Unicorns - Startups, Business & Enterpreneurship

After Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy’s startup aims to apply AI assistants to education Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. In tech speak, that usually means built from the ground up with AI at its core. And while Eureka Labs’ AI ambitions are lofty, the company is starting with a more traditional approach to teaching.  San Francisco-based Eureka Labs, which Karpathy registered as an LLC in Delaware on June 21, aims to leverage recent progress in generative AI to create AI teaching assistants that can guide students through course materials.  Eureka Labs envisions AI assistants or personalities that would work with a human teacher to allow “anyone to learn anything,” according to Karpathy, who posted the news on X. Teachers would still design the course material, but they’d be supported by this AI assistant. The startup does not yet appear to have built or tested the efficacy of integrating AI assistants into the classroom. At least one Georgia State University studyfound that AI teaching assistants helped some students get better grades. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

YC-backed CrowdVolt shakes up the secondary ticket market with its bid-ask model The current secondary ticket exchange system is fraught with several issues, such as tickets being resold at prices much higher than their face value, exorbitant fees and other additional costs. Not to mention the risk of purchasing counterfeit or invalid tickets, resulting in a disappointing user experience.  CrowdVolt wants to disrupt the space with its user-centric, bid-ask ticket marketplace, which aims to give buyers an affordable ticket price with full transparency. A graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch CrowdVolt operates on a model similar to sneaker resell marketplace StockX, meaning buyers submit bids on tickets, and sellers set asking prices. When a bid aligns with an ask, the transaction is complete. The platform’s bid-ask model could appeal to concertgoers because it allows them to name their desired price. Traditionally, secondary ticket marketplaces are focused on how much the seller wants to sell a ticket for, but CrowdVolt changes that. CrowdVolt also enables buyers and sellers to message each other, making ticket-buying less anonymous. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Exa raises $17M from Lightspeed, Nvidia, Y Combinator to build a Google for AIs While there’s no shortage of startups aiming to replace Google with AI-powered search (we’re looking at you, Perplexity), a startup called Exa has a different idea: a Google for AI. Humans aren’t the ones who desperately need a new kind of search engine, Exa’s founders believe. Rather, as AI increasingly takes hold in corporate and consumer life, it is the AI platforms themselves that must regularly venture out onto the internet to search for information and return bona fide answers, not hallucinations. And they can’t just type their requests on their keyboards. Exa is building a tool that allows AI models to perform something like a web search, but with an AI-native twist. The co-founders bought a million dollars’ worth of GPUs (which were easier to get in those days) and, using a vector database and embeddings (not a classic transformer-based LLM), they began to build a machine learning model trained to natively understand links rather than words and sentences. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Google backs Indian open source Uber rival Google has become one of the latest investors in Moving Tech, the parent firm of Indian open source ridesharing app Namma Yatri that is quickly capturing market share from Uber and Ola with its no-commission model. Bengaluru-based Moving Tech has raised $11 million in a pre-Series A funding round co-led by Blume Ventures and Antler, the startup said. Google, which has pledged to invest $10 billion in India, participated in the round. Namma Yatri works atop the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an interoperable scheme backed by the Indian government is aiming to democratize e-commerce in the country. Namma Yatri’s app connects customers with auto-rickshaw and cab drivers without charging either party for rides. Instead, the startup collects a small monthly fee from its driver partners. Uber and Ola, in comparison, charge their driver partners as much as 25%-30% of the ride cost, and have refused to join the ONDC network for their core mobility offerings. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Lhoopa raises $80M to spur more affordable housing in the Philippines A lack of affordable housing is a growing problem worldwide, even in emerging markets with significant demand. That’s in part because traditional developers and real estate companies focus on serving people looking for luxury houses, and want to avoid the immense operating expenses associated with affordable housing, which eat into gross margins over time. The Singaporean-headquartered startup uses a mix of technology and decentralized operations, partnering with local professionals, including brokers and building contractors, to solve the problem specifically for people looking to buy affordable homes. The six-year-old startup has kicked off its service in the Philippines, a market with unfilled demand of around 6.5 million units for low-income earners. Marc-Olivier Caillot (co-founder and CEO) and Sabrina Tan (co-founder and president) founded Lhoopa in 2018, shortly after moving to the Philippines from the U.S. and experiencing firsthand the lack of platforms for searching for affordable housing. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures