In 2013, Nico Jaspers, who previously founded market research firm Dalia Research, began noticing a shift in consumer behavior: More people were easily reachable via their smartphones. He realized that phones could become a key way to reach people for product research purposes, opening the door to opportunities to hear new points of view. Armed […]
Google and Solo.io today announced the next evolution of the Istio service mesh. Dubbed the “Ambient Mesh,” this new framework does away with Istio’s sidecar-centric architecture and replaces it with a sidecar-less approach that promises to improve the service’s security posture and make it easier for new users to adopt the technology by reducing the […]
In recent years, there’s been an explosion in the usage of APIs — the interfaces that software apps use to communicate with each other. When asked to predict API usage in 2022 in a recent survey, 90.5% of developers responding said that they expect to use APIs more or the same as in 2021, while […]
Hebbia, a startup developing AI-infused search tools, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures with participation from Radical Ventures. Of note, among the investors was Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang (full disclosure: Yahoo! is TechCrunch’s parent company) and Raquel Urtasun, a former head of AI research at […]
Bond Pet Foods, known for making plant-based pet treats, is shifting its focus from treats to pet food applications as it leans into the creation of “nature-identical” chicken, beef, fish and other meat proteins using precision fermentation. Last November, Bond kicked this off by announcing a partnership with Hill’s Pet Nutrition to develop a craft […]
Getting prospective customers to answer sales calls and texts can feel like a Sisyphean task. According to a 2020 LinkedIn report, roughly 69% of prospects accepted a call from a new salesperson in the previous year, but it took an average of 18 calls to connect with the buyer. That’s not surprising — few folks […]
Uiflow, a company that enables teams to build frontend apps using their existing data, today announced that it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Addition, Transpose Platform and Together Fund — bringing the company’s total raised to $21 million. CEO Sol Eun told TechCrunch in an interview that the infusion will be […]
QA Wolf, a cloud-based platform designed to detect bugs in software, today exited stealth and announced a $20 million funding round led by Inspired Capital with participation from Notation Capital, Operator Partners and Thiel Capital and several angel investors (among them Peter Thiel). CEO Jon Perl tells TechCrunch that the new cash will go toward […]
For any journalist who has ever googled their name, or for anyone else who has ever googled a journalist’s name, there is a good chance that one of the top hits will be for Muck Rack, a database that trawls social media, online publications and other expanses of the internet to compile lists of people, […]
Is it possible to build a voice assistant for the call center that can pick up on indirect questions to figure out the best time to hand calls over to a human? That depends on how high the bar’s set. Generally speaking, customers don’t look forward to any automated experiences over the phone, which means […]