Julie Bort, Author at TechCrunch

Ben Ling’s Bling Capital has already nabbed another $270M for fourth fund

Julie Bort — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:45:57 +0000

Bling Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has nabbed another $270 million for a new flagship, fourth fund.

ServiceTitan names LLMs from Microsoft, OpenAI as risk factors

Julie Bort — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 22:45:38 +0000

With ServiceTitan's public IPO documents, we may be witnessing the birth of a new boilerplate warning: LLMs.

Gadget lover Marc Benioff says his favorite gadget these days is his cars and trucks

Julie Bort — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:03:56 +0000

Marc Benioff famously got into tech as a child coder writing games. He’s always loved tech gadgets. During an episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, when asked about his latest gadgets, he showed off his Oura ring. But then he considered and said that his favorite gadget these days is his car. “I think my car […]

Marc Benioff says it’s ‘crazy talk’ that AI will hurt Salesforce, wants a billion AI agents in a year

Julie Bort, Theresa Loconsolo — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 15:10:00 +0000

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the next big thing for enterprise software, particularly Salesforce, is AI agents — or software bots that will do limited tasks on their own taking those tasks off of human workers. “What if your workforce had no limits? Now, that is a question we could not ask in the last […]

a16z VC Martin Casado explains why so many AI regulations are so wrong

Julie Bort — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Attempts to regulate AI to date have focused on some mythical future instead of understanding what new risks AI actually introduces, argues VC Martin Casado.

Productivity hacks are overrated, says a16z VC who sold his own startup for $1.25B

Julie Bort — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 15:00:00 +0000

What’s the secret to success? It isn’t any of the trends that so many founders in Silicon Valley subscribe to, a16z's Martin Casado says.

How AI startup Conflixis is protecting hospitals from corrupt doctors

Julie Bort — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:00:00 +0000

After a career as a corruption investigator, Aaron Narva had an idea for a startup in the age of LLM AI: help hospitals identify risky behavior by doctors.

AI coding assistants can help startups develop products, seed VCs believe

Julie Bort — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:00:00 +0000

By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning. AI coding may one day involve agents that can write the programs themselves based on a natural language […]

AI startups will need ‘quality of revenue’ to raise in 2025, seed VCs warn

Julie Bort — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:00:00 +0000

To raise VC money next year, it won't just be about sales and growth, but about the "quality" of that growth, VCs say.

No, startups shouldn’t always take the highest valuation, seed VCs say

Julie Bort — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:00:00 +0000

One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better. “I think we’ve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years,” Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of […]

Level Zero Health is working on a potentially life-changing device for hormone health

Julie Bort — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:35:00 +0000

Level Zero Health’s co-founders Ula Rustamova and Irene Jia are swinging for the fences. They are attempting to invent a never-achieved technology that could help millions of people. If they succeed — and there are some positive early indicators — they will create a continuous hormone monitoring medical device. Such a device could do for […]

VC megadeals are booming — and AI is surprisingly not the top category

Julie Bort — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Ask any VC if we’re still in a venture capital bear market and that investor will almost certainly tell you no, that funding is still flowing for good companies. That might sound like spin, because anecdotes abound about how rough it still is for those raising now. And for good reason. Down rounds — that […]

Wiz hopes to hit $1B in ARR in 2025 before an IPO, after turning down Google’s $23B

Julie Bort — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:08:46 +0000

Wiz co-founder Roy Reznik said the company hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue this year, and still thought it could double that in 2025.

Benchmark is raising $170M for its latest partners-only fund

Marina Temkin, Julie Bort — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 18:29:48 +0000

While fund sizes of many venture capital firms have ballooned into billions of dollars over the last decade, Benchmark Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors, has stuck to raising approximately $425 million in capital every few years. That’s what the storied firm told in a letter to its limited partners when it announced […]

Eric Schmidt’s SandboxAQ aims for $5B valuation for its AI/quantum Google moonshot

Julie Bort — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 21:17:54 +0000

SandboxAQ began as Alphabet’s moonshot AI and quantum computing and now has an impressive roster of projects.

Marc Benioff warns that AI, while useful, is overhyped and partly blames Microsoft

Julie Bort — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 18:23:33 +0000

One of the tech industry’s biggest hype men, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, is psyched about AI, but points out that it hasn't cured cancer.

How customer service AI startup Neuron7 convinced Keith Block to invest

Julie Bort — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Five-year-old AI customer service startup Neuron7 just closed an oversubscribed $44 million Series B round led by Keith Block and his year-and-half-old venture firm, Smith Point Capital. Neuron7 sits in one of the most promising areas for AI technology: customer service. But unlike the hoards of ChatGPT customer chatbot startups, or those doing natural language […]

Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup

Julie Bort — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:13:50 +0000

A Y Combinator startup named PearAI launched with a tweet thread and YouTube video on Saturday and caused an immediate backlash.

Series, a GenAI game development platform, has quietly raised $28M from Netflix, Dell, a16z, others

Julie Bort — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 16:10:00 +0000

It’s been quite the year for game industry exec Pany Haritatos.
Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million from Netflix, Dell a16z, and others.

Fintech Mesa promises 1% cash back on mortgages, up to 3x on other home needs

Julie Bort — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Mortgage fintech Mesa has emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $9.2 million in seed capital and a novel idea for homeowners. It’s offering cash back and rewards on all spending done on the home, including the mortgage itself. Mesa is offering mortgage loans, original or refinancing, that include a credit-card-style 1% cash back on the […]