How Personalis is detecting cancer with improved precision

Through genomic sequencing and analytics, Sacramento-based Personalis aims to make detection of cancer ever more precise and timely. In October 2023, the company launched early access to its NeXT Personal Dx test, which offers ultra-sensitive circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) detection, enabling earlier detection of cancer recurrence and more detailed monitoring of treatment response.

NeXT Personal Dx is a whole-genome sequencing test that detects circulating tumor DNA molecules, findin

How Cohere’s AI offers a fresh take on enterprise search

The Canadian commercial AI startup Cohere doesn’t get as much time in the spotlight as OpenAI and Anthropic, but it spent 2023 quietly establishing itself as an attractive API for enterprises. Part of the company’s 2023 success owes to its go-to-market approach. It allows enterprises to host a Cohere language model on their own servers or in a private or commercial cloud.

Last July, Amazon Web Services started to distribute the Cohere models through its Bedrock AI plat

How Perplexity aims to reinvent web search

The way we search the web—picking through a list of links, some of them paid for, some gamed to show up high on the page—has remained virtually unchanged for more than two decades. Then came AI chatbots, which can understand plain-language questions and return direct answers, potentially reshuffling the $110 billion search ad business now dominated by Google.  One-year-old Perplexity’s “answer engine” is at the forefront of this new world of chatbot-ass

This company is ensuring hospital IVs are working the way they should

Inserting an IV catheter is among the most common hospital procedures, yet up to half of them fail. This can lead to patients getting the wrong dose or cause scarring and nerve damage.

Extreme cases of complications from incorrectly placed IVs can lead to amputation and even death. While hospitals use continuous monitoring for patients’ heart rates and blood-oxygen levels, it hasn’t been standard practice to continuously monitor IV sites to ensure that patients receive

This startup’s advice can helps those in home-buying hell

Last June, U.K.-based mortgage broker Habito made an unusual move: It hired a new CEO who simultaneously became the startup’s biggest shareholder. Ying Tan, an entrepreneur who previously led mortgage advice startup Dynamo, invested his own money in Habito as he took the reins. At the time, 7-year-old Habito was struggling to turn a profit despite its focus on frustrated and overwhelmed first-time homebuyers—a population that is growing in the U.K., as in the United States. Habi

The buck stops at truck stops when using this company’s anti-fraud app

Relay Payments develops fintech products that make on-the-road transactions easier for truck drivers. While the company is most known among haulers for an app that lets them securely charge and accept digital payments for “lumper fees”—the cost of loading and unloading cargo, typically paid upfront—it recently set its sights on making gas fill-ups safer, too. In June 2023, Relay partnered with several truck stop brands, including Pilot Company and its 800 locations

How a single individual made one of the best-selling PC games of 2023

A decade ago, creating a successful online multiplayer game required a large company’s worth of expertise to handle networking, graphics, and marketing and distribution—the list goes on. This year, one of the top-selling PC games, Lethal Company, was developed and released by an individual known only as Zeekerss.

Zeekerss stands on the shoulders of giants, of course: They built their co-op sci-fi horror game using the sophisticated Unity game engine, and distributed it

This company helps smaller businesses keep up with rising data compliance demands

As people insist on more privacy, and more legislators follow the examples of Europe and California, companies are facing a surge in compliance demands and data subject requests.

That’s hard enough for big companies, with sprawling landscapes of data, but it’s especially complicated for smaller businesses, which lack the kinds of professionals needed to manage a proper privacy program.

DataGrail helps organizations keep better track of their privacy responsib

This company stepped up when Silicon Valley Bank went down

Brex was already in the midst of a dramatic reinvention when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023. The spend management platform, founded in 2017, had spent the prior year pivoting from a focus on offering corporate credit cards to startups to a software-as-a-service model encompassing a more holistic spend-management platform designed for enterprise customers. But Brex didn’t hesitate to rapidly spin up solutions for fleeing SVB customers, increasing FDIC insurance on its busin

Meet the company keeping its eye on the skies for satellite makers and even the U.S. Space Force

With more active satellites than ever orbiting Earth—more than 8,300 at last count—helping them dodge space junk and avoid collisions is an increasingly important sector of the space industry. El Segundo, California-based Slingshot Aerospace aims to be the definitive source for information on space situational awareness. “We are building the common operating picture for space,” says Audrey Schaffer, the company’s VP of strategy and policy. By pulling in data


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