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Benchmark's partners told TechCrunch Disrupt that AI is straining venture capital's rule against backing direct rivals. Founders with board observers or investors in rival startups now have reason to decide what each of them can see.
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Bluesky has extended its Attie AI tool from custom feeds to prompt-built small social apps that run on the AT Protocol. Its pitch is a built-in audience on a network of 47 million registered users, where TechCrunch reports engagement has declined.
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Apate, an Australian startup, says its AI decoy victims have held 2.5 million scam conversations and wasted 17 years of scammers' time. Divided out, that is about 3.6 minutes a conversation, so customers are buying the details the agents extract.
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Industrial Next says its robot stations can retool a factory line in minutes, and BMW's technology office will evaluate its dexterous manipulation. TechCrunch attributes the minutes figure to the company; BMW's announced role is to evaluate.
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Zach Yadegari, the 19-year-old co-founder of Cal AI, raised $10 million for Persona, an AI assistant built around a $179 wearable band. Until the band ships, people use Persona free over iMessage, and the company's business model relies on sponsored products in its shopping research.
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Lola Vision Systems will license its compiler on existing chips, aiming at what its founder says can be roughly 200 hours of manual setup per new chip. Cheaper porting would let edge teams test a second board, though the company has not said how many of those hours its software saves.
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