Mike Wheatley
Latest from Mike Wheatley
AI voice cloning startup ElevenLabs raises $250M in Series C funding round
The synthetic voice startup Eleven Labs Inc. closed on a bumper $250 million Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to between $3 billion and $3.3 billion. According to a Friday report by TechCrunch, the round was led by ICONIQ Growth and saw participation from previous investor Andreessen Horowitz, which was one of the lead ...
Report: ByteDance sets aside about $20B for AI spending this year
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. has set aside 150 billion yuan ($20.64 billion) for its capital expenditure this year, and the bulk of that money will be spent on boosting its artificial intelligence capabilities, Reuters reported today. The report cites two anonymous people familiar with the matter as saying that around half of the amount ...
Palona AI gets $10M to build more reliable customer service chatbots that don’t make mistakes
A trio of artificial intelligence engineers who previously led projects at Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. say they have raised $10 million for a new startup that aims to make AI-powered customer sales chatbots more reliable and “emotionally attuned.” Palona AI, officially incorporated as Proactive AI Lab Inc., said today’s ...
Trump signs new executive order on AI development, overturning Biden-era restrictions
U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing for the development of artificial intelligence systems that are “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas” in his latest executive order. The order, signed earlier today, is an effort to repeal previous U.S. government policies that some have interpreted as “barriers to American AI innovation.” Its chief aim ...
Baya Systems raises $36M to transform AI chiplet design
System-on-chip design startup Baya Systems Inc. said today it has closed on $36 million fuding to support its operational growth and accelerate the development of its software portfolio to meet the needs of the emerging “chiplet” economy. Today’s Series B round was led by Maverick Silicon and Synopsys Inc., and saw participation from existing investors ...
WebAI’s Companion is an AI assistant for enterprise employees that runs privately on their own devices
The privacy-focused artificial intelligence development startup webAI Inc. said today it’s rolling out a new AI-powered assistant called Companion to help large organizations “supercharge” their productivity. Companion, webAI claims, is a “breakthrough” AI assistant that can be customized to support almost any kind of enterprise workload. Theh company is known for its focus on private ...
AI procurement management software startup Vertice raises $50M
Procurement software startup Vertice Technology Inc. said today it has finalized a $50 million funding round led by Lakestar, bringing its total amount raised to more than $100 million, and its valuation to a reported $500 million. Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity also participated in the Series C round, alongside existing investors Bessemer Venture ...
Eleos gets $60M in funding to transform behavioral healthcare with AI agents
Eleos Health Inc. said today it has closed on a $60 million Series C round of funding, and will use the money to continue its mission of trying to transform the way behavioral healthcare is delivered by empowering clinicians with artificial intelligence assistants. Today’s round was led by Greenfield Partners and saw participation from existing backers ...
DigitalOcean dives into agentic AI creation, making it accessible to every developer
The small developer team-focused cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean Holdings Inc. has become the latest company to embrace the agentic AI trend, launching a new GenAI Platform that enables teams to build and deploy AI agents in a matter of minutes. AI agents are one of the hottest trends in the artificial intelligence industry today, referring to ...
Diesel Labs blends generative AI chat with big-data analysis to create synthetic focus groups for marketing teams
Business intelligence startup Diesel Labs Inc. is merging generative artificial intelligence chat capabilities with its enormous, proprietary dataset on consumer attitudes to create a new tool called PanelAI that will deliver what it says are “unprecedented” consumer insights. Available now, PanelAI provides marketing and media teams with almost instantaneous access to actionable, real-time insights from ...