GPTBot scraped all the internet – now you can opt it out
Threat for WeWork operations, YouTube announcements on GenAI, Google's initiative to limit a flight’s impact on the climate, and more
🗞 In the Know
In a statement made last week, WeWork said there’s “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue operating, citing sustained losses and canceled memberships to its office spaces. The co-working business will focus over the next 12 months on reducing rental costs, negotiating more favorable leases, increasing revenue and raising capital, WeWork said
YouTube is getting ready to release generative AI tools for creators. But unlike rivals such as Meta Platforms, it’s less interested in chatbots — the conversational software. Instead, it focuses on tools that will power video editing or help creators generate ideas. “What’s most exciting about generative AI is the potential for lowering barriers to creation,” Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s vice president of Americas told TheInformation.
Waymo and Cruise were approved to operate their robotaxi services 24/7 in San Francisco after a contentious six-hour public hearing in which residents voiced their support and opposition to the vehicles.
Google has been working with American Airlines and Bill Gates’s climate investment fund, Breakthrough Energy, to chart more sustainable flight routes. The aim is to help pilots limit a flight’s impact on the climate by avoiding routes that create contrails, those white streaks in the sky that planes sometimes leave behind. Contrails are a big problem for the planet because they trap heat, accounting for about 35% of aviation’s global warming impact.
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🏁 VentureVista
Daybreak Health, a startup that provides virtual pediatric mental health care, raised a $13M Series B round. Union Square Ventures was the deal lead, while Lux Capital and previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Maven Ventures, and Y Combinator also participated.
Daybreak Health is a teletherapy provider, which partners with school districts to provide personalized mental health support for students. The evidence-based model treats students to a place of concrete improvement to drive academic outcomes like better grades, higher attendance, and behavioral improvements. The clinicians are personally matched to each student—based on presenting needs, cultural background, language, and personal preferences—and specialize across different mental health conditions and modalities of care.Middleware, a startup whose platform collects data from various sources and applies machine learning algorithms to detect patterns and anomalies that indicate performance issues and other problems, raised a $6.5M seed round led by 8VC, with Fin Capital also contributing.
“We’re seeing an explosion of microservices, kubernetes and distributed systems as more applications move to the cloud,” said Middleware CEO Laduram Vishnoi in an interview with VentureBeat. “These new architectures generate much more monitoring data than traditional systems. Our AI agents can quickly analyze this flood of data to pinpoint problems and their root causes.”Tromzo, a startup that searches a client's security tools, source code systems, and cloud platforms for security vulnerabilities, raised an $8M seed extension led by Venture Guides, with Alumni Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures also participating.
Tromzo’s mission is to help eliminate the friction between developers and security teams by providing end-to-end visibility, reducing noise, eliminating manual work and driving security ownership. Tromzo’s platform integrates with existing security tools, source code systems, and cloud platforms, and leverages its Intelligence Graph and AI capabilities to prioritize and remediate the most critical vulnerabilities across the software environment.Parcha AI, a startup that says it's building enterprise-grade AI agents, has raised $5M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital.
Parcha’s initial focus is on fintech and banking, a market boasting over 25,000 companies globally. Parcha’s AI agents are designed to handle repetitive workflows, enabling operations teams to function more effectively. Early customers include those in payments, lending, banking, and crypto sectors.
🔥 Exits:
Zillow Group has paid approximately $35M to acquire a software company Aryeo, a Boston-based platform that serves real estate photographers, with plans to bring the startup within Zillow's real estate software suite.
Proterra, a company that develops battery systems for buses and other heavy-duty EVs, filed for bankruptcy last week, making it the latest in a string of failures in the EV sector, TechCrunch reports.
CRED Founder’s motivation tweets here
💡Innovation Spotlight
ChatGPT creator OpenAI launched a new web crawler — called GPTBot. In the new documentation, OpenAI says that webpages crawled with GPTBot "may potentially be used to improve future models," and that allowing GPTBot to access your site "can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety." OpenAI claims it has implemented filters ensuring that sources behind paywalls, those collecting personally identifiable information, or any content violating OpenAI's policies will not be accessed by GPTBot. OpenAI also published its instructions on how to protect your resources from being scraped by GPTBot.
One more on this. ChatGPT expands its ‘custom instructions’ feature to free users. OpenAI is expanding custom instructions, allowing all users to add preferences and requirements to ChatGPT's responses. This feature saves time by eliminating the need to repeat instruction prompts.
📈 Insightful Data
According to Business Insider, a survey of over 1,200 business leaders found that 40% believe recent Gen Z graduates are unprepared for the workplace.
Furthermore, those sentiments have influenced hiring decisions, as 94% of that subset have previously avoided hiring recent Gen Z college graduates to some extent.
This survey, published by the student-focused magazine Intelligent, is not the first report of managers experiencing difficulties with younger colleagues. Gen Z was identified as the "most challenging generation" to work with by almost 75% of managers and business leaders surveyed by ResumeBuilder.com in April.
Venturized is compiled and written by Ivan Taranenko, Associate at Roosh Ventures.
Roosh Ventures is a Kyiv-based entrepreneurs-led, generalist VC firm investing in Pre-seed to Series A across EU and US markets. Powered by Roosh.
Join the Roosh Ventures fam on 🐥 Twitter and 🔗 Linkedin. More about Roosh Ventures and its portfolio companies on 🌐 roosh.vc.