Author: pekandesigns

Background noise on calls could be a thing of the past if Krisp has anything to do with it. The app, now available on Windows and Macs after a long beta, uses machine learning to silence the bustle of a home, shared office, or coffee shop so your voice and the voices of others comes […]

Private equity firms get a bad rap — and not without reason. In the prototypical example, a bunch of men in suits (and these folks always seem to be men for some reason) swoop in from Manhattan with Excel spreadsheets and pink slips, slashing and burning through an organization while ladening the balance sheet with […]

RealityEngines.AI, a research startup that wants to help enterprises make better use of AI, even when they only have incomplete data, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed funding round. The round was led by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google founding board member Ram Shriram. Khosla Ventures, Paul […]

Building a company is fueled by highs and lows, but one of the few moments of potential ecstasy (or perhaps for grizzled veterans, deep annoyance) is the VC outreach email. You are building your startup on deforming IKEA desks eating frozen dinners when out of nowhere, a major VC firm reaches out and wants to […]

We can’t talk cybersecurity without hearing from the government. We’re thrilled to announce Homeland Security Assistant Director Jeanette Manfra, a senior executive at the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will be at Disrupt SF. Manfra is one of the federal government’s most experienced cybersecurity civil servants. She currently leads CISA’s cybersecurity efforts in […]

With 200X the range of WiFi at 1/1000th of the cost of a cellular modem, Helium’s “LongFi” wireless network debuts today. Its transmitters can help track stolen scooters, find missing dogs via IoT collars, and collect data from infrastructure sensors. The catch is that Helium’s tiny, extremely low-power, low-data transmission chips rely on connecting to […]

Group travel — it’s something you either love or hate, but Stride, which describes itself as a marketplace for “experiential multi-day and multi-destination packaged trips planned by experts,” wants to change this perception. The service, which was co-founded by former Starwood Hotels and Viator executive Gavin Delany, today announced that it has raised a $2.5 […]

Apollo, a San Francisco-based startup that provides a number of developer and operator tools and services around the GraphQL query language, today announced that it has raised a $22 million growth funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners. Existing investors Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network also participated in this round. Today, Apollo […]

Google will now allow iPhone and iPad owners to use their Android security key to verify sign-ins, the company said Wednesday. Last month, the search and mobile giant said it developed a new Bluetooth-based protocol that will allow modern Android 7.0 devices and later to act as a security key for two-factor authentication. Since then, […]

City navigation and public transit app Citymapper is ending the program it called “Citymapper Ride,” which has gone through a number of incarnations since its introduction back in 2017. Since then, the company has gone from running one bus route in London designed to supplement a need for customers that wasn’t currently well-addressed by existing […]