Frederic Lardinois, Author at TechCrunch

Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Google's new features include Gemini in BigQuery and Looker to help users with data engineering and analysis.

Lightrun launches its AI debugger to help developers fix their production code

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Lightrun also on Wednesday disclosed an $18 million SAFE round it raised last year, bringing Lightrun's total funding to date to $45 million.

Airtable acquihires onboarding startup Dopt for AI talent

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:30:00 +0000

Airtable today announced that it has acquired Dopt, a startup focused on helping other startups build product onboarding experiences for new users. Earlier this year, Dopt introduced a number of features that helped users add AI-based assistance tools to their respective services — those are the main reason Airtable is now acquiring the company. The […]

Real-time database startup ClickHouse acquires PeerDB to expand its Postgres support

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0000

ClickHouse has made a name for itself as a real-time data warehouse for large enterprises. Its customer list includes Deutsche Bank, eBay, Fastly, GitLab, HubSpot, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Spotify.

Vanta raises $150M Series C, now valued at $2.45B

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Vanta, a trust management platform that helps businesses automate much of their security and compliance processes, today announced that it has raised a $150 million Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The company is now valued at $2.45 billion, up from $1.6 billion in 2022 when it raised its $40 million Series B […]

Cyabra, a startup helping companies and governments detect disinformation, plans to go public via SPAC

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:51:21 +0000

The transaction values Cyabra at $70 million, and the company expects the merger to close by the end of the year.

Announcing the agenda for the SaaS Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

Frederic Lardinois, Ron Miller, Richard Smith — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Software as a service (SaaS) is an ever-evolving industry. We’ll talk to some of the sharpest minds and professionals in the industry — executives from early- and late-stage SaaS companies, leaders from the infrastructure companies that power the industry and the venture capitalists who fund them. Explore and enjoy, and we hope you’ll join us […]

Test automation platform Tricentis acquires SeaLights

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Tricentis, the well-funded test automation platform that helps developers find bugs in their code (now with the help of AI, of course), today announced that it has acquired SeaLights, a startup that makes the automated testing process more efficient by focusing only on the code that has changed. The two companies did not disclose the […]

Shaped raises $8M Series A and launches its self-serve recommendations and search service

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s an online marketplace, store or social media platform, virtually every site today uses some kind of recommendation service to personalize its offerings. Shaped, which is announcing an $8 million Series A funding round today, wants to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to combine the data they already have with large […]

With $6M in seed funding, Enso plans to bring AI agents to SMBs

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 13:01:00 +0000

Running a small business means doing more with less. AI agents can help, but building custom agents for specific workflows remains challenging, even with today’s low-code/no-code tools. The idea behind Enso — which came out of stealth by announcing a $6 million seed funding round Tuesday — is to give small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) […]

Retool expands its low-code platform for creating internal apps to support external apps, too

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Retool's focus is on business apps, not the next social network.

Nubank acquires AI-for-banks startup Hyperplane

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Hyperplane focused on allowing banks to train their own models to power tools across their risk, collections and marketing departments.

Creatio raises $200M at a $1.2B valuation for its no-code CRM and workflow platform

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Creatio CEO Katherine Kostereva argues that what sets her company apart is that it was always architected to work at an enterprise scale.

Notion Sites takes Notion sites up a level

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Popular productivity tool Notion has long allowed its users to make any of their pages public. Now, the company is expanding on this with the launch of Notion Sites, which adds several new features to its existing publishing tools. For the most part, these are pretty straightforward, but together, they do make for a more […]

SUSE wants a piece of the AI cake, too

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 07:01:00 +0000

Suse on Tuesday is announcing its AI strategy and SUSE AI solutions, a new vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform.

Databricks launches LakeFlow to help its customers build their data pipelines

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Since its launch in 2013, Databricks has relied on its ecosystem of partners, such as Fivetran, Rudderstack, and dbt, to provide tools for data preparation and loading. But now, at its annual Data + AI Summit, the company announced LakeFlow, its own data engineering solution that can handle data ingestion, transformation and orchestration and eliminates […]

Databricks expands Mosaic AI to help enterprises build with LLMs

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000

A year ago, Databricks acquired MosaicML for $1.3 billion. Now rebranded as Mosaic AI, the platform has become integral to Databricks’ AI solutions. Today, at the company’s Data + AI Summit, it is launching a number of new features for the service. Ahead of the announcements, I spoke to Databricks co-founders CEO Ali Ghodsi and […]

Restate raises $7M for its lightweight workflows-as-code platform

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

When one of the co-creators of the popular open source stream-processing framework Apache Flink launches a new startup, it’s worth paying attention. Stephan Ewen was among the founding team of the open source project back in 2010 and then later became the CTO of Data Artisans, which aimed to monetize Flink. Alibaba then acquired the […]

Atlassian now gives startups a year of free access

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Long before product-led growth became a buzzword, Atlassian offered free tiers for virtually all of its productivity and developer tools. Today, that mostly means free access for up to 10 users and some other limitations. For startups, that’s a good way to get started with the company’s tools like Jira and Bitbucket, but they also […]

Tektonic AI raises $10M to build GenAI agents for automating business operations

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Only a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was ‘robotic process automation’ (RPA). It doesn’t feel like those services, which tried to automate a lot of repetitive business processes, ever quite lived up to their promise. The rise of generative AI, however, may just be the missing key to building […]