From TechCrunch
By Ron Miller
October 19, 2023
When Warmly started a couple of years ago, people were meeting regularly in Zoom and the company provided a custom background and information about the participants. It was useful as far as it went, but when the founders had trouble selling the approach, they decided to pivot to a new idea: providing warm leads for […]
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After selling Drift, ex-HubSpot exec launches AI for customer success managers
Elias Torres has achieved a lot for somebody who immigrated to the US from Nicaragua at 17 without knowing any English. He served as a VP of engineering at HubSpot before co-founding Drift, a company that sold to Vista Equity for about $1.2 billion in 2021. “It’s very rare to get this far, but I’m not done,” Torres told TechCrunch. About a year ago, Torres (pictured above) founded Agency, an AI-powered startup designed to automate tasks traditionally handled by customer success managers (CSMs).
Oct 16, 2024
Numa raises $32M to bring AI and automation to car dealerships
Sometimes, a pivot ends up being the smartest decision company leaders can make. See Netflix’s pivot from DVDs to streaming, or Corning’s pivot from lightbulbs to touchscreens. The list of extremely successful startup pivots goes on. And on. And on. A less-prominent (but by no means failed) pivot is Numa’s. Its co-founders killed the startup’s original conversational AI product to instead sell customer service automation tools. Not just any tools, though — these tools are targeted at auto deale
Oct 1, 2024
Zoom rebrands existing — and intros new — generative AI features
To stay competitive in the crowded market for videoconferencing, Zoom is updating and rebranding several of its AI-powered features, including the generative AI assistant formerly known as Zoom IQ. The news comes after controversy over changes to Zoom’s terms of service, which implied that Zoom reserved the right to use customers’ videos to train its […]
Sep 5, 2023
Always be prompting
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Reporter’s note: Before we get into this, thank you to the Startups Weekly readers who pointed out that last week’s link to my column was […]
Apr 1, 2023