Tootfinder

Parspec, whose AI-powered workflow tool automates procurement processes in the construction supply chain, raised a $20M Series A led by Threshold Ventures (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/construction-supply-chain-startup-parspec/

Exclusive: AI-Powered Construction Procurement Startup Lands $20M Series A 
Parspec, a startup using artificial intelligence to improve efficiency in the construction industry supply chain to help sales agents and wholesale distributors “efficiently bid and supply” construction products, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding, the company told Crunchbase News exclusively.

Remember the cat litter story from https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/115107752572750888?
So, the vendor insisted that the delivery company will take two packages with a single label. The delivery man disagreed. So over the weekend I had to keep asking, and finally got two labels. The delivery man took the packages. I got my money back.
As soon as I found the time, I've left a negative comment on the sales platform, explaining the problem in detail. And what? With a speed of a shitty script I got a request to change the opinion. Of course, it's all a cheap template, cut in the middle because it didn't fit in the explanation length limit. "Oh dearie, could we know why did you give us a negative opinion? Blah blah blah." Yeah, sure. You could have just read it!
But well, I've changed my comment. To one that's even worse. Added that they shamelessly automatically send requests to change the opinion. The platform wanted me to confirm that they didn't offer me a reward for this change of opinion 😆.

European car makers have subsidized Musk's Tesla for years by buying EU carbon credits from him so they could continue to sell fossil fuel cars.
Now the European public is turning away from Tesla, will they move on to subsidizing China's BYD instead?
https://

BYD in Talks to Sell Carbon Credits to European Automakers to Avoid EU Emissions Fines
BYD is in advanced talks with European automakers to form a carbon credit pool, allowing companies with lower EV sales to buy emissions credits

A look at Marc Benioff's pursuit of productivity gains through AI at Salesforce, which has undergone a series of layoffs over the past two years (Caroline O'Donovan/Washington Post)

Automation comes for tech jobs in the world capital of AI
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made himself a cheerleader for AI’s potential to disrupt work while also laying off staff.

Britain's Jaguar Landrover hit by cyber incident that disrupts production, sales
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/britains-jlr-hit-by-cyber-incident-that-disrupts-production-sales-2025…

Tesla's Europe sales cratered 40% in July while overall EV sales were up 34% compared to a year ago. Tesla sales in the Netherlands were down 62%!
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/teslas-europe-sales-crater-40-in-july-as…

Tesla's Europe sales crater 40% in July as BYD, competitors gain
Tesla's troubles across the pond in Europe are worsening. Per the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, Tesla EV registrations (a proxy for sales) ...

AI startup Aurasell, which aims to automate sales tools built on top of CRM software like Salesforce, emerges from stealth with $30M seed led by Next47 (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-sales-startup-aurasell-raise…

AI startup Aurasell raised $30M seed in 28 hours to take on Salesforce
AI sales startup Aurasell is emerging from stealth with a $30 million seed round that its founders said closed in roughly a day.

Artisan raised a ruckus in San Francisco last year
when it rolled out its
“Stop Hiring Humans” catch phrase.
The slogan referred to how its product, A.I. chatbots that help sales teams automate repetitive tasks, could do what people do.
The company received angry emails and death threats addressed to Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, its 23-year-old chief executive.
But the marketing seems to have worked.
Artisan posted billboards in April announcing a successfu…

Tech Billboards Are All Over San Francisco. Can You Decode Them?
Take this quiz to test how fluent you are in the lingo of today’s tech industry.

BLUEX Revisited: Enhancing Benchmark Coverage with Automatic Captioning
Jo\~ao Guilherme Alves Santos, Giovana Kerche Bon\'as, Thales Sales Almeida
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21294

BLUEX Revisited: Enhancing Benchmark Coverage with Automatic Captioning
With the growing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an increasing need for robust evaluation methods, especially in multilingual and non-English contexts. We present an updated version of the BLUEX dataset, now including 2024-2025 exams and automatically generated image captions using state-of-the-art models, enhancing its relevance for data contamination studies in LLM pretraining. Captioning strategies increase accessibility to text-only models by more than 40%, producing …

Sources: Salesforce and ServiceNow are in talks to invest ~$750M each in Genesys, which uses AI to automate customer service functions, valuing Genesys at ~$15B (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-31/salesforc…