Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Voice AI company ElevenLabs revealed new investors that are part of its $500 million Series D fundraise, which was first announced in February. The additions include institutions such as BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, and Schroders; enterprises like Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom; and individual investors such as Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk. The startup also noted that it surpassed $500 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue), after ending last year with nearly $350 million in ARR. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Mati Staniszewski, said last month that ElevenLabs added $100 million in net…

Many companies today provide AI simply as a chatbot inside their apps: You type in (or dictate) what you want it to do, and the AI bot goes and tries to do it. Still, the experience tends to feel clunky. A text-based UI doesn’t always translate to a smooth experience; for example, if you want to use a travel app to book an entire itinerary but have to scan through reams of text. According to the founders of CopilotKit, that approach doesn’t make the most of what AI agents and LLMs can do. The company’s co-founders, Atai Barkai (pictured above,…

Four days. That’s all that’s left to lock in one of the smartest advantages you can give yourself as a founder, investor, or operator right now. For the next four days only, you can buy one pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and get 50% off a second of the same ticket type. That window closes May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT. After that, prices go up, and you’ll pay more to bring a partner or colleague. Register here to get your plus-one pass at 50% off. Winning as a startup isn’t just about pitching Advancing from idea to IPO takes time, and how you spend that time can make a difference in whether you stall or scale. Many think it’s the pitch that…

Anthropic’s new technique for nabbing customers: Partner with the companies that own them. Loading audio narration… The AI giant is rolling out a consulting business with the help of Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman. That group will serve as the founding partners, but investing giants like General Atlantic, Apollo, and Sequoia Capital are also backers.BI’s Alex Nicoll and Reed Alexander have more on what one insider described as the “McKinsey of AI.”The company wants to work with everyone from community banks to mid-sized manufacturers who “stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources to build and…

Same story, different company. Loading audio narration… Crypto firm Coinbase is the latest company to shed staff, and the CEO Brian Armstrong’s memo to workers follows the same tried-and-tested format that its tech brothers and sisters in the same boat have used this year.Business Insider’s Dan DeFrancesco even joked about how cliché these letters have become in his newsletter earlier this month.”Today is a SAD ADJECTIVE day for us. We’re unfortunately saying goodbye to PERCENTAGE of our staff. This decision wasn’t easy to make, but it’s one that needed to be done to secure COMPANY NAME’S future,” DaFrancesco wrote, before laying out all…

Krutrim, India’s first GenAI unicorn, is shifting from AI model development to cloud services after months of relative quiet on product updates — a move that reflects the tougher economics of building large-scale AI systems. On Tuesday, Krutrim said it was moving toward cloud services, adding that the shift follows a business overhaul in late 2025 that included reallocating capital and talent and pausing chip design efforts. The update comes more than a year after the Bengaluru-based startup released its Krutrim-2 base model. The move follows a period of limited public activity from Krutrim, which has not made any significant…

Inworld AI rolled out a new AI voice model designed to make conversations with machines feel more human by understanding not just what users say but how they say it. Loading audio narration… The Mountain View-based startup’s latest system, Realtime TTS-2, analyzes vocal cues such as tone, pacing, and pitch to infer a speaker’s emotional state in real time. It then dynamically adjusts its own voice and delivery to create more natural, emotionally aware interactions (TTS stands for text-to-speech, a type of voice-based AI model).As AI voice models become more realistic, that could increase usage and engagement. While text-based models, AI…

The largest study ever of school cell phone bans finds that they offer decidedly mixed results, with teachers reporting fewer distractions when students lock their phones away during the school day, but little evidence the bans quickly bring improved academic achievement or better behavior, as many advocates have hoped.The study, by scholars at Stanford University, Duke University, The University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, compiled data from Yondr, a California startup that makes lockable pouches for schools, businesses and entertainment venues. Published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it looks at data from about 4,600 schools…

Lawyers have always been professional delegators. Loading audio narration… Partners give work to associates who hand down tasks to junior lawyers and paralegals. Winston Weinberg, the CEO of Harvey, thinks artificial intelligence agents are about to become the next link in that chain of command.That is the idea behind Harvey’s latest product push. The $11 billion legal software startup made its name with software that lets lawyers chat with documents and ask legal research questions. Now, Harvey is moving deeper into agents — software that uses AI to perform tasks on behalf of users.The company tells Business Insider exclusively it…

Employees working in Google DeepMind’s UK offices have voted to unionize over concerns about the company’s defense work with Israel and the Pentagon. Loading audio narration… If successful, DeepMind — which is central to Google’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence — would be the first frontier AI lab to unionize.In a letter sent to management on Tuesday and seen by Business Insider, employees in the DeepMind unit requested recognition of the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union.The vote to unionize comes days after the Pentagon confirmed it had signed deals with Google and a handful of other AI labs…