Latest news with #Greylock
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Fintech startup Aspora secures $53 million in Series B
Aspora , a fintech company committed to reimagining banking for immigrants, has announced the successful raise of $53 million in Series B funding , co-led by Sequoia and Greylock, with Quantum Light Ventures also contributing to the round. Existing investors include Hummingbird Ventures, Soma Capital, Global Founders Capital and Y Combinator. Previously, known as Vance, the company is building financial solutions tailored for global diasporas—starting with non-resident Indians (NRIs), who represent just 1% of India's population but contribute significantly to its economy. This fundraise marks a major milestone in Aspora's mission to transform cross-border banking. Emphasising on the fundraise, Parth Garg, Founder and CEO, Aspora, said in a statement, 'The latest fundraise allows us to accelerate our mission of building a truly global financial ecosystem for diaspora communities. We're just getting started—our users deserve modern financial infrastructure that works across borders.' Aspora was founded in 2022 by Parth Garg, who made the bold decision to drop out of Stanford University to build the company. Parth was born in India and spent his formative years in both India and Abu Dhabi. Drawing from personal experiences navigating financial systems across borders, Parth set out to address the unique challenges faced by global Indians. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Join new Free to Play WWII MMO War Thunder War Thunder Play Now Undo Today, Aspora serves 250,000 users, helping them remit money to India with ease. The company's core user base is currently in the UAE. In the past six months alone, Aspora's transaction volume has surged from $400 million to over $2 billion. During the same period, users have collectively saved over $15 million in fees—savings that would have otherwise gone to traditional providers. Aspora guarantees users exchange rates identical to those displayed on Google and charges zero fees on transfers made from the UAE (fees do apply in other regions). The company currently operates in the UK, the UAE, and across the EU region. It is now preparing to launch in the United States this July, followed by planned expansions into Canada, Australia, and Singapore by the end of the year. Aspora is also building a suite of new products to help users bank seamlessly across multiple countries, invest in diverse asset classes, and access credit and insurance services across borders—further strengthening its vision to support the evolving financial needs of global announcement marks the culmination of three rounds of funding raised over the past six months to the tune of $93 million: Live Events Seed extension ($5M) - September 2024 led by Hummingbird Ventures (existing investors) Series A ($35M) - December 2024 led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Greylock Series B ($53M) - May 2025, co-led by Sequoia and Greylock with Quantum Light (Nik Storonsky's fund, CEO of Revolut) participating Aspora is also backed by notable angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Former CTO, Coinbase; Sundeep Jain, Former CPO, Uber; Prasanna Sankar, Co-Founder, Rippling; and Chad West, Former Global Head of Marketing and Communications, Revolut. The company is headquartered in London with offices in Dubai and Bengaluru. Luciana Lixandru, Partner, Sequoia Capital, and a new member of Aspora's board, said: 'Aspora is bringing diaspora banking into the modern age, enabling many millions to participate in the growth stories of their home countries. This isn't just about digital banking; it's about the new opportunities Aspora can create for immigrants all over the world. We were proud to be among Aspora's first believers by leading their Series A late last year and after seeing the team drive payment volume to $2B. We're excited to double down and co-lead their Series B as they scale and expand into the US, Canada, and Europe.'
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
The Most Overlooked Opportunity In AI Isn't What You Think
HVAC AI: coming to a VC team near you. It's no secret that generative AI has been dominating the venture capital discourse. But while many investors continue to chase co-pilots for coders and GPT plug-ins for enterprise software, a quieter AI revolution is taking place in industries often overlooked by tech: plumbing, HVAC, and skilled trades. Netic, a San Francisco-based startup, recently raised $20 million from Greylock and Founders Fund to bring AI to the home services sector. Its platform automates client outreach, schedules technicians, and even predicts emergency service needs. This is not just a flash in the pan. McKinsey estiamtes that global invstment in construction and engineering technology doubled to $50 billion in the period between 2020 and 2022 vs. 2017 and 2019. Silicon Valley is often perceived to favor abstract problems over physical ones; more than half of venture dollars have flooded into AI infrastructure and enterprise productivity. Critical sectors like home servicesre main reliant on manual processes, word-of-mouth referrals, and outdated systems. These represent the next frontier in AI and fintech innovation. Pricing transparency is one are where AI can influence the construction industry. In this context, the emergence of 'HVAC AI" feels both timely and overdue. Despite their unglamorous nature, these sectors represent essential services. Demand is surging due to aging infrastructure, climate extremes, and a shrinking labor pool. But the software layer supporting these workers remains fragile at best. Much of the attention so far has focused on scheduling automation. But the challenges in home services extend far beyond the calendar. Homeowners frequently receive drastically different quotes for the same repair job with no clear standard for comparison. Plumbing estimates can range from $300 to $1,200, depending on who you call. This inconsistency erodes trust and drives inefficiency. Standardized pricing frameworks powered by AI could help address this. Using regional data and historical estimates, platforms could benchmark average costs, enabling providers to differentiate based on quality rather than opacity. This would not only improve the customer experience. Furthermore, it would reward contractors who operate transparently and efficiently. Project visibility is another critical gap. Delays are common in repair and renovation projects, but homeowners often do not find out until it is too late. Commercial builders have long used project management software to reduce rework and miscommunication; some report a 20% reduction in delays due to better coordination. A similar tool for residential projects could dramatically improve outcomes for consumers and contracots aliek. Imagine a world where real-time updates, timelines, and permit tracking are avialable in one click. This is the true power of 'HVAC AI.' Single women are a rising percentage of first-time home buyers. Homeowners often lose track of service intervals or warranty expiration dates. AI could streamline this process, acting as a digital maintenance assistant: logging repair history, tracking service schedules, and surfacing proactive alerts before things break. For providers, this creates opportunities to build long-term relationships rather than one-off transactions. Predictive modeling offers even more promise. Given a home's age, square footage, location, and renovation history, machine learning models could forecast when major systems might require maintenance or replacement. If a prospective home buyer, for instance, knows at the time of purchase that she will need replace a roof in 5 years, she can begin to plan financially. These insights would empower consumers to budget more effectively and make informed decisions at the point of purchase, not in moments of crisis. These gaps are not theoretical. They are felt most acutely by the growing segment of homeowners navigating maintenance without deep expertise or trusted referrals. Women now make up the majority of first-time homebuyers in the U.S., despite earning less than their male counterparts. Yet the service landscape remains opaque, inconsistent, and in many cases, dismissive. This represents both a market inefficiency and an equity issue. Tech solutions that address these problems holistically will not only modernize the industry, but also make it more iclusive, trusworthy, and efficient. Pricing transparency, proactive maintenance, and real-time updates are merely the tip of the spear. The venture community often talks about 'picks and shovels' investing, which refers to building foundational tools rather than flashy end-user apps. Yet some of the most powerful picks and shovels may be those helping legacy industries work smarter, not harder. In an era where AI is too often reduced to chatbots and copilots, the bigger opportunity might be in making sure someone shows up on time to fix your boiler—and knows exactly what it will cost. The next generation of AI breakthroughs may not look like another unicorn SaaS platform. They may look like the smart layer sitting on top of physical labor, infrastructure, and home services that have kept cities running for decades. Investors would be wise to pay attention.
Mint
02-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
AI is here for plumbers and electricians. Will it transform home services?
The next time you book a plumber, artificial intelligence might be taking your call or returning your message. Or, it might reach out because it knows your air conditioner needs an upgrade well before the summer. Netic, a startup based in San Francisco, is selling an AI-based platform that helps home-services firms automatically reach out to clients in need of maintenance or upgrades, and takes calls and messages on their behalf. Founded in 2024, Netic is part of a growing crop of startups looking beyond the saturated white-collar market and toward home-services operators like electricians, plumbers, roofers and HVAC—which stands for heating, ventilation and air conditioning—specialists. The startup Monday said it has raised $20 million with funding from venture-capital firms including Greylock and Founders Fund. While Netic's mission to automate sales and business operations seems simple, it can be a challenge to actually integrate AI into services businesses that run on manual labor—and it certainly can't replace the work of skilled human technicians. The rise of AI in skilled trades is getting a boost from private-equity firms, which have invested heavily in the area and are now injecting the technology into their portfolio companies—hoping for productivity gains and hefty returns. Netic's customers are mostly private-equity-owned home-services companies, as well as some larger owner-operated firms, the startup said. Asheem Chandna, an investor at venture-capital firm Greylock who served as lead investor in Netic's seed round, said home-services businesses often have 'underutilized capacity," or staff who aren't being put to work most efficiently. The point of AI, then, is to optimize the pairing of technicians with customers when they need help, and to reach them before they do, Chandna said. Netic's platform, which uses generative AI models and fine-tuned language models, is designed to use a certain AI model for each technology function, from customer verification to urgency and priority analysis, said Melisa Tokmak, the startup's founder and chief executive.. For instance, Netic's algorithms pick up on signals from customer calls, bumping a regular maintenance call to lower priority or escalating repairs for weather and emergencies. Or, a customer who has a quote from a rival firm might be pushed to the top. To help drive sales, Netic's AI creates marketing campaigns that predict when customers might need a maintenance call based on data like an impending storm, the region and property type. The platform also works with various customer management software for the trades, Tokmak said, and is meant to minimize the amount of integration between software that businesses have to deal with. One customer, Chris Hoffmann, CEO of St. Louis-based home-services company HB Solutions Group, said that many startups are automating the work of booking appointments over the phone through AI voice agents. Hoffmann gets so many pitches for AI products, he said, that he's often turning down vendors hawking their wares. But Netic's AI platform, along with taking calls and answering messages with more accuracy and recall than humans can, helps Hoffmann Brothers plan and prioritize which of the firm's hundreds of technicians should take appointments and when, he said. 'I have to match my capacity with my customer demand on a daily basis," Hoffman said. 'And that's really hard, because I don't always get to choose how many people's air conditioners are going to break when they call me." Still, even with the amount of AI that Hoffmann has put into his firm, only 20% of customer calls are being answered by Netic's AI platform. 'We're still human first," he added.
Business Insider
17-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
LinkedIn cofounder says students should expect tests to get harder to cheat on with ChatGPT — and to involve an AI examiner
AI can make it easier to game traditional college assessments such as essays — so the way students are tested is likely to change, the LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman says. As a result, he says, students should expect college exams to become harder to fake their way through and to include an AI examiner. "Wishing for the 1950s past is a bad mistake," Hoffman said on a recent episode of his podcast " Possible," which he cohosts. "The fact that universities have not changed, and it's like, 'Well, but I already have my curriculum, and this is the way I've been teaching it for the last X decades,' etc." Concerns regarding AI-driven academic dishonesty have been on teachers' minds since ChatGPT took off in late 2022. Plenty of students do use large language models as homework help machines, rather than slogging through the work themselves. Hoffman said the way students were using AI to cut corners was circumventing the "whole point" of the educational system: learning. "Obviously a student goes, 'Huh, I could spend 30 hours writing an essay, or I could spend 90 minutes with my ChatGPT, Claude, Pi — whatever — prompting and generate something for that,'" Hoffman said. "And obviously, to some degree, they're underserving what they actually really need." The LinkedIn cofounder, who's also a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock, isn't an advocate for keeping AI out of schools — he believes there are ways in which it could aid learning rather than kneecapping it. For instance, he thinks integrating AI into the curriculum could be more helpful than trying to stave off student usage. "Whether it's an essay or an oral exam or anything else — you're going to go in, and the AI examiner is going to be with you doing that," Hoffman said. "And actually, in fact, that will be harder to fake than the pre-AI times." He noted that prior to the advent of AI, ways to "hack" the educational system already existed, such as piling on just enough knowledge to pass a written test or rushing to complete a passable essay that didn't dive much deeper than surface level. AI examiners aside, Hoffman suggested that assessments such as oral tests, which he believes are more difficult than written, could force students to study more intensely and absorb more overall. "Part of the reason why oral exams are hard — generally reserved for Ph.D. students, sometimes master's students, etc. — is because actually, in fact, to be prepared for oral exams, you've got to be across the whole zoom," Hoffman said. "Now, let's think if every class had an oral exam essentially on it," he added. "Ooh, you're going to have to learn a whole lot more in order to do this. And I think that's ultimately how this stuff will be." There are also less drastic ways that teachers could be using AI to their advantage, Hoffman added, that don't require them to entirely rewrite their curriculums. For instance, if they believe that AI essays are subpar, they can provide students with examples of what not to do, he said. "Alright, so you're teaching a class on Jane Austen and her relevance to, call it, early literary criticism, or something like that," Hoffman said. "And you say: 'OK, well I went to ChatGPT, and I generated 10 essays, and here's the 10. These are D minuses. Do better.'" The most important thing, Hoffman said, is that teachers bring AI into the classroom in some way, big or small, if only to gain a better understanding of how it can be applied in their fields. He said that no matter their focus areas, it would be to their — and their students' — detriment to "ignore the new tool." "We're in a disruptive moment," Hoffman said. "We have a bunch of professors, just like classic, established professionals who go: 'I don't want to be disrupted. I want to keep my curriculum the way it is. I want to keep doing the thing that I'm doing.' And it's like, well, no, you can't, right? And so you need to be learning this." Hoffman, who didn't immediately respond to a request for further comment on the topic, argued that it's now an educator's responsibility to get their students ready to work with AI because it will transform their future workplaces, as well. "The most central thing is preparing students to be capable, healthy, happy participants in the new world," he said. "And obviously your ability to engage with, deploy, leverage, utilize, AI — AI agents, etc. — is going to be absolutely essential."
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
LinkedIn cofounder says students should expect tests to get harder to cheat with ChatGPT — and to involve an AI examiner
Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn and partner at VC firm Greylock, says college assessments need to change in the AI era. Different kinds of tests could force students to learn more deeply, he said in a recent podcast interview. Oral exams would require students to develop greater knowledge, rather than relying on AI, he added. AI can make it easier to game traditional college assessments like essays — so the way students are tested is likely to change, says LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. As a result, he added, students should expect college exams to become harder to fake their way through and to include an AI examiner. "Wishing for the 1950s past is a bad mistake," Hoffman said on an episode of his podcast Possible, which he co-hosts. "The fact that universities have not changed, and it's like, 'Well, but I already have my curriculum, and this is the way I've been teaching it for the last, X decades,' et cetera." Concerns regarding AI-driven academic dishonesty have been on teachers' minds since ChatGPT took off in late 2022. Plenty of students do use LLMs as homework help machines, rather than slogging through the work themselves. The current way that students are using AI to cut corners, Hoffman said, is circumventing the "whole point" of the educational system: learning. "Obviously a student goes, 'Huh, I could spend 30 hours writing an essay, or I could spend 90 minutes with my ChatGPT, Claude, Pi — whatever — prompting and generate something for that,'" Hoffman said. "And obviously, to some degree, they're underserving what they actually really need." The LinkedIn cofounder isn't an advocate for keeping AI out of schools — on the contrary, he believes there are ways in which it could aid learning, rather than kneecapping it. For instance, he thinks integrating AI into the curriculum could be more helpful than trying to stave off student usage. "Whether it's an essay or an oral exam or anything else — you're going to go in and the AI examiner is going to be with you doing that," Hoffman said. "And actually, in fact, that will be harder to fake than the pre-AI times." Prior to the advent of AI, Hoffman said, ways to "hack" the educational system already existed, such as piling on just enough knowledge to pass a written test or rushing to complete a passable essay that didn't dive much deeper than surface level. Potential AI examiners aside, Hoffman suggests that assessments like oral tests, which he believes are more difficult than written, could force students to study more intensely and absorb more overall. "Part of the reason why oral exams are hard — generally reserved for Ph.D. students, sometimes master's students, et cetera — is because actually, in fact, to be prepared for oral exams, you got to be across the whole zoom," Hoffman said. "Now, let's think if every class had an oral exam essentially on it," he added. "Ooh, you're going to have to learn a whole lot more in order to do this. And I think that's ultimately how this stuff will be." There are also less drastic ways that teachers could be using AI to their advantage, Hoffman added, that don't require them to entirely rewrite their curriculums. For instance, if they believe that AI essays are subpar, they can provide students with examples of what not to do. "Alright, so you're teaching a class on Jane Austen and her relevance to, call it, early literary criticism, or something like that," he said. "And you say, 'Okay, well I went to ChatGPT and I generated 10 essays, and here's the 10. These are D minuses. Do better.'" The most important thing, Hoffman said, is that teachers bring AI into the classroom in some way, big or small, if only to gain a better understanding of how it can be applied in their fields. No matter their focus areas, it would be to their — and their students' — detriment to "ignore the new tool," he said. "We're in a disruptive moment," Hoffman said. "We have a bunch of professors, just like classic, established professionals who go, 'I don't want to be disrupted. I want to keep my curriculum the way it is. I want to keep doing the thing that I'm doing.' And it's like, 'Well, no, you can't,' right? And so you need to be learning this." Hoffman, who didn't immediately respond to a request for further comment on the topic, argues it's now an educator's responsibility to get their students ready to work with AI, given that he believes it will transform their future workplaces, as well. "The most central thing is preparing students to be capable, healthy, happy participants in the new world," he said. "And obviously your ability to engage with, deploy, leverage, utilize, AI — AI agents, et cetera — is going to be absolutely essential." Are you a teacher changing your approach to assignments or exams in the age of ChatGPT? Contact the author at sperkel@ Read the original article on Business Insider
