Tag: Design

Have you ever asked Alexa to remind you to send a WhatsApp message at a determined hour? And then you just wonder, ‘Why can’t Alexa just send the message herself? Or the incredible frustration when you use an app to plan a trip, only to have to jump to your calendar/booking website/tour/bank account instead of your AI assistant doing it all? Well, exactly this gap between AI automation and human action is what the agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol aims to address. With the introduction of AI Agents, the next step of evolution seemed to be communication. But when communication between machines…

Imagine the moment you bring a new dog or cat into your life. That mix of excitement and responsibility. Vet visits, vaccines, learning what food suits them, managing check-ups, and always wondering how to keep them healthy as they grow. Most pet insurance only steps in after a costly accident or illness. It doesn’t help you avoid the situation in the first place. Lassie’s product is built around a different insight: giving owners the tools to look after their pets every day, not just when something goes wrong. Now, Stockholm-based insurtech Lassie has secured $75 million in a Series C…

In a technology M&A deal, whether you are acquiring or selling a tech or software business, valuation rarely hinges on a single dimension. Financial performance, growth efficiency, and cash flow durability remain the backbone of any transaction. In practical terms, this means metrics such as revenue and ARR, retention as a proxy for revenue quality, margin structure, and capital intensity continue to anchor how buyers price risk. However, alongside these tangible indicators sits another layer of value, one that does not always surface cleanly in financial statements and may even remain invisible if it is not properly understood or articulated:…

For families living with neurodegenerative disease, the hardest part is not always the diagnosis. It is the slow erosion that follows: memory fading, personality shifting, independence shrinking. It unfolds quietly. First, forgotten appointments. Then repeated questions. Then moments when a familiar face no longer feels familiar. The illness does not isolate itself to one body. It rearranges the lives around it. Partners become caregivers. Children become decision-makers. Conversations grow shorter. Patience grows thinner. Guilt creeps in, for being tired, for wishing things were easier, for missing the person who is still physically there. Neurodegeneration is rarely a single patient story.…

We stand at one of history’s most exhilarating crossroads. Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of work, business, and human potential at breathtaking speed. The very capabilities that make us most human, our creativity, our imagination, our ability to dream up what doesn’t yet exist, are becoming our most valuable assets. This is not a story about humans versus machines. It’s a story about human potential unleashed. It’s about a future where technology handles the tedious so we can focus on the transcendent. Where the dreamers, the questioners, the bold thinkers who color outside the lines are not just welcomed,…

Paris-headquartered Naboo has raised a $70m in Series B as it accelerates its ambition to become the operating layer for how large companies plan, book, and control corporate events. The round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the same investor that backed Mistral AI in 2023, and lands just a year after Naboo closed a €20m Series A. Naboo positions itself as an AI-powered procurement platform for corporate events, covering everything from venue booking and travel to supplier coordination and budget control. Founded in 2022, Naboo built its name on simplifying how companies organise and run corporate events,  from booking…

Databricks is having one of those years that most enterprise software companies would quietly envy. The data and AI platform says it has reached a $5.4bn annual revenue run rate, growing 65% year over year, at a time when growth across the sector has cooled noticeably. For a private company, that pace is rare. And it helps explain why investors have continued to pour money into Databricks, even as funding has become more selective. The company says it has now raised more than $7bn in total capital, including recent equity funding that values the business at $134bn, alongside a large…

Budapest-based robotics company Allonic has raised $7.2 million in a pre-seed round, marking what investors are calling the largest pre-seed funding round in Hungarian startup history. The raise was led by Visionaries Club with participation from Day One Capital, Prototype, SDAC Ventures, TinyVC, and more than a dozen angels from organisations including OpenAI and Hugging Face. Allonic’s $7.2m pre-seed matters because it breaks a quiet rule in Europe: that truly hard hardware problems are supposed to wait until later rounds, or later continents. This is early money going into the physical layer of robotics, not the AI wrapper around it,…

London-based energy software company Tem has closed a $75 million Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional funding from AlbionVC, Atomico, Hitachi Ventures, Schroders Capital, Voyager Ventures, Allianz, and others. The round reportedly values the company at more than $300 million and will fund its expansion into the United States and Australia. Tem builds an AI-native energy platform designed to automate the pricing, matching, and execution of electricity transactions, a market that has long relied on manual processes and legacy infrastructure. Its core system uses machine learning to forecast supply and demand, match buyers with suppliers, and…

Earned media has always been hailed as the holy grail of PR due to its unparalleled ability to build trust. Most recent surveys state that 40%–60% of the population still trusts organic content the most, depending on the country. However, I see significant business risks in relying on organic PR only, especially now that various AI systems are on the rise. Robots don’t distinguish between earned and paid content when using it to generate answers. And that’s a wake-up call for us all to revise our PR strategies. The potential dangers of earned-only PR strategies The primary advantage of earned media,…