed it as an “AI notebook for everyone,” with applications for students to organize lecture notes and coursework documents.

While NotebookLM holds promise, it remains to be seen whether it will avoid the fate of many of Google’s experimental projects consigned to the “Google Graveyard,” as previously highlighted by TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway.

San Francisco startup MaintainX raises $50 million for industrial AI.

MaintainX, a startup based in San Francisco that specializes in industrial maintenance software, discreetly revealed on Wednesday that it has successfully secured $50 million in a Series C funding round. The funding was led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), a prominent investor in growth-stage enterprises, and it placed a valuation of $1 billion on the company. This achievement marks MaintainX as the latest addition to the prestigious unicorn club for the current year. The infusion of capital will be instrumental in fueling MaintainX’s expansion efforts in research and development, bolstering its artificial intelligence capabilities, and broadening its customer base.

Established in 2018, MaintainX offers a mobile platform that empowers frontline workers to engage with their supervisors, monitor tasks, access manuals and checklists, and promptly report issues. Additionally, the platform aggregates and assesses data from diverse sources, including sensors, equipment usage, and parts inventory, to provide valuable insights and recommendations aimed at enhancing operational efficiency and reducing downtime.

Currently, MaintainX’s software is embraced by over 6,500 clients across a wide spectrum of industries encompassing manufacturing, energy, hospitality, and food and beverage. Notable customers include Duracell, Marriott, Volvo, AB InBev, McDonald’s, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In an exclusive conversation with VentureBeat, Chris Turlica, the CEO and co-founder of MaintainX, articulated the company’s vision of forging a “zero-downtime future” for industrial operations. This ambitious goal hinges on leveraging artificial intelligence and real-time data sets to preemptively identify and mitigate potential breakdowns and operational challenges.

Turlica also underscored the company’s commitment to catering to the preferences of a new generation of frontline professionals and procurement managers who prioritize user-friendly and intuitive software solutions. He noted that the industrial sector is undergoing a transformation where the decision-makers are no longer traditional IT professionals but instead, frontline workers, plant managers, and maintenance supervisors who seek software that is easy to deploy, integrate, and use.

Merritt Hummer, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures who spearheaded the investment and joined MaintainX’s board of directors, expressed admiration for the company’s growth, product quality, and high customer satisfaction. She characterized MaintainX as one of the standout emerging growth-stage firms, citing the exceptional founding team, expansive market potential, and impressive track record as driving factors behind her enthusiasm.

Hummer also highlighted the potential synergy between Bain Capital Ventures, with its portfolio of more than 400 companies, and MaintainX. She emphasized the opportunity to introduce MaintainX’s software to their existing industrial and manufacturing companies, potentially facilitating further growth.

The industrial maintenance sector, estimated at over $49 billion globally by Allied Market Research, is witnessing a rising demand for software solutions that optimize workflows, reduce costs, and ensure compliance. The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies in the sector, emphasizing the importance of such solutions.

MaintainX, competing with players like UpKeep, Fiix, and eMaint, has experienced a remarkable revenue growth, surging 13-fold since its previous funding round in 2021, when it secured $39 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This substantial funding infusion underscores investor confidence in MaintainX’s mission and its ability to leverage artificial intelligence for industrial maintenance transformation. The participation of prominent business figures such as former GE CEO Jeff Immelt further underscores MaintainX’s traction.

In a landscape shaped by artificial intelligence and big data, MaintainX’s focus on these areas positions the company favorably in the marketplace. With its mission to reduce operational downtime through AI, MaintainX is poised to disrupt the industrial maintenance sector in a significant manner.

Meta AI introduces ‘Seamless’ translator enabling instant cross-language communication.

Meta AI researchers unveiled their latest achievement on Thursday, introducing a groundbreaking suite of artificial intelligence models known as “Seamless Communication.” These models are designed to facilitate more natural and authentic cross-language communication, effectively bringing the concept of a Universal Speech Translator into reality. This week, the research team made these models available to the public, alongside comprehensive research papers and associated data.

The flagship model, aptly named “Seamless,” amalgamates the capabilities of three other models: SeamlessExpressive, SeamlessStreaming, and SeamlessM4T v2, into a unified system. As outlined in the research paper, Seamless marks a significant milestone as “the first publicly accessible system that enables expressive cross-lingual communication in real-time.”

Understanding How Seamless Operates as a Universal Real-time Translator The Seamless translator signifies a pioneering advancement in the realm of AI-assisted communication across borders. It harnesses the power of three sophisticated neural network models to facilitate real-time translation across over 100 spoken and written languages, all while preserving the speaker’s vocal style, emotions, and prosody.

SeamlessExpressive’s primary focus is on safeguarding the speaker’s vocal style and emotional subtleties during language translation. As articulated in the research paper, “Translations should capture the nuances of human expression. While existing translation tools excel at conveying the content of a conversation, they typically rely on monotonous, robotic text-to-speech systems for their output.”

SeamlessStreaming takes the lead in offering nearly instantaneous translations, with a mere two seconds of latency. According to the researchers, it stands as the “first massively multilingual model” to deliver such rapid translation speeds across almost 100 spoken and written languages.

The third model, SeamlessM4T v2, serves as the cornerstone for the other two models. It represents an upgraded iteration of the original SeamlessM4T model released the previous year. This novel architecture enhances the “consistency between text and speech output,” as highlighted in the research paper.

“In summary, Seamless offers us a crucial glimpse into the technical underpinnings essential for transforming the Universal Speech Translator from a mere science fiction concept into a tangible real-world technology,” noted the researchers.

The Potential to Revolutionize Global Communication

These models’ capabilities have the potential to usher in new voice-based communication experiences, ranging from real-time multilingual conversations using smart glasses to automatically dubbed videos and podcasts. The researchers also envision these models breaking down language barriers for immigrants and others grappling with communication challenges.

The research paper states, “By openly sharing our work, we aspire to empower researchers and developers to extend the impact of our contributions by crafting technologies aimed at bridging multilingual connections in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.”

Nonetheless, the researchers acknowledge the potential misuse of this technology for voice phishing scams, deep fakes, and other harmful purposes. To ensure safety and responsible usage of the models, they have implemented various measures, including audio watermarking and novel techniques to minimize problematic outputs.

Models Now Publicly Available on Hugging Face In alignment with Meta’s commitment to open research and collaboration, the Seamless Communication models have been made accessible to the public on platforms such as Hugging Face and Github. This collection encompasses the Seamless, SeamlessExpressive, SeamlessStreaming, and SeamlessM4T v2 models, accompanied by relevant metadata.

Meta’s objective in providing these state-of-the-art natural language processing models to the public is to foster collaboration among fellow researchers and developers, allowing them to build upon and expand this work in order to connect people across diverse languages and cultures. This release underscores Meta’s leadership in the domain of open source AI, offering a valuable new resource for the global research community.

“In conclusion,” the researchers affirm, “the multifaceted experiences that Seamless may enable have the potential to revolutionize the landscape of machine-assisted cross-lingual communication.”

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