Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of the companies chasing that bet is Sandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi about…
AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of the companies chasing that bet is Sandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi about…
Europe’s favorite vibe-coding startup Lovable has confirmed previously reported whispers that it was raising another mega round at a $13.3 billion valuation. Lovable said on Wednesday that it has raised $400 million in a Series C round led by Menlo Ventures and the Scaleup Europe Fund, with more than a dozen other investors participating. This new funding comes after Lovable hit $500 million in annualized run rate revenue in June, the startup told TechCrunch. Its previous round, announced in December, brought in $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation and was also led by Menlo Ventures, with CapitalG as co-lead.…
When VideoVerse announced its acquisition in September 2025, it felt like a victory for startups across India. VideoVerse was a simple clipping service, but after years of startup incubators and pitching clients, the company had pulled off a $250 million exit. The acquirer was Minute Media, an international sports publisher split between New York and Tel Aviv, with plans to scale VideoVerse’s clipping software beyond its Indian niche and into the lucrative world of international sports. Less than a year after the announcement, the deal has unraveled. Investors are still waiting for their share of the $250 million windfall, and…
On a hot August afternoon, wool expert Brent Roeder strode among sheep, combing his fingers through their fleece to assess color, length and uniformity. Roeder, an extension specialist at Montana State University, tends to the college-owned flock at an old off-campus cavalry barracks called the Fort Ellis Research and Teaching Farm. The flock exists to give agriculture students hands-on experience. That includes learning how to raise high-quality sheep for sales like the one in Miles City that Roeder plans to take six animals to this September.“You’re taking your best of your best,” Roeder said. Roeder is on a mission to…
Google is holding its Made by Google 2026 event on Wednesday, unveiling the Pixel 11 series, the Pixel Watch 5, and even a competitor to Apple’s AirTag. The tech giant also used the event to show off new Gemini-powered features across its devices. Gemini gets more useful on Pixel Google spent a good portion of the event talking about Gemini and other AI features coming to its devices. One of the more notable accessibility updates is an expansion of “Live Transcribe” to support American Sign Language. Using the Pixel Camera, users can have sign language translated into text, giving people…
Although OpenAI still straggles behind Anthropic in a closely watched measure of AI adoption among businesses, there’s a spark of hope for CEO Sam Altman’s company.OpenAI has an advantage over its rival’s priciest and most advanced model, according to new data from Ramp’s AI Index. The data shows that Anthropic’s Fable 5 model generated 75% as much spend as OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model did in July, indicating that Anthropic’s top model was less popular among businesses. As Anthropic retains its lead in business adoption, weaker demand for top-end AI could ring alarm bells about customers’ spending restraint.Ramp, a financial technology…
CMOs: Get ready to field more sales pitches from Nielsen.The TV ratings giant surprised the ad industry by announcing plans to buy DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion — and sent chins wagging with hot takes about the implications.At stake: trustworthy data.CMOs depend on data to craft their strategies, but it’s often patchy and unreliable. That’s why they need credible auditors to double-check — or double-verify, if you will — those numbers. For CMOs, this deal could simplify audience measurement and ad verification, but consolidation would mean greater concentration of power under Nielsen and one fewer independent player.Eric Salama, former CEO of…
SpaceX is joining the new AI gold rush: employee data.In a company all-hands, Elon Musk told staff that SpaceX plans to train its Grok AI on the company’s data, including contributions from staff. This type of data has become a valuable commodity for tech companies training AI agents to use computers and perform real-world tasks.”We’re going to be training Grok on the sum total of all SpaceX information,” Musk told employees in a video of the all-hands posted on X on Tuesday.”So in a way, it will be trained on you,” he added.The world’s richest man reiterated concerns he has…
Security-compliance software startup Vanta wants to become known as a “trust company” that can also have a bit of fun. It’s entrusting a new CMO to get it there.Vanta has promoted its VP of marketing, Sarah Scharf, to CMO, the company exclusively told CMO Insider.In an interview, Scharf said the two tasks at the top of her to-do list are to solidify the Vanta brand’s association with trust among its clients and potential customers, and to reinvent how the company gets marketing done internally in the age of AI.”How can we capture the moment and also reposition Vanta in a…