#Revisiting 19th-century Paris with VR

#Revisiting 19th-century Paris with VR

While I have fond memories of past efforts to combine VR content with real-world locations, I’d assumed the pandemic had put those ambitions to an end. If I wanted VR in 2024, I thought I’d have to buy a headset, and it would be a largely solitary experience at home or in the office —…

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#Microsoft’s M12 invests another .5M into NeuBird, months after its M seed round

#Microsoft’s M12 invests another $22.5M into NeuBird, months after its $22M seed round

Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks with generative AI. Having sold their previous cloud-native storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million, the pair was well-versed in the IT challenges faced by today’s enterprises. “It’s very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There’s…

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#Queer-founded brand discovery platform Famm launches a LinkedIn for the LGBTQ+ community

#Queer-founded brand discovery platform Famm launches a LinkedIn for the LGBTQ+ community

Famm, the discovery platform for queer-owned brands, was created by BIPOC queer married couple Cat Perez and Marianna Di Regolo to help users find LGBTQ-owned businesses. Now it’s launching a new social networking app for LGBTQ+ professionals and business owners to connect and collaborate.  Famm Connect, now available on iOS and Android devices, includes common…

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#Y Combinator alum Nowadays, founded by sisters, raises M to automate event planning

#Y Combinator alum Nowadays, founded by sisters, raises $2M to automate event planning

Not even the people inventing AI always know what it’s good for besides writing emails. But there are seed-stage companies, like Y Combinator grad and 2024 Disrupt Battlefield participant Nowadays, that are doing something mind-blowingly useful with AI. Nowadays uses LLM AI to automatically plan large, expensive events. Using its own database of 400,000 global…

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#MobiKwik downsizes its IPO for the third time

#MobiKwik downsizes its IPO for the third time

MobiKwik, an Indian financial services startup, has cut the size of its planned IPO for the third time, setting a price band of ₹265-₹279 ($3.1-$3.3) that values it at $250 million — down sharply from its last private valuation of $924 million in 2021. The Gurugram-based fintech, backed by Peak XV and ADIA, is seeking…

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