Navi targets $2B valuation: Indian fintech Navi, put together by Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, is hunting for a massive external funding round that could push its valuation to $2 billion. The company has been largely self-funded to date and was considering an IPO before that market cooled. Navi sells "personal and home loans as well as health insurance to customers," Manish Singh reports... Read More
Aerospike snags $100M: Speaking of mega-rounds, NoSQL database startup Aerospike has closed a nine-figure Series E led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Back in 2022, the company expanded its product offerings to include graph and vector capabilities, which are "crucial for building real-time AI and ML applications," Frederic Lardinois writes. Chalk the Aerospike round up to the AI boom, in other words... Read More
Pigment raises $145M: French startup Pigment has closed a massive funding round, too. Pigment is in the business planning market, which I won't pretend to understand intimately, but its fundraising success is evidence that enterprise software remains a great business model in these days of AI hype and buzz... Read More
Big tech companies want to curb AI-related job mayhem: Some jobs are going to get automated away by AI. It's happening frequently enough already to be talked about in earnings calls. But Cisco, Google, Microsoft, IBM and other tech companies that make up the new AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium are going to look into the matter. The good news is that the tech companies are all trying to find the guy who did this... Read More
AI, India and elections: As a major election approaches in India, the country is grappling with AI and how it is used and abused by political entities. X is doing its part by rolling out its community note feature to India, which expands the global footprint of users who can post notes... Read More
More troubles in Car Land: Fisker is hardly alone in finding it hard to make money from making and selling cars. Ghost, which worked on software for self-driving cars, is shutting down after nearly raising a quarter billion dollars, and Faraday Future has avoided getting evicted from its HQ after coming to new terms with its landlord amid cash flow issues... Read More
SingleInterface raises $30M: Singapore-based SingleInterface has closed a large amount of capital to help offline businesses collect more customers. TechCrunch reports that the company has more than 400 "multi-location brands" on its customer roll. Asia Partners led the round, which also saw participation from PayPal Ventures... Read More
