Tootfinder

@… For Magit https://magit.vc/donate/, I switched to bank transfers: from my perspective, it cuts out the middlemen and I already have an account with my bank ;-)
Maybe

@… For Magit https://magit.vc/donate/, I switched to bank transfers: from my perspective, it cuts out the middlemen and I already have an account with my bank ;-)
Maybe

On the quadratic complexity of subsets of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ of bounded $\mathrm{VC_{2}}$-dimension
C. Terry, J. Wolf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12767 https://

On the quadratic complexity of subsets of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ of bounded $\mathrm{VC_{2}}$-dimension
In prior work, we showed that subsets of $\mathbb{F}_{p}^{n}$ of $\mathrm{VC_{2}}$-dimension at most $k$ are well approximated by a union of atoms of a quadratic factor of complexity $(\ell,q)$, where the complexity $\ell$ of the linear part and the complexity $q$ of the quadratic part are both bounded in terms of $k$, $p$, and the desired level of approximation $μ$. A key tool in the proof of this result was an arithmetic regularity lemma for the Gowers $U^3$-norm by Green and Tao, which resu…

(R)evolution of Programming: Vibe Coding as a Post-Coding Paradigm
Kevin Krings, Nino S. Bohn, Thomas Ludwig
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12364 https://arxiv…

(R)evolution of Programming: Vibe Coding as a Post-Coding Paradigm
Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly large language models, have introduced new possibilities for software development practices. In our paper we investigate the emerging Vibe Coding (VC) paradigm that emphasizes intuitive, affect-driven, and improvisational interactions between developers and AI systems. Building upon the discourse of End-User Development (EUD), we explore how VC diverges from conventional programming approaches such as those supporte…

O_O-VC: Synthetic Data-Driven One-to-One Alignment for Any-to-Any Voice Conversion
Huu Tuong Tu, Huan Vu, cuong tien nguyen, Dien Hy Ngo, Nguyen Thi Thu Trang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09061

O_O-VC: Synthetic Data-Driven One-to-One Alignment for Any-to-Any Voice Conversion
Traditional voice conversion (VC) methods typically attempt to separate speaker identity and linguistic information into distinct representations, which are then combined to reconstruct the audio. However, effectively disentangling these factors remains challenging, often leading to information loss during training. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages synthetic speech data generated by a high-quality, pretrained multispeaker text-to-speech (TTS) model. Specifically, syntheti…

Dealroom: 230 European defense tech startups have launched since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with VC funding reaching $1.5B this year, mostly for drone tech (Sylvia Pfeifer/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/6c247bbe-0181-472f-8369-581e2fd4f19b

SynthVC: Leveraging Synthetic Data for End-to-End Low Latency Streaming Voice Conversion
Zhao Guo, Ziqian Ning, Guobin Ma, Lei Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09245 https://

SynthVC: Leveraging Synthetic Data for End-to-End Low Latency Streaming Voice Conversion
Voice Conversion (VC) aims to modify a speaker's timbre while preserving linguistic content. While recent VC models achieve strong performance, most struggle in real-time streaming scenarios due to high latency, dependence on ASR modules, or complex speaker disentanglement, which often results in timbre leakage or degraded naturalness. We present SynthVC, a streaming end-to-end VC framework that directly learns speaker timbre transformation from synthetic parallel data generated by a pre-traine…

What Makes a Visualization Complex?
Mengdi Chu, Zefeng Qiu, Meng Ling, Shuning Jiang, Robert S. Laramee, Michael Sedlmair, Jian Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08332 https://

What Makes a Visualization Complex?
We investigate the perceived visual complexity (VC) in data visualizations using objective image-based metrics. We collected VC scores through a large-scale crowdsourcing experiment involving 349 participants and 1,800 visualization images. We then examined how these scores align with 12 image-based metrics spanning information-theoretic, clutter, color, and our two object-based metrics. Our results show that both low-level image properties and the high-level elements affect perceived VC in vis…

»DID Method for Natural Persons«
Does anyone know about this and are there any post-quantum cryptography approaches available? How widespread is it, and is it already being used extensively? If so, where and by whom in what areas?
I thank you in advance for your answers and the retoot :BoostOK:
🧑‍💻 https://

Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02420 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02420

Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
The aim of this note is to overview some of our work in Chernikov, Towsner'20 (arXiv:2010.00726) developing higher arity VC theory (VC$_n$ dimension), including a generalization of Haussler packing lemma, and an associated tame (slice-wise) hypergraph regularity lemma; and to demonstrate that it characterizes higher arity PAC learning (PAC$_n$ learning) in $n$-fold product spaces with respect to product measures introduced by Kobayashi, Kuriyama and Takeuchi'15. We also point out how some of th…

HISPASpoof: A New Dataset For Spanish Speech Forensics
Maria Risques, Kratika Bhagtani, Amit Kumar Singh Yadav, Edward J. Delp
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09155 https://

HISPASpoof: A New Dataset For Spanish Speech Forensics
Zero-shot Voice Cloning (VC) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) methods have advanced rapidly, enabling the generation of highly realistic synthetic speech and raising serious concerns about their misuse. While numerous detectors have been developed for English and Chinese, Spanish-spoken by over 600 million people worldwide-remains underrepresented in speech forensics. To address this gap, we introduce HISPASpoof, the first large-scale Spanish dataset designed for synthetic speech detection and attribut…

VC firm Insight Partners says thousands of staff and limited partners had personal data stolen in a ransomware attack
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/vc-giant-insight-partners-notifies-staff-and-limited-partners-after-data-b…

VC firm Insight Partners says thousands of staff and limited partners had personal data stolen in a ransomware attack | TechCrunch
The venture capital giant, behind cyber giants Wiz and Databricks, notified current and former employees, as well as the firm's limited partners, that their data was stolen in a January cyberattack.

Simple, an AI-powered health coaching app to help users lose weight, raised a $35M Series B led by Kevin Hart's HartBeat Ventures (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/kevin-harts-vc-firm-leads-35m-series-…

Kevin Hart’s VC firm leads $35M Series B for weight-loss app Simple | TechCrunch
Simple is an AI-powered health coaching app that helps people lose weight.

BlockSDN-VC: A SDN-Based Virtual Coordinate-Enhanced Transaction Broadcast Framework for High-Performance Blockchains
Wenyang Jia, Jingjing Wang, Kai Lei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00306

BlockSDN-VC: A SDN-Based Virtual Coordinate-Enhanced Transaction Broadcast Framework for High-Performance Blockchains
Modern blockchains need fast, reliable propagation to balance security and throughput. Virtual-coordinate methods speed dissemination but rely on slow iterative updates, leaving nodes out of sync. We present BlockSDN-VC, a transaction-broadcast protocol that centralises coordinate computation and forwarding control in an SDN controller, delivering global consistency, minimal path stretch and rapid response to churn or congestion. In geo-distributed simulations, BlockSDN-VC cuts median latency b…

Cofinal families of finite VC-dimension
Omer Ben-Neria, Itay Kaplan, George Peterzil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24744 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24744

Cofinal families of finite VC-dimension
Given infinite cardinals $θ\leq κ$, we ask for the minimal VC-dimension of a cofinal family $\mathcal{F}\subseteq[κ]^{<θ}$. We show that for $θ=ω$ and $κ=\aleph_n$ it is consistent with ZFC that there exists such a family of VC-dimension $n+1$, which is known to be the lower bound. For $θ>ω$ we answer this question completely, demonstrating a strong dichotomy between the case of singular and regular $θ$. We furthermore answer some relative and generalized versions of the above questio…

"check matrix" "hop on vc" no bitch let's hop on https://ynoproject.net and meet up on mars

Lighter, which operates an Ethereum Layer 2 network and a decentralized exchange to support perpetual futures contracts, raised $68M at a ~$1.5B valuation (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/378358/lighte

I was thinking of #Bluesky as not-Twitter, i.e., commercial but free of the RW nazi-adjacent stuff, & run by well-intentioned people. I was forgetting that it is a US-based VC-funded corp. I imagine there are all sorts of crazy pressures on it to buckle under MAGA rule, and that e.g., Charlie Kirk stuff was a lightning rod.
The only way BS could be immune to the sorts of pressures that…

I'm so glad I never took up any of those Silicon Valley companies or VC-backed startups on their offers.
Probably I'd be rich, I guess.
But I prefer to have my conscience not flushed down the toilet.

1Password founders sold a $75M stake as part of a $100M secondary sale, valuing the company at $6.8B, the same valuation as its $620M Series C in January 2022 (Jeff Stone/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

LatentVoiceGrad: Nonparallel Voice Conversion with Latent Diffusion/Flow-Matching Models
Hirokazu Kameoka, Takuhiro Kaneko, Kou Tanaka, Yuto Kondo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08379

LatentVoiceGrad: Nonparallel Voice Conversion with Latent Diffusion/Flow-Matching Models
Previously, we introduced VoiceGrad, a nonparallel voice conversion (VC) technique enabling mel-spectrogram conversion from source to target speakers using a score-based diffusion model. The concept involves training a score network to predict the gradient of the log density of mel-spectrograms from various speakers. VC is executed by iteratively adjusting an input mel-spectrogram until resembling the target speaker's. However, challenges persist: audio quality needs improvement, and conversion…

#Italian corp aggregator of failed #VC discards #BendingSpoons buys assets of #Vimeo the once high flying premium

MeanVC: Lightweight and Streaming Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Mean Flows
Guobin Ma, Jixun Yao, Ziqian Ning, Yuepeng Jiang, Lingxin Xiong, Lei Xie, Pengcheng Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08392

MeanVC: Lightweight and Streaming Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Mean Flows
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transfer timbre from a source speaker to any unseen target speaker while preserving linguistic content. Growing application scenarios demand models with streaming inference capabilities. This has created a pressing need for models that are simultaneously fast, lightweight, and high-fidelity. However, existing streaming methods typically rely on either autoregressive (AR) or non-autoregressive (NAR) frameworks, which either require large parameter sizes to…

Polymarket raised "double-digit millions" from 1789 Capital, which Donald Trump Jr. joined as a partner in 2024; Trump Jr. will join Polymarket's advisory board (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/26/trump-jr-vc-fund-polymarket

Scoop: Donald Trump Jr.'s VC firm bets on Polymarket
1789 Capital invested double-digit millions of dollars into Polymarket

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.DM. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DM/new
[1/1]:
- Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner

Arcade Media, the management company behind British YouTuber collective The Sidemen, sells a minority stake to Thomas Benski's film studio and VC group Lumina (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/9e7e3955-dd9e-4e0f-b22c-fca01a480485

Source: Stripe is in talks to buy back shares from its VC backers at a $106.7B valuation; Sequoia bought $861M worth of shares in 2024 at a $70B valuation (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/23/stripe-buy-back-stock-vc

Scoop: Stripe in talks to buy back stock from investors
Stripe has never seemed interested in an IPO.

Man I'm still pissed about last week. I keep thinking about it. I'm most definitely not having an open VC this Saturday, and I don't know when I will do that again.

Soso, #Nexthink an eine US-amerikanische Firma zu verkaufen ist also ein grosser Erfolg.
Fühlt sich irgendwie falsch an.
Der Einschub «Diese Transaktion wird viel Geld in die Region zurückbringen, das reinvestiert werden kann» finde ich nur halbwegs tröstlich. Aber hey, ich bin ja auch kein VC...

Nexthink: Schweizer Softwarefirma für 3 Milliarden übernommen
Wenige Start-ups erreichen je den in der Businesswelt begehrten Einhornstatus. Nexthink war eines davon. Dass es verkauft wurde, sei ein Meilenstein für die Schweizer Techbranche, sagt ein Experte.

Ripple Effects
Hosted by Soph Dicker from So Invested following Australian founders and VC operators on a transformative two-week journey in Tanzania...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/ripple-effects/

Maxmum Size of a Uniform Family with Bounded VC-dimension
Tianchi Yang, Xingxing Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14334 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14334

Maxmum Size of a Uniform Family with Bounded VC-dimension
In 1984, Frankl and Pach proved that, for positive integers $n$ and $d$, the maximum size of a $(d+1)$-uniform set family $\mathcal{F}$ on an $n$-element set with VC-dimension at most $d$ is at most ${n\choose d}$; and they suspected that ${n\choose d}$ could be replaced by ${n-1\choose d}$, which would generalize the famous Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem and was mentioned by Erdős as Frankl--Pach conjecture. However, Ahlswede and Khachatrian in 1997 constructed $(d+1)$-uniform families on an $n$-elem…

Good Morning #Canada
On the eve of #RemembranceDay, it's fitting that we wish a ##HappyBirthday to Charles Cecil Ingersoll Merritt, who was born on this day in 1908. Merritt was the first Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross in #WWII, the highest award for bravery among troops of the British Empire. He was also the son of Captain Cecil Mack Merritt, who was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres on April 23rd, 1915. Merritt commanded The South Saskatchewan Regiment, Canadian Army, (Canadian Infantry Corps), and led his regiment at the failed Dieppe Raid on August 19th, 1942. He led multiple charges against fortified positions, was wounded twice, and stayed on the beach to defend his troops as they were withdrawn. He was captured by the Germans and remained a prisoner until the end of the war.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianHeroes
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/charles-cecil-merritt-vc

PitchBook: VCs have invested $192.7B in AI startups so far this year, putting 2025 on track to be the first year when 50% of VC funding goes to the AI industry (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

“The day may come sooner than many expect when shareholders, directors and executives will demand evidence that the massive investment in LLM technology will generate an adequate return for them. The answer will be “no” for many, if not most”
(This isn’t from some mad poster, this guy has been a big shot VC since the 1980s.)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/24/ai-investors-llms

Crosslisted article(s) found for math.LO. https://arxiv.org/list/math.LO/new
[1/1]:
- Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner

Sources: Reflection AI, which is building AI coding tools, nears a deal to raise ~$1B at a valuation of $4.5B to $5.5B; Nvidia's VC arm would invest $250M (Financial Times)

Bulk viscous cosmological models with cosmological constant: Observational constraints
R. Noem\'i Villalobos, Yerko V\'asquez, Norman Cruz, Carlos H. L\'opez-Caraballo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11614

Bulk viscous cosmological models with cosmological constant: Observational constraints
We investigate whether viscous cold dark matter (vCDM) in a $Λ$-dominated FLRW universe can alleviate the Hubble tension while satisfying thermodynamic constraints, examining both flat and curved geometries. We model vCDM with bulk viscosity $ζ= ζ_0\,(Ω_{vc}/Ω_{vc0})^m$, where $m$ determines the viscosity evolution and $Ω_{vc}$ is the density parameter of vCDM. We explore two particular scenarios: constant viscosity ($m=0$), and variable viscosity ($m$ free). Using Bayesian inference, we …

VCBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Venture Capital
Rick Chen, Joseph Ternasky, Afriyie Samuel Kwesi, Ben Griffin, Aaron Ontoyin Yin, Zakari Salifu, Kelvin Amoaba, Xianling Mu, Fuat Alican, Yigit Ihlamur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14448

VCBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Venture Capital
Benchmarks such as SWE-bench and ARC-AGI demonstrate how shared datasets accelerate progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). We introduce VCBench, the first benchmark for predicting founder success in venture capital (VC), a domain where signals are sparse, outcomes are uncertain, and even top investors perform modestly. At inception, the market index achieves a precision of 1.9%. Y Combinator outperforms the index by a factor of 1.7x, while tier-1 firms are 2.9x better. VCBench p…

How VC firm 1789 Capital grew to $1B in assets with Donald Trump Jr. as a partner; its recent deals include investments in xAI, Neuralink, and Perplexity (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trump-linked-venture-fun…

Crosslisted article(s) found for math.CO. https://arxiv.org/list/math.CO/new
[1/1]:
- Higher-arity PAC learning, VC dimension and packing lemma
Artem Chernikov, Henry Towsner

Filing: Insight Partners says a ransomware attack on its systems between October 2024 and January 2025 affected 12,600 people, including limited partners (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/vc-giant…

VC firm Insight Partners says thousands of staff and limited partners had personal data stolen in a ransomware attack | TechCrunch
The venture capital giant, behind cyber giants Wiz and Databricks, notified current and former employees, as well as the firm's limited partners, that their data was stolen in a January cyberattack.

Strong enhancement of d-wave superconductivity in an extended checkerboard Hubbard ladder
Xichen Huang, Saisai He, Jize Zhao, Zhong-Bing Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24415 h…

Strong enhancement of d-wave superconductivity in an extended checkerboard Hubbard ladder
By employing the density-matrix renormalization group method, we study an extended checkerboard Hubbard model on the two-leg ladder, which includes an intraplaquette nearest-neighbour attraction V. The simulated results show that V plays a significant role in enhancing the d-wave superconductivity when the electron density is close to half-filling. In the homogeneous case t'=t (t and t' are the intraplaquette and interplaquette hopping integrals), large critical |Vc| is required to in…

Might be a while until I have people in a VC on stream after this one. Not even gonna publish the VOD.

Dealroom: European VC deals are set to rise 3-4% YoY in 2025 to $57B, about the same as in 2023, driven by rising startup valuations in AI, fintech, and defense (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5cd37cea-87e7-4648-b85b-f77091dd4558

Tracxn: funding for Indian digital lending startups fell to $462M between January and August 2025 from $1.1B a year earlier, after RBI tightened lending norms (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t

Clock’s ticking for digital lenders as VC funding plunges 50% in 2025
Funding into digital lending startups slumped to $462 million between January and August 2025 from $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn. Only around 50 of the 154 fintech deals reported this year involved digital lenders, the data showed.

Stabilizers and NIP arithmetic regularity
G. Conant, C. Terry
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04271 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04271

Stabilizers and NIP arithmetic regularity
We give a new proof of the NIP arithmetic regularity lemma for finite groups (due to the authors and Pillay), which describes the approximate structure of "NIP sets" in finite groups, i.e., subsets whose collection of left translates has bounded VC-dimension. Our new proof avoids sophisticated ingredients from the model theory of NIP formulas (e.g., Borel definability and generic compact domination). The key tool is an elaboration on an elementary lemma due to Alon, Fox, and Zhao concerning the…

London-based Evantic Capital, founded by ex-Sequoia VC Matt Miller, raised a $400M fund, with ~12.5% coming from 135 "legends", including CEOs, a novel strategy (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

MaskVCT: Masked Voice Codec Transformer for Zero-Shot Voice Conversion With Increased Controllability via Multiple Guidances
Junhyeok Lee, Helin Wang, Yaohan Guan, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Jes\'us Villalba, Najim Dehak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17143

MaskVCT: Masked Voice Codec Transformer for Zero-Shot Voice Conversion With Increased Controllability via Multiple Guidances
We introduce MaskVCT, a zero-shot voice conversion (VC) model that offers multi-factor controllability through multiple classifier-free guidances (CFGs). While previous VC models rely on a fixed conditioning scheme, MaskVCT integrates diverse conditions in a single model. To further enhance robustness and control, the model can leverage continuous or quantized linguistic features to enhance intellgibility and speaker similarity, and can use or omit pitch contour to control prosody. These choice…

PitchBook: European defense tech startups have raised €2.4B since 2022, including €1.4B in the first 7 months of 2025, up from €30M in 2020 and €150M in 2021 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/a194942b-93ff-49a0-8aa9-02460055748e

Europe’s defence tech start-ups attract investment surge
Russia’s war in Ukraine and fears over US security relationship drive wave of VC funding

Replaced article(s) found for cs.DM. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DM/new
[1/1]:
- Sunflowers in set systems with small VC-dimension
J\'ozsef Balogh, Anton Bernshteyn, Michelle Delcourt, Asaf Ferber, Huy Tuan Pham

Paris-based Filigran, which develops open-source threat intelligence tools, raised a $58M Series C led by French VC Eurazeo and reports 6K users (Daphné Leprince-Ringuet/Sifted)
https://sifted.eu/articles/cybersecurity-startup-filigran-raises-58m/

Look, I'm not accusing #Replit of anything, but are we sure it is wise to perform a massive migration from #Vercel to Replit without doing the proper background checks first?¹
As far as I know, even though their founders are under no suspicion, this company is still american, VC-backed, and has all sorts of partnerships with ultra-tainted companies (such as Microsoft).
Please be mindful, just saying.
1. For reference: #freepalestine #boycottisrael

PitchBook: VC investment in Asia slowed to $48.9B in the first nine months of 2025, just over half of 2024's total, amid uncertainty due to US tariff policies (Pak Yiu/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/finance/asian-ven…

Asian venture capital activity slows amid US tariff uncertainty
Investors increasingly cautious as deals shift toward supply chains and manufacturing

Source: Balderton Capital, one of Revolut's earliest VC backers, has sold ~$1B in shares through multiple transactions that valued the fintech company at $45B (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/fe6f985b-15b7-48cb-a05d-d5b613d75474

Qualcomm Ventures and six Indian VC firms join India Deep Tech Alliance with an additional $850M in commitments; Nvidia joins as a strategic technical adviser (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/nvid

NVIDIA, Qualcomm join U.S., Indian VCs to help build India's next deep tech startups | TechCrunch
Qualcomm Ventures has joined six Indian venture firms, collectively adding more than $850 million to boost India’s deep-tech ecosystem.

Sources: Roelof Botha was asked to step aside after some Sequoia partners raised concerns about his leadership; Botha had declined to comment on Shaun Maguire (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/sequ

Vocoder-Projected Feature Discriminator
Takuhiro Kaneko, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Yuto Kondo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17874 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Vocoder-Projected Feature Discriminator
In text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC), acoustic features, such as mel spectrograms, are typically used as synthesis or conversion targets owing to their compactness and ease of learning. However, because the ultimate goal is to generate high-quality waveforms, employing a vocoder to convert these features into waveforms and applying adversarial training in the time domain is reasonable. Nevertheless, upsampling the waveform introduces significant time and memory overheads. To addres…

FasterVoiceGrad: Faster One-step Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Adversarial Diffusion Conversion Distillation
Takuhiro Kaneko, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Yuto Kondo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17868

FasterVoiceGrad: Faster One-step Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Adversarial Diffusion Conversion Distillation
A diffusion-based voice conversion (VC) model (e.g., VoiceGrad) can achieve high speech quality and speaker similarity; however, its conversion process is slow owing to iterative sampling. FastVoiceGrad overcomes this limitation by distilling VoiceGrad into a one-step diffusion model. However, it still requires a computationally intensive content encoder to disentangle the speaker's identity and content, which slows conversion. Therefore, we propose FasterVoiceGrad, a novel one-step diffusion-b…

DealStreetAsia: VC funding in Indonesian startups fell to just $80M in H1 2025 from $200M a year earlier, as startups face fallout from corruption scandals (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/asean-money/indonesian-s…

Indonesian startups face funding fallout from corruption scandals
Experts urge better governance and more hands-on investor oversight to revive ecosystem

Q&A with General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja on the VC firm's "AI roll-up" strategy to buy service businesses and inject them with AI, investment bubbles, and more (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/2757870b-dbbf-4603-9fc3-7ccd03ffc…

Sources: Kalshi is receiving funding offers from VC investors at $10B-$12B or higher valuations, just weeks after it announced a $300M round at a $5B valuation (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Ultralytics, which develops the YOLO series of open-source computer vision models and sells commercial licenses, raised a $30M Series A led by Elephant VC (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/09/17/computer-vision-startup-ul…

Computer vision startup Ultralytics raises $30M in funding - SiliconANGLE
Computer vision startup Ultralytics raises $30M in funding - SiliconANGLE

A profile of Edwin Chen, the CEO of Surge AI, a Scale AI rival that had $1.2B revenue in 2024, is profitable, and is reportedly raising $1B at a $30B valuation (Phoebe Liu/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/09/17/the-ai-billionaire-…

AI Founder Edwin Chen Shunned VC. Now He’s Worth $18 Billion
An alum of Google and Twitter, Edwin Chen built his data labeling company, Surge, in the shadows of the AI revolution. Now the 37-year-old wants to make his voice heard.

Everett Randle, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, joins VC firm Benchmark as general partner, following a slew of personnel departures at Benchmark (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/benchmark-names-ev…

Benchmark Names Everett Randle as New General Partner 
Everett Randle, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins investing out of its growth-stage funds, has joined Benchmark as the firm’s newest general partner, the early-stage firm announced Monday. At Kleiner, Randle worked on investments including enterprise search startup Glean and legal AI startup Harvey, earning him a top spot on The Information’s Next General Partners list in 2024. The hiring

PitchBook: 15.9% of VC-backed deals in 2025 so far have been down rounds, a 10-year high, with AI and ML startups accounting for 29.3% of the down rounds (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/startup-down-rounds-are-at…

Startup down rounds are at a 10 year high, according to PitchBook data
PitchBook data revealed that 15.9% of venture-backed deals in 2025 to date have been down rounds, marking a decade high.

Israel-based Second Nature, whose conversational AI helps train sales teams, raised a $22M Series B led by Sienna VC, taking its total raised to $80M (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bj0cciralg

Zoom-backed Second Nature raises $22 million Series B to expand AI sales training platform
The Israeli startup uses conversational AI to transform how companies coach sales teams.