Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Hello, and welcome to TechCrunch PM! When you're done making an avatar of yourself on Microsoft's new Designer app, check out all the money spent on the first day of Amazon Prime Day, the myriad venture fund announcements, and why the U.K.'s AI bill is not ready yet. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft's Designer makes its debut: Microsoft's AI-powered Designer app came out of preview and is now available to all users on iOS and Android. With it, you can generate images and designs with text prompts to create things like stickers, greeting cards, invitations and collages. Even more fun are all the emojis, clip art, wallpapers, monograms and avatars. Read more

First time for everything: When Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale launched AI talent and services company Tribe AI in 2019, they had to convince companies that having an AI strategy mattered. After the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and the AI mania it ushered in, the startup has experienced a "massive boom" in demand. Six years of bootstrapping later, the company raised its first round of venture capital, a $3.25 million seed round led by Bryce Roberts, the founding partner at Indie. Read more

What did you buy on Prime Day? I don't usually see much to purchase on Amazon Prime Day, but the fact that U.S. buyers found $7.2 billion worth of things gives me some FOMO. All that buying on the first day came in at 11.7% year-on-year growth. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

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Tricentis acquires Sealights: Two testing automation companies separately walk into a bar and leave together. For its part, Sealights continuously checks if any code has changed and maps tests to those changes. Tricentis will integrate that and other capabilities so that its users have what it calls "AI-enabled quality intelligence." Read more

Hola, soy tu DJ: Spotify's AI DJ feature is now bilingual. The AI guide introduces personalized song selections, in Spanish if you so choose, and goes by the name "Livi." Read more

Rules and regulations: There had been rumors the U.K.'s shiny new-in-post Labour government would commit to introducing a dedicated artificial intelligence bill today as it unveiled its full legislation program amid the pomp of the state opening of parliament. Nothing yet! Read more

Money, money, money

Image Credits: ArtemisDiana / Getty Images

Solving supply chain management: It's a sector that remains a stubborn problem — dare we say logistical nightmare? — for many mid-market companies that can't afford SAP or lack sufficient IT resources to manage a complex program. Didero, an early-stage startup, decided to build an AI-fueled tool to make it easier on them. And now it has $7 million to help. Read more

LLMs to the rescue: Shaped, which raised $8 million in fresh capital, wants to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to combine the data they already have with large language models and other recommendation systems to offer a personalized user experience. It's worth noting that Shaped is a developer-first platform. With that, its customers gain a high level of flexibility, including choosing data sources, integration methods, language models (e.g., Llama, CLIP, BERT) and scoring mechanisms for recommendations and search results. Read more

Disrupting deepfakes: The threat of deepfakes is growing as the AI tools to create them become widely accessible. As such, this trend continues to be a windfall for companies that market tools to defend against deepfakes and technologies used to produce them. One of those companies is Pindrop, which secured a $100 million, five-year loan from Hercules Capital. Read more

Breathe and reboot: A new app called The Way is aiming to help people explore the deeper side of meditation through a single, structured path guided by an authorized Zen master. Founded by uncle-and-nephew duo Henry Shukman and Jack Shukman, The Way wants to help people move beyond modern mindfulness practices offered by popular meditation apps like Headspace and Calm, and guide them deeper into the teaching of millennia-old meditation traditions. Oh, and investors like it, too, giving the company $1.4 million in new funding. Read more

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Around the web 🌐

Apple delays this iPhone feature — again: 9to5Mac reports that the consumer tech giant is pausing the proposed new resin-coated copper components in the iPhone. This one change would help save internal space for the iPhone. Read more

General Motors to make more Cadillac Escalades: Yes, and the gas-powered ones at that. Confused? Don't be. It's actually the carmaker's plan to better align the V-Series with one of GM's all-electric Escalades that's coming up. CNBC has more