All posts tagged: AI agents

Poke makes using AI agents as easy as sending a text

Poke makes using AI agents as easy as sending a text

Published by skeptic

Is Poke an OpenClaw for the rest of us? That’s the idea coming from a new startup offering an AI agent that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp. The AI agent Poke launched publicly in March, allowing consumers to access a personal assistant that can take action on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can help with everyday needs, like daily planning, managing your calendar, tracking your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos, and more, all via text message. Image Credits:Poke/The Interaction Company of California While you may still interact with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you have questions or want to do research, you’d turn to Poke when you want to get something done quickly, or when you want to automate some task to save you time. For instance, you could ask Poke to alert you to specific emails (like those from your family or your boss), or remind you in the morning if you need to take …

Atlassian launches visual AI tools and third-party agents in Confluence

Atlassian launches visual AI tools and third-party agents in Confluence

Published by skeptic

Software giant Atlassian announced new AI tools and agents on Wednesday with a focus on turning data into visual assets and applications. This includes the rollout of the visual tool Remix in open beta. Remix allows enterprises to turn the data and information stored in Atlassian’s content collaboration software Confluence into assets including charts and graphics. Remix will recommend which visual format makes the most sense for the data or information at hand and create these visual assets without requiring the users to open another application or software. The company also announced three new third-party agents that run within Confluence using model context protocols (MCPs). One agent connects Confluence users to the vibe coding darling Lovable to turn product ideas and data into working prototypes. Another agent connects to app builder software Replit and allows users to convert technical documents into starter apps. The third agent works with AI presentation builder Gamma to build slides and other presentation materials. “With Remix and agents in Confluence, a single page becomes the starting point for whatever comes …

Nothing CEO Carl Pei says smartphone apps will disappear as AI agents take their place

Nothing CEO Carl Pei says smartphone apps will disappear as AI agents take their place

Published by skeptic

Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of Nothing, is imagining a future beyond the iPhone — and it’s a device powered by AI agents, not running apps. “In terms of AI in software, I think people should understand that apps are going to disappear,” said Pei, whose consumer electronics brand makes unique smartphones and other accessories. “So, if you’re a founder or a startup and your app is like where the core value lies, that will be disrupted whether you like it or not.” Pei made these comments during an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin on Wednesday. The founder has talked about an AI-first device before, as this vision helped the company close its $200 million Series C funding round last year. At the time, Nothing was pitching the idea of a new kind of smartphone using AI and personalization technology that’s accurate enough for its users to not feel they had to go behind the AI and double-check its output. At SXSW, Pei expanded on his vision for the AI-first device and the …

Nvidia’s version of OpenClaw could solve its biggest problem: security

Nvidia’s version of OpenClaw could solve its biggest problem: security

Published by skeptic

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks every company should have an OpenClaw strategy. And Nvidia is here to provide it. Nvidia has developed NemoClaw, an enterprise-grade platform built off the viral, local AI autonomous agent, Huang announced during his GTC keynote on Monday. The open source platform is essentially OpenClaw with enterprise-grade security and privacy considerations baked in. The idea is to turn OpenClaw into a secure platform that enterprises can tap into with one command and control how agents behave and handle data, according to the company. “For the CEOs, the question is, what’s your OpenClaw strategy?” Huang said on stage. “We need it. We all have a Linux strategy. We all needed to have an HTTP HTML strategy, which started the internet. We all needed to have a Kubernetes strategy, which made it possible for mobile cloud to happen. Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic systems strategy.” Nvidia worked with OpenClaw’s creator Peter Steinberger to develop NemoClaw, Jensen said. Once it is released, NemoClaw users will …

Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the human context they’re missing

Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the human context they’re missing

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AI agents are expected to soon start making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans. But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the full context required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve. Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to discern whether a person’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government records all belong to the same human being. To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build Nyne, a startup aiming to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand humans across their entire digital footprint. On Friday, Nyne announced it raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with participation from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense. While it may seem that Nyne is tackling an issue …

Mandiant’s founder just raised 0M for his autonomous AI agent security startup

Mandiant’s founder just raised $190M for his autonomous AI agent security startup

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Kevin Mandia, who founded the cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and sold it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has launched a new AI-native cybersecurity startup with what the company claims is a record-breaking funding round. The new outfit, called Armadin, has raised $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Accel, with participation from GV, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel. The company claims the combined total is a record for a security startup at that early a stage, though it isn’t disclosing its valuation. While other security startups have raised even slightly bigger Series A rounds, we couldn’t find another one that did so out of the gate. In 2019, for example, password-management company 1Password and privacy compliance company OneTrust both raised $200 million in Series A funding. But 1Password was already 14 years old at the time and OneTrust was three years old and already in growth mode. Prior to Armadin, Mandia, an internationally recognized security expert, had been a VC …

AWS launches a new AI agent platform specifically for health care

AWS launches a new AI agent platform specifically for health care

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Amazon Web Services announced Thursday the launch of Amazon Connect Health. This AI agent-powered platform is meant to help health care organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among other things. Amazon Connect Health is HIPAA eligible and connects with electronic health record (EHR) software. The platform is currently partnered with EHR software providers, data integrators, and patient engagement companies, the company said. This move is not the cloud giant’s first in the health care space, and it comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to grow its footprint in the $5 trillion U.S. health care industry. The company launched Amazon Comprehend Medical, a HIPAA-eligible natural language processor for unstructured medical data in 2018, and it launched Amazon HealthLake in 2021 which is HIPAA-eligible Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) infrastructure used to organize health data. The company also launched HealthOmics, a bioinformatics workflow, in 2022. Still, it is its first major product offering AI agents — software that completes complex tasks on behalf of a human — within a …

Synthesia hits B valuation, lets employees cash out

Synthesia hits $4B valuation, lets employees cash out

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British startup Synthesia, whose AI platform helps companies create interactive training videos, has raised a $200 million Series E round of funding that brings its valuation to $4 billion — up from $2.1 billion just a year ago. Unlike some other AI startups that are still a long way from turning a profit, Synthesia has found a lucrative business in transforming corporate training thanks to AI-generated avatars. With enterprise clients including Bosch, Merck, and SAP, the London-based company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in April 2025. This milestone explains why Synthesia’s venture backers are literally doubling down. The Series E that nearly doubled its valuation was led by existing investor GV (Google Ventures), with participation from several other previous backers — including Series B lead Kleiner Perkins, Series C lead Accel, Series D lead New Enterprise Associates (NEA), NVIDIA’s venture capital arm NVentures, Air Street Capital, and PSP Growth.  Aside from ongoing support, this round will bring both new and departing investors. On one hand, Matt Miller’s VC firm Evantic and the …

Rogue agents and shadow AI: Why VCs are betting big on AI security

Rogue agents and shadow AI: Why VCs are betting big on AI security

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What happens when an AI agent decides the best way to complete a task is to blackmail you?  That’s not a hypothetical. According to Barmak Meftah, a partner at cybersecurity VC firm Ballistic Ventures, it recently happened to an enterprise employee working with an AI agent. The employee tried to suppress what the agent wanted to do, what it was trained to do, and it responded by scanning the user’s inbox, finding some inappropriate emails, and threatening to blackmail the user by forwarding the emails to the board of directors.  “In the agent’s mind, it’s doing the right thing,” Meftah told TechCrunch on last week’s episode of Equity. “It’s trying to protect the end user and the enterprise.” Meftah’s example is reminiscent of Nick Bostrom’s AI paperclip problem. That thought experiment illustrates the potential existential risk posed by a superintelligent AI that single-mindedly pursues a seemingly innocuous goal – make paperclips – to the exclusion of all human values. In the case of this enterprise AI agent, its lack of context around why the employee …

In 2026, AI will move from hype to pragmatism

In 2026, AI will move from hype to pragmatism

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If 2025 was the year AI got a vibe check, 2026 will be the year the tech gets practical. The focus is already shifting away from building ever-larger language models and toward the harder work of making AI usable. In practice, that involves deploying smaller models where they fit, embedding intelligence into physical devices, and designing systems that integrate cleanly into human workflows.  The experts TechCrunch spoke to see 2026 as a year of transition, one that evolves from brute-force scaling to researching new architectures, from flashy demos to targeted deployments, and from agents that promise autonomy to ones that actually augment how people work.  The party isn’t over, but the industry is starting to sober up. Scaling laws won’t cut it Image Credits:Amazon In 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton’s ImageNet paper showed how AI systems could “learn” to recognize objects in pictures by looking at millions of examples. The approach was computationally expensive, but made possible with GPUs. The result? A decade of hardcore AI research as scientists worked to invent …