Latest news with #GV
National Post
2 days ago
- Business
- National Post
FBN Expands AI-Powered Platform for Ag Commerce, Financing, and Farm Intelligence
Article content SAN MATEO, Calif. — Farmers Business Network (FBN®), the collaborative peer-to-peer farmer network generating farm-level intelligence and a leading marketplace for North America's agricultural sector, announced new investments and platform expansions alongside $50 million in funding to fuel new product lines and AI deployment. Article content The funding will support FBN's mission of powering the prosperity of family farms. Backed by leading investors, including GV (Google Ventures), Temasek, Arteqin, Colle Capital and T Rowe Price, the company builds on its digital platform to simplify agriculture's supply of goods, financing and services, while becoming the farmer's trusted personal AI partner. Article content FBN's farmer network has grown to over 117,000 farms, representing 187 million acres in the U.S. and Canada. Its Amazon-like e-commerce platform offers more than 7,200 products from crops and livestock with direct-to-farm delivery on most orders within 24 to 72 hours. According to recent farmer surveys by Stratus Ag Research, FBN was visited by 35% of farmers when shopping for inputs, and the number of farmers buying inputs online grew 86% vs. 2023. In 2025, more farmers returned to FBN to purchase inputs than ever before, as producers focused on profitability. FBN's Finance platform has now extended nearly $3 billion in total financing to growers. Article content 'Our commitment to putting farmers first means a relentless focus on efficiency and convenience,' said Diego Casanello, CEO of FBN. 'Our goal is to reduce a farm's operating costs 20% or more compared to brick-and-mortar retail. We're working to maximize grower savings and ensure every dollar they spend goes as far as possible.' Article content To better serve its members and build for the future, FBN is evolving to focus on its core digital strengths. This has meant making difficult choices to align its workforce with strategic priorities. These essential changes, while challenging, position FBN to deliver exceptional and sustainable value to its members through innovation. Article content FBN is increasing its strategic investment in advanced AI development. 'Artificial Intelligence is enabling us to provide our farmer members with more personalized and relevant insights,' said Casanello. 'Simultaneously, it offers new tools to automate our marketplace operations, reducing costs and improving the customer experience.' Article content FBN launched 'Norm', the first Large Language Model (LLM) to answer farmer's agronomy questions. The model has been now trained to help farmers with crop marketing related inquiries. Future versions are expected to include personalized agronomy, finance and risk management support. Article content The company is broadening its marketplace offerings – all while improving the fast and convenient service farmers have come to expect and rely on. FBN has significantly expanded its private label product portfolio in 2025 and opened the platform to third-party sellers, allowing them to offer their own brands directly to FBN members via a suite of seller tools and commercial services. Article content Today's announcement includes these expanded product portfolio features: Article content More Private Label and Third-party Crop Protection Products: FBN is enhancing its crop protection, biological and nutrition offerings for major commodity crops like corn, canola, cotton, soybeans, alfalfa and wheat, creating one of the industry's broadest and most trusted portfolios under its Willowood USA ® and Farmers First ® brands, while opening up the platform to more third-party sellers. Canadian Growth: FBN Canada has expanded its wheat crop protection portfolio, added bulk liquid fertilizer and equipment financing, and will open two new distribution centers in 2026. New Seed Platform: FBN is opening the marketplace for third-party seed offers, with leading brands like Seitec Genetics ®, featuring products for corn, soybean, sorghum, alfalfa, and cover crops. Expanding Livestock: FBN's rapidly growing livestock marketplace will continue to expand with new products including feed from Ridley ® & Sweetlix ®, fencing, and a growing assortment of farm & ranch supplies. Article content Farmers Business Network, Inc. (FBN®) is a pioneering digital marketplace and farmer-to-farmer network dedicated to empowering family farmers globally while promoting sustainable agriculture. With over 117,000 members, FBN's Farmers First® promise unites growers and ranchers in their quest to maximize profitability and increase food production. FBN leverages data, AI and direct-to-farm delivery to simplify the agricultural supply chain, boosting convenience and transparency, reducing farm input costs, enhancing access to financing and services, and providing personalized farm insights. Its Gradable® joint-venture helps thousands of farmers adopt and earn rewards for regenerative practices while simplifying the access of regenerative products for the world's leading food companies and grain buyers. Article content Article content Article content Article content
Hans India
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Hans India
Polavaram completion by 2027 impossible: Ex-MP
Rajamahendravaram: Former MP GV Harsha Kumar has stated that completing the Polavaram Project by 2027, as claimed by Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu is not feasible. Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, Harsha Kumar blamed the past mistakes of the TDP government that are causing the current delays in the project's construction. He pointed out that errors in the construction of the diaphragm wall and cofferdams have made the project highly complex. He claimed that nearly 1.60 lakh cusecs of seepage is expected at the project site, and questioned how construction can proceed without effectively addressing this issue. Citing expert committee recommendations, he said the foundation for the diaphragm wall must be laid up to 2 metres deep into the rock bed. However, the Polavaram project contractor is allegedly denying the necessity of this, which he termed as unacceptable. 'If the diaphragm wall and cofferdams are not structurally strong, how can the project withstand pressure?' he asked. Harsha Kumar also welcomed the Central Government's decision to reject the Banakacharla project, saying it would have placed an unnecessary financial burden on the state. He further remarked that MLAs visiting people under the 'Suparipalanalo Toli Adugu' initiative will certainly face tough questions from the public.
TechCrunch
01-07-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Nothing launches its most expensive flagship yet, Phone (3)
Nothing on Tuesday launched its newest flagship phone after a two-year gap. At an event in London, the company unveiled the Phone (3), which starts at $799 and aims to take on bigwigs like Samsung and Apple with its differentiated design and features targeting tech enthusiasts. Since releasing Phone (1) in 2022 , the GV-backed startup has relied on a transparent design to make its phone stand out from others. The Phone (3) follows that same design language, but it introduces a stranger camera arrangement that forgoes the typical square or circular alignment found on other smartphone devices. (If you are someone who gets triggered by unaligned elements on websites or apps, this camera arrangement might make you mad!) Image Credits: Nothing Nothing has also favored arranging LEDs on its back — a feature that it calls Glphy. This was always somewhat gimmicky, but the company made use of this to show you different alerts and notifications using the LED lights. Old Glyph interface on Phone (2) Image Credits: TechCrunch/Brian Heater Image Credits:Brian Heater Now, the company is replacing GIphy with a small circular mini LED screen, called Glphy Matrix, on the back of the device at the top right. This addition displays 16-bit styled patterns, which can offer more information than the earlier Glphy arrangement. The company is also releasing mini-apps for this interface, such as spin the bottle and rock, paper, scissors. The new Glphy Matrix interface is on the top right. Image Credits: Nothing It is 2025, so the phone has to include some AI-powered features, too. At launch this includes two features called Essential Space and Essential Search. The company first debuted Essential Space, an app to save screenshots and take notes, on the Nothing Phone 3a Pro. Now, Nothing is upgrading this app to let you record meetings and view an AI transcription and summary. To use the feature, you'll have to press the Essential key and place the phone with the screen side down to start the recording. While this sounds potentially useful, Nothing doesn't have a web interface to access these transcriptions and summaries at this time. Nothing is also debuting Essential Search — a feature like the iPhone's Spotlight search — and infusing it with AI. This search feature allows you to search for settings, files, or photos on your phone by typing in keywords. Plus, you can type in natural language queries to get web results by pressing a button next to the search bar. This is similar to iPhone's upgraded Siri interface, which is integrated with ChatGPT. Specifications and availability The new smartphone has comparable specifications to other companies' Android flagships. This includes a 6.67-inch AMOLED screen with 1.5K resolution, which is protected by Gorilla Glass 7i. The device is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 processor, built on a 4-nanometer architecture. The trio of cameras all have a 50-megapixel resolution, but play different roles. The main camera has a 1.3-inch sensor, which is 20% bigger than Phone (2), at a f/1.68 aperture; the periscope telephoto lens offers 3x optical zoom, and 60x digital zoom with AI Super Res Zoom; and the ultra-wide lens provides a 114-degree field of view. Nothing is also upgrading the selfie camera from 32 megapixels to 50 megapixels. The Phone (3) has a 5150 mAh battery (5,500 mAh in its India variant) with support for 65W wired charging and 15W wireless charging. The company said the phone will ship with Nothing OS 3.5, which is based on Android 15, and will be updated to Nothing OS 4.0, based on Android 16, later this year. It noted that the flagship device will get five years of software updates and seven years of security updates. The company will sell the 256GB model of the Phone (3) for $799 and the 512GB model for $899. At this price, the phone directly competes with the Samsung Galaxy S25, which was released at a base price of $799 earlier this year. Pre-orders for the device begin on July 4 with general availability on July 15. As TechCrunch reported last month, Nothing is making the Phone (3) available in the U.S. generally through its own website and Amazon. This is the second device, after Phone (2) the company is making widely available. Its other budget devices were available only through a restrictive beta program.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Time Platform Laurel Raises $100 Million to Transform the Professional Services Industry
IVP leads and GV joins Series C as Laurel reshapes how professional services firms keep time and optimize work using AI SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Laurel, the world's first AI Time platform, today announced it has raised $100 million in Series C funding led by IVP, with participation from GV (Google Ventures). Laurel will leverage this investment to scale its AI time platform and accelerate to solve what it calls the "time intelligence challenge"—the inability for knowledge industries to accurately map time to business outcomes. In the age of AI, quantifying and understanding human capital goes from a "nice to have" to a "cannot exist without" for enterprises. In addition to IVP and GV, new investors in the round, which consists of primary and secondary funding, also include: 01.a (created by former CEO and COO of Twitter & CRO of Facebook), DST Global, Kevin Weil (CPO @ OpenAI), Alexis Ohanian, Vladimir Fedorov (CTO @ GitHub), Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder of Dropbox), and Hans Tung. These investors join returning investors ACME, Anthos, Gokul Rajaram, AIX Ventures, and Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures. The funding comes as Laurel experiences rapid adoption among enterprise professional services firms like Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Freshfields, and Crowell & Moring. Over the last 12 months, Laurel grew ARR +300% at double-digit scale, increased usage by +500%, and works with +100 of the top legal, accounting, and consulting firms across US, UK, EU, Australia, and Canada. Laurel's AI Time platform, now leveraged by hundreds of the world's top enterprise professional service firms, uses AI to automatically categorize, describe, and analyze how professionals spend their time on admin work. The platform's ability to connect time data with business outcomes has proven transformative for firms looking to maximize profits, allocate their resources effectively, and understand exactly what workflows to apply AI to and what agents to automate. Customers using the company's AI-native time platform report profit increases between 4-11%—driven by an additional 28 billable minutes per day per professional, and increased realization of 1-4%. Laurel's ROI methodology has been independently audited and validated by a Big-4 Firm. The platform currently processes over $5B in gross market value for its customers, and +$360M of that amount is net-new value attributable to Laurel. In addition, Laurel saves its professionals up to 80% in time recording, freeing them to work on high-leverage work. "Laurel uniquely delivers value across lawyers, clients, finance, and marketing by streamlining time capture, enriching narratives, and accelerating accurate billing," says David Cunningham, Chief Innovation Officer at global law firm Reed Smith. "As firms assess the impact of AI and fixed fees, gaining granular intelligence with less effort is essential to redefining value within a firm and for its clients." "I've seen first-hand how Laurel can transform our approach to time intelligence. What used to be a manual process of time-keeping and entry is now significantly technology enabled," says Matt Newnes, Partner and Tax Transformation leader at Ernst & Young. "Laurel doesn't just help our people to capture time that they spend on work more comprehensively; it helps us to understand much more about how our teams work allowing us to identify best practices to help ensure we always drive the best outcomes for our clients. It has proven to be one of our most impactful AI investments, delivering measurable results while laying the foundation for broader transformation initiatives." Automating time is Laurel's first step. Laurel's AI platform turns its proprietary data around work and time to address the #1 business problem impacting knowledge industries: operating without visibility into their supply chain. "Nobody has ever mapped the input of time to the output of outcomes. Industries like legal and accounting are best at understanding their input (time), but still struggle to price value. On the flip side, industries like consulting and financial services understand value, but operate blind to the true cost of creation. While all other industries have been obsessed about optimizing their supply chain, the supply chain of knowledge work—which represents over 50% of Global GDP—has never been surfaced. This funding helps us solve this fundamental challenge while giving firms the data foundation they need to deploy AI strategically. We're not just automating time—we're creating the time intelligence layer that will transform how all knowledge industries operate," says Ryan Alshak, founder and CEO of Laurel. "Laurel has identified one of the largest efficiency gaps in the modern economy, one I understand deeply as a former CFO of a public company. Professional services represent trillions in global economic activity, yet these firms operate without basic visibility into their core resource – time. By solving the time intelligence challenge, Laurel creates a platform for broader AI transformation. As these industries invest heavily in AI over the next five years, Laurel's data foundation becomes essential infrastructure that truly tracks the ROI of AI. The market opportunity is massive, and Laurel's unique position makes them the clear leader in this space," says Ajay Vashee, General Partner at IVP. "Laurel is creating the enterprise intelligence layer for knowledge work that leverages timekeeping as a product wedge," said Frederique Dame, General Partner at GV. "By capturing and organizing the full lifecycle of how professionals spend their time, Laurel unlocks a new class of data that makes work itself measurable, optimizable, and automatable. The goal isn't just better time tracking, it's building the data foundation for AI-powered workflows, predictive resourcing, and strategic insights." Transforming How Knowledge Industries Understand and Optimize Work While manufacturing companies know exactly how much it costs to produce a car down to the penny, and retail businesses track inventory with precision, professional services firms have historically operated without understanding their most critical resource: human capital. Both the outcomes of the work itself and the time it takes to produce it. As a result, organizations are operating blind on what the biggest impact for AI is across their companies, and how to point people to highest value tasks (like Business Development, Relationship Management, and first principles strategic thinking). As knowledge industries plan to spend over $1 trillion on AI in the next five years, Laurel's time intelligence platform ensures these investments target the highest-impact opportunities. Key customer results include: Average recovery of 28+ billable minutes per professional per day 4-11% increase in overall firm profitability 80%+ reduction in time spent on manual time entry Real-time visibility into project profitability and resource utilization "While Laurel is unique in that it is AI that generates profits, the reason everyone at Laurel cares so much about solving this problem is because people waste so much time at work, and the only way to solve this at scale is to deeply understand where that time is going," says Alshak. "And we're starting with professional services because that will give us the human-in-the-loop required to create the world's first-ever agentic timesheet. The average knowledge worker works 9 hours a day, but only adds leverage for 3. That is 3 hours a day we're doing work that should be done by agents, and 3 hours a day we're doing work that nobody should do. That is our opportunity set – 6.4 billion years currently being spent by knowledge workers on tasks humans no longer need to do. That is our opportunity." About Laurel Laurel is the world's first AI Time platform for professional services firms. The company's AI transforms how organizations track, analyze, describe, and optimize their most valuable resource: time. By automating work time and connecting time data to business outcomes, Laurel enables firms to increase profitability, improve client delivery, and make data-driven strategic decisions. Founded in 2018, Laurel serves many of the world's largest accounting, consulting and law firms. For more information, visit About IVP IVP supercharges growth in breakout companies, converting momentum into market dominance. One of the original venture firms on Sand Hill Road, IVP partners with companies that define their eras—from Slack, Crowdstrike and Coinbase to Perplexity, Abridge, Glean and Chainguard—before the world truly appreciated them. Each year, IVP invests in just a dozen breakout founders ready to scale from millions to hundreds of millions in revenue and expand from one market to many. We've guided market leaders through cycles and storms, unlocking pivotal growth by activating the right expertise at the moments founders need it. With 130+ IPOs out of 400 investments, IVP helps ambitious founders defy limits, command industries and cement their place at the top. View source version on Contacts Media Contact: Alexa Guerra, Head of Marketing | marketing@ Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Time Platform Laurel Raises $100 Million to Transform the Professional Services Industry
IVP leads and GV joins Series C as Laurel reshapes how professional services firms keep time and optimize work using AI SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Laurel, the world's first AI Time platform, today announced it has raised $100 million in Series C funding led by IVP, with participation from GV (Google Ventures). Laurel will leverage this investment to scale its AI time platform and accelerate to solve what it calls the "time intelligence challenge"—the inability for knowledge industries to accurately map time to business outcomes. In the age of AI, quantifying and understanding human capital goes from a "nice to have" to a "cannot exist without" for enterprises. In addition to IVP and GV, new investors in the round, which consists of primary and secondary funding, also include: 01.a (created by former CEO and COO of Twitter & CRO of Facebook), DST Global, Kevin Weil (CPO @ OpenAI), Alexis Ohanian, Vladimir Fedorov (CTO @ GitHub), Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder of Dropbox), and Hans Tung. These investors join returning investors ACME, Anthos, Gokul Rajaram, AIX Ventures, and Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures. The funding comes as Laurel experiences rapid adoption among enterprise professional services firms like Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Freshfields, and Crowell & Moring. Over the last 12 months, Laurel grew ARR +300% at double-digit scale, increased usage by +500%, and works with +100 of the top legal, accounting, and consulting firms across US, UK, EU, Australia, and Canada. Laurel's AI Time platform, now leveraged by hundreds of the world's top enterprise professional service firms, uses AI to automatically categorize, describe, and analyze how professionals spend their time on admin work. The platform's ability to connect time data with business outcomes has proven transformative for firms looking to maximize profits, allocate their resources effectively, and understand exactly what workflows to apply AI to and what agents to automate. Customers using the company's AI-native time platform report profit increases between 4-11%—driven by an additional 28 billable minutes per day per professional, and increased realization of 1-4%. Laurel's ROI methodology has been independently audited and validated by a Big-4 Firm. The platform currently processes over $5B in gross market value for its customers, and +$360M of that amount is net-new value attributable to Laurel. In addition, Laurel saves its professionals up to 80% in time recording, freeing them to work on high-leverage work. "Laurel uniquely delivers value across lawyers, clients, finance, and marketing by streamlining time capture, enriching narratives, and accelerating accurate billing," says Reed Cunningham, Chief Innovation Officer at global law firm Reed Smith. "As firms assess the impact of AI and fixed fees, gaining granular intelligence with less effort is essential to redefining value within a firm and for its clients." "I've seen first-hand how Laurel can transform our approach to time intelligence. What used to be a manual process of time-keeping and entry is now significantly technology enabled," says Matt Newnes, Partner and Tax Transformation leader at Ernst & Young. "Laurel doesn't just help our people to capture time that they spend on work more comprehensively; it helps us to understand much more about how our teams work allowing us to identify best practices to help ensure we always drive the best outcomes for our clients. It has proven to be one of our most impactful AI investments, delivering measurable results while laying the foundation for broader transformation initiatives." Automating time is Laurel's first step. Laurel's AI platform turns its proprietary data around work and time to address the #1 business problem impacting knowledge industries: operating without visibility into their supply chain. "Nobody has ever mapped the input of time to the output of outcomes. Industries like legal and accounting are best at understanding their input (time), but still struggle to price value. On the flip side, industries like consulting and financial services understand value, but operate blind to the true cost of creation. While all other industries have been obsessed about optimizing their supply chain, the supply chain of knowledge work—which represents over 50% of Global GDP—has never been surfaced. This funding helps us solve this fundamental challenge while giving firms the data foundation they need to deploy AI strategically. We're not just automating time—we're creating the time intelligence layer that will transform how all knowledge industries operate," says Ryan Alshak, founder and CEO of Laurel. "Laurel has identified one of the largest efficiency gaps in the modern economy, one I understand deeply as a former CFO of a public company. Professional services represent trillions in global economic activity, yet these firms operate without basic visibility into their core resource – time. By solving the time intelligence challenge, Laurel creates a platform for broader AI transformation. As these industries invest heavily in AI over the next five years, Laurel's data foundation becomes essential infrastructure that truly tracks the ROI of AI. The market opportunity is massive, and Laurel's unique position makes them the clear leader in this space," says Ajay Vashee, General Partner at IVP. "Laurel is creating the enterprise intelligence layer for knowledge work that leverages timekeeping as a product wedge," said Frederique Dame, General Partner at GV. "By capturing and organizing the full lifecycle of how professionals spend their time, Laurel unlocks a new class of data that makes work itself measurable, optimizable, and automatable. The goal isn't just better time tracking, it's building the data foundation for AI-powered workflows, predictive resourcing, and strategic insights." Transforming How Knowledge Industries Understand and Optimize Work While manufacturing companies know exactly how much it costs to produce a car down to the penny, and retail businesses track inventory with precision, professional services firms have historically operated without understanding their most critical resource: human capital. Both the outcomes of the work itself and the time it takes to produce it. As a result, organizations are operating blind on what the biggest impact for AI is across their companies, and how to point people to highest value tasks (like Business Development, Relationship Management, and first principles strategic thinking). As knowledge industries plan to spend over $1 trillion on AI in the next five years, Laurel's time intelligence platform ensures these investments target the highest-impact opportunities. Key customer results include: Average recovery of 28+ billable minutes per professional per day 4-11% increase in overall firm profitability 80%+ reduction in time spent on manual time entry Real-time visibility into project profitability and resource utilization "While Laurel is unique in that it is AI that generates profits, the reason everyone at Laurel cares so much about solving this problem is because people waste so much time at work, and the only way to solve this at scale is to deeply understand where that time is going," says Alshak. "And we're starting with professional services because that will give us the human-in-the-loop required to create the world's first-ever agentic timesheet. The average knowledge worker works 9 hours a day, but only adds leverage for 3. That is 3 hours a day we're doing work that should be done by agents, and 3 hours a day we're doing work that nobody should do. That is our opportunity set – 6.4 billion years currently being spent by knowledge workers on tasks humans no longer need to do. That is our opportunity." About Laurel Laurel is the world's first AI Time platform for professional services firms. The company's AI transforms how organizations track, analyze, describe, and optimize their most valuable resource: time. By automating work time and connecting time data to business outcomes, Laurel enables firms to increase profitability, improve client delivery, and make data-driven strategic decisions. Founded in 2018, Laurel serves many of the world's largest accounting, consulting and law firms. For more information, visit About IVP IVP supercharges growth in breakout companies, converting momentum into market dominance. One of the original venture firms on Sand Hill Road, IVP partners with companies that define their eras—from Slack, Crowdstrike and Coinbase to Perplexity, Abridge, Glean and Chainguard—before the world truly appreciated them. Each year, IVP invests in just a dozen breakout founders ready to scale from millions to hundreds of millions in revenue and expand from one market to many. We've guided market leaders through cycles and storms, unlocking pivotal growth by activating the right expertise at the moments founders need it. With 130+ IPOs out of 400 investments, IVP helps ambitious founders defy limits, command industries and cement their place at the top. View source version on Contacts Media Contact: Alexa Guerra, Head of Marketing | marketing@ Sign in to access your portfolio
