Tootfinder

On the a16z podcast, Bryan Kim said a16z backed Cluely because speed in marketing and building beats crafting a perfect "artisan" product due to AI competition (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…

Why a16z VC believes that Cluely, the ‘cheat on everything’ startup, is the new blueprint for AI startups | TechCrunch
Andreessen Horowitz explains why its new investment philosophy prioritizes 'build as you go' approach embodied by Cluely

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

@… It’s a company that takes USA VC money and spends it on children in the UK. I can’t get mad about that!

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers,
increasingly using artificial intelligence,
are entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org,
a labor rights nonprofit based in New York. 
Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed
workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.
While lar…

VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
A funding surge has given rise to technologies to track, analyze and manage workers — often in countries with little regulation.

Lockheed Constellation sobre Santiago de Cuba https://archivo.kamasystems.nl/es/2023/07/31/lockheed-constellation-sobre-santiago-de-cuba/

PitchBook: US VC investment in AI startups rose 33% QoQ to $65B in Q1, up 550% from the quarter prior to ChatGPT's 2022 release (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/technology/ai-spending-openai-amazon-meta.html…

A.I. Frenzy Escalates as OpenAI, Amazon and Meta Supersize Spending
Companies like OpenAI, Amazon and Meta have supersized their spending on artificial intelligence, with no signs of slowing down.

Extended VC-dimension, and Radon and Tverberg type theorems for unions of convex sets
Noga Alon, Shakhar Smorodinsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17777 https…

Extended VC-dimension, and Radon and Tverberg type theorems for unions of convex sets
We define and study an extension of the notion of the VC-dimension of a hypergraph and apply it to establish a Tverberg type theorem for unions of convex sets. We also prove a new Radon type theorem for unions of convex sets, vastly improving the estimates in an earlier result of Bárány and Kalai.

A little reminder that DuckDuckGo is venture capital (VC) funded.
The way VC works:
1. You get VC
2. You grow as fast as you can (or fail fast)
3. You sell (either to a larger corporation or to the public in an IPO; this is called the “exit”)
(In case any of you are surprised by recent/future developments.)
#DuckDuckGo

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…

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…

#SZ am 19. Juli in einem Bericht über VC, Business Angels und Gründerinnen. "deutschsprachigen Raum zum Alltag. Damit stehen sie nicht allein da. Ein Viertel der abhängig beschäftigten Frauen erleben in ihrem Berufsleben einen Fall sexueller Belästigung im näheren Arbeitsumfeld oder sind selbst betroffen, hat eine aktuelle Umfrage des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) ergeben. Anders als Gründerinnen haben sie"
Das glaube ich nicht. "Berufsleben" umfasst die Zeit von der…

#SZ am 19. Juli in einem Bericht über VC, Business Angels und Gründerinnen. "deutschsprachigen Raum zum Alltag. Damit stehen sie nicht allein da. Ein Viertel der abhängig beschäftigten Frauen erleben in ihrem Berufsleben einen Fall sexueller Belästigung im näheren Arbeitsumfeld oder sind selbst betroffen, hat eine aktuelle Umfrage des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) ergeben. Anders als Gründerinnen haben sie"
Das glaube ich nicht. "Berufsleben" umfasst die Zeit von der…

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

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…

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…

Metacurity is pleased to offer our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection covers
--Bashar al-Assad was toppled by spyware,
--Facial recognition threatens us all with deportation,
--VC money fuels worker surveillance,
--Will Trump launch offensive cyber ops on US networks?,
--The Pall Mall Process and commercial c…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 5/31/25
Bashar al-Assad was toppled by spyware, Facial recognition threatens us all with deportation, VC money fuels worker surveillance, Will Trump launch offensive cyber ops on US networks?, The Pall Mall Process and commercial cyber intrusions, Self-confidence leads to GenAI skepticism, more

Centific, an AI "data foundry" that works with businesses to develop, train, and deploy their AI models, raised a $60M Series A led by Granite Asia (Nicholas Gordon/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/asia/2025/06/25/centi…

Singapore VC Granite Asia leads $60 million funding round for AI ‘data foundry’ Centific to fund global expansion
“This funding round isn’t about necessity—it’s about ambition,” CEO Venkat Rangapuram said in a statement.

Conan: A Chunkwise Online Network for Zero-Shot Adaptive Voice Conversion
Yu Zhang, Baotong Tian, Zhiyao Duan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14534 https://

Conan: A Chunkwise Online Network for Zero-Shot Adaptive Voice Conversion
Zero-shot online voice conversion (VC) holds significant promise for real-time communications and entertainment. However, current VC models struggle to preserve semantic fidelity under real-time constraints, deliver natural-sounding conversions, and adapt effectively to unseen speaker characteristics. To address these challenges, we introduce Conan, a chunkwise online zero-shot voice conversion model that preserves the content of the source while matching the voice timbre and styles of referenc…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Portishead:
🎵 It Could Be Sweet
#Portishead
https://virv-celest.bandcamp.com/track/portishead-it-could-be-sweet-vc-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/1cpnpMvnvmdy3hzYgd5oo9

Investors are finding new opportunities in climate tech despite VC firms decreasing funding in the sector. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

VC firms aren’t putting as much money into climate tech—but some investors see new opportunity
VC investments in climate tech are down for the third year in a row, but investors say the space is narrowing, not disappearing.

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 …

The VC-dimension of random subsets of finite groups
Brad Rodgers, Anurag Sahay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14219 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

The VC-dimension of random subsets of finite groups
For a random subset of a finite group $G$ of cardinality $N$, we consider the VC-dimension of the family of its translates (equivalently the VC-dimension of a random Cayley graph) and prove a law of large numbers as $N\rightarrow\infty$. This answers a question of McDonald--Sahay--Wyman.

PitchBook: in H1, AI startups raised $104.3B in the US, or about 66% of all US VC funding, up from 49% last year; there were 281 VC-backed exits totaling $36B (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/22/ai-startups-raised-1…

AI startups raised $104 billion in first half of year, but exits tell a different story
AI accounted for nearly two-thirds of all fundraising deal value in the first half of 2025, with the bulk of those dollars concentrated in a few companies.

JIS: A Speech Corpus of Japanese Idol Speakers with Various Speaking Styles
Yuto Kondo, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Takuhiro Kaneko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18296

JIS: A Speech Corpus of Japanese Idol Speakers with Various Speaking Styles
We construct Japanese Idol Speech Corpus (JIS) to advance research in speech generation AI, including text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) and voice conversion (VC). JIS will facilitate more rigorous evaluations of speaker similarity in TTS and VC systems since all speakers in JIS belong to a highly specific category: "young female live idols" in Japan, and each speaker is identified by a stage name, enabling researchers to recruit listeners familiar with these idols for listening experiments. With i…

Does anybody else see "VC" in an article and have their brain replace it with "Viet Cong"?
It's so much funnier imagining someone making a funding pitch to a bunch of communist guerrillas in the jungle rather than some stodgy bay area tech bros.

Largest dyadic dual VC-dimension of non-piercing families
Xinqi Huang, Yuzhen Qi, Mingyuan Rong, Zixiang Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13606 https://

Largest dyadic dual VC-dimension of non-piercing families
The dyadic dual VC-dimension of a set system \( \mathcal{F} \) is the largest integer \( \ell \) such that there exist \( \ell \) sets \( F_1, F_{2}, \dots, F_\ell \in \mathcal{F} \), where every pair \( \{i, j\} \in \binom{[\ell]}{2} \) is witnessed by an element \( a_{i,j} \in F_i \cap F_j \) that does not belong to any other set \( F_k \) with \( k \in [\ell] \setminus \{i, j\} \). In this paper, we determine the largest dyadic dual VC-dimension of a non-piercing family is exactly $4$, provi…

Active biphasic heat transfer enhancement in vertical natural convection
Haoran Qi, Chaoben Zhao, Yaning Fan, Yihong Du, Varghese Mathai, Chao Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01262

Active biphasic heat transfer enhancement in vertical natural convection
Vertical natural convection (VC), often cannot meet the high heat transfer demands due to the inherent misalignment of the direction of buoyancy (vertical) with the direction of the heat transfer (horizontal). Here we applied a novel strategy on a water based VC system to enhance the heat transfer. By adding 2% of the total volume with a low-boiling-temperature liquid (HFE-7000) and introducing a gas-liquid layer on top of the VC cell, we create a self-sustained state of pseudo-turbulence with …

VC-dimension of generalized progressions in some nonabelian groups
Gabriel Conant, Aycin Iplikci Arodirik, Tora Ozawa, David Zeng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21789

VC-dimension of generalized progressions in some nonabelian groups
We analyze generalized progressions in some nonabelian groups using a measure of complexity called VC-dimension, which was originally introduced in statistical learning theory by Vapnik and Chervonenkis. Here by a "generalized progression" in a group $G$, we mean a finite subset of $G$ built from a fixed set of generators in analogy to a (multidimensional) arithmetic progression of integers. These sets play an important role in additive combinatorics and, in particular, the study of approximate…

StarVC: A Unified Auto-Regressive Framework for Joint Text and Speech Generation in Voice Conversion
Fengjin Li, Jie Wang, Yadong Niu, Yongqing Wang, Meng Meng, Jian Luan, Zhiyong Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02414

StarVC: A Unified Auto-Regressive Framework for Joint Text and Speech Generation in Voice Conversion
Voice Conversion (VC) modifies speech to match a target speaker while preserving linguistic content. Traditional methods usually extract speaker information directly from speech while neglecting the explicit utilization of linguistic content. Since VC fundamentally involves disentangling speaker identity from linguistic content, leveraging structured semantic features could enhance conversion performance. However, previous attempts to incorporate semantic features into VC have shown limited eff…

Avatars and Environments for Meetings in Social VR: What Styles and Choices Matter to People in Group Creativity Tasks?
Anya Osborne, Sabrina Fielder, Lee Taber, Tara Lamb, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Katherine Isbister
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21780

Avatars and Environments for Meetings in Social VR: What Styles and Choices Matter to People in Group Creativity Tasks?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many professional entities shifted toward remote collaboration and video conferencing (VC) tools. Social virtual reality (VR) platforms present an alternative to VC for meetings and collaborative activities. Well-crafted social VR environments could enhance feelings of co-presence and togetherness at meetings, helping reduce the need for carbon-intensive travel to face-to-face meetings. This research contributes to creating meeting tools in VR by exploring the effe…

PitchBook: AI startups received 53% of all global VC dollars invested in H1 2025, rising to 64% in the US, and accounted for 29% of all global startups funded (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/03/ai-startups-vc-investments

AI is eating venture capital, or at least its dollars
AI startups received 53% of all global VC dollars invested in the first half of 2025.

On Tight Robust Coresets for $k$-Medians Clustering
Lingxiao Huang, Zhenyu Jiang, Yi Li, Xuan Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11260 https://

On Tight Robust Coresets for $k$-Medians Clustering
This paper considers coresets for the robust $k$-medians problem with $m$ outliers, and new constructions in various metric spaces are obtained. Specifically, for metric spaces with a bounded VC or doubling dimension $d$, the coreset size is $O(m) + \tilde{O}(kd\varepsilon^{-2})$, which is optimal up to logarithmic factors. For Euclidean spaces, the coreset size is $O(m\varepsilon^{-1}) + \tilde{O}(\min\{k^{4/3}\varepsilon^{-2},k\varepsilon^{-3}\})$, improving upon a recent result by Jiang and …

Sources: at least six of China's biggest VC firms are targeting a combined $2B in new USD-denominated funds to allow overseas investment in Chinese startups (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-18/chi…

Here’s what the “just let tech bros run everything” crowd fundamentally misunderstands about how innovation actually works: It requires exactly the kind of chaotic, unpredictable, open ecosystem that authoritarianism systematically destroys.
Real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit, not on who can kiss the leader’s ass most effectively. In a functioning democracy with actual rule of law, the best products have the opportunity to win. In an authoritari…

Fascism For First Time Founders
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…

This was really interesting. It's about Topaz AI, which was a denoising/upscaling solution I looked at about nine months ago, and rejected because I wasn't really prepared to make the investment at that stage ($300/yr) https://mstdn.social/@Onmyom/114779996030982643…

This is exactly what I was afraid of when #laravel took VC money.
https://hachyderm.io/@j3j5/114784445289560905

You gotta be locked in when you're playing GTA 3/VC, those games will drop an npc with a gun on you out of nowhere lmao

RT-VC: Real-Time Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Speech Articulatory Coding
Yisi Liu, Chenyang Wang, Hanjo Kim, Raniya Khan, Gopala Anumanchipalli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10289

RT-VC: Real-Time Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Speech Articulatory Coding
Voice conversion has emerged as a pivotal technology in numerous applications ranging from assistive communication to entertainment. In this paper, we present RT-VC, a zero-shot real-time voice conversion system that delivers ultra-low latency and high-quality performance. Our approach leverages an articulatory feature space to naturally disentangle content and speaker characteristics, facilitating more robust and interpretable voice transformations. Additionally, the integration of differentia…

Eu comentando num grupo "Caramba, o Flamengo estš ganhando de 5 a 0! E eu estava trabalhando aqui, nem lembrei que tinha jogo hoje."
A resposta do meu amigo: "Jš acabou. Mas agora que vc descobriu, o Juiz vai mandar voltar a bola pra um terceiro tempo e o Fortaleza vai virar pra 6 a 5!"
Sim, é esse o nível da minha fama de pé-frio rs.

Pureformer-VC: Non-parallel Voice Conversion with Pure Stylized Transformer Blocks and Triplet Discriminative Training
Wenhan Yao, Fen Xiao, Xiarun Chen, Jia Liu, YongQiang He, Weiping Wen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08348

Pureformer-VC: Non-parallel Voice Conversion with Pure Stylized Transformer Blocks and Triplet Discriminative Training
As a foundational technology for intelligent human-computer interaction, voice conversion (VC) seeks to transform speech from any source timbre into any target timbre. Traditional voice conversion methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) encounter significant challenges in precisely encoding diverse speech elements and effectively synthesising these elements into natural-sounding converted speech. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Pureformer-VC, an encoder-decoder frame…

Source: Chime's IPO is expected to price at ~$11B, down from its $25B private valuation in 2021; every VC-backed IPO in the past 12 months has been a down round (Cory Weinberg/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/every-vc-ba…

Every VC-Backed IPO in the Past 12 Months Has Been a Down Round
When banking app Chime goes public next month, it will mark the eighth straight venture capital–backed initial public offering in the past 12 months to be valued less than it was in private fundraising rounds. Chime, for instance, was valued at $25 billion in 2021, but its bankers have been ...

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/5]:
- An $\tilde{O}$ptimal Differentially Private Learner for Concept Classes with VC Dimension 1
Chao Yan

Gen. Timothy Haugh, former Director of the NSA and Commander of US Cyber Command has joined cyber-focused VC firm Ballistic Ventures as Strategic Advisor
https://ballisticventures.com/former-n

Former NSA Director and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command Gen. Timothy D. Haugh joins Ballistic Ventures as Strategic Advisor
Former NSA Director Gen. Haugh joins Ballistic Ventures as Strategic Advisor to shape the future of cyber innovation.

On the pointwise and sup-norm errors for local regression estimators
J\'er\'emy Bettinger, Fran\c{c}ois Portier, Adrien Saumard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07132

On the pointwise and sup-norm errors for local regression estimators
In this paper, we analyze the behavior of various non-parametric local regression estimators, i.e. estimators that are based on local averaging, for estimating a Lipschitz regression function at a fixed point, or in sup-norm. We first prove some deviation bounds for local estimators that can be indexed by a VC class of sets in the covariates space. We then introduce the general concept of shape-regular local maps, corresponding to the situation where the local averaging is done on sets which,…

Relativistic Deformation of Geometry through Function C(v): Scalar Deformation Flow and the Geometric Classification of 3-Manifolds
Anton Alexa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01146

Relativistic Deformation of Geometry through Function C(v): Scalar Deformation Flow and the Geometric Classification of 3-Manifolds
We introduce the scalar deformation function C(v), which captures how local geometric structures respond to motion at velocity v. This function exhibits smooth analytic behavior and defines a critical velocity vc beyond which the geometry compresses. Extending C(v) into a flow C(v, tau), we construct a scalar analogue of Ricci flow that governs the evolution of geometric configurations toward symmetric, stable states without singularities. The flow is derived from a variational energy functiona…

Sources: Stripe appoints Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang to serve as CEO of its planned Layer-1 blockchain Tempo; a source says Huang will remain at Paradigm (Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/08/12/matt-huang-paradigm-stripe-tempo-blockchain-ceo/…

Exclusive: Top crypto VC Matt Huang to lead Stripe blockchain Tempo as CEO, stay at Paradigm
Huang serves on Stripe’s board, and his VC firm Paradigm is helping incubate the fintech’s blockchain.

Training-Free Voice Conversion with Factorized Optimal Transport
Alexander Lobashev, Assel Yermekova, Maria Larchenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09709 http…

Training-Free Voice Conversion with Factorized Optimal Transport
This paper introduces Factorized MKL-VC, a training-free modification for kNN-VC pipeline. In contrast with original pipeline, our algorithm performs high quality any-to-any cross-lingual voice conversion with only 5 second of reference audio. MKL-VC replaces kNN regression with a factorized optimal transport map in WavLM embedding subspaces, derived from Monge-Kantorovich Linear solution. Factorization addresses non-uniform variance across dimensions, ensuring effective feature transformation.…

PitchBook: 27 VC-backed companies went public in the US in the first half of 2025, the smallest number in at least 10 years, raising a total of $44.4B (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

REF-VC: Robust, Expressive and Fast Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Diffusion Transformers
Yuepeng Jiang, Ziqian Ning, Shuai Wang, Chengjia Wang, Mengxiao Bi, Pengcheng Zhu, Lei Xie, Zhonghua Fu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04996

REF-VC: Robust, Expressive and Fast Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Diffusion Transformers
In real-world voice conversion applications, environmental noise in source speech and user demands for expressive output pose critical challenges. Traditional ASR-based methods ensure noise robustness but suppress prosody, while SSL-based models improve expressiveness but suffer from timbre leakage and noise sensitivity. This paper proposes REF-VC, a noise-robust expressive voice conversion system. Key innovations include: (1) A random erasing strategy to mitigate the information redundancy inh…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21568 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSD_…

VoiceMark: Zero-Shot Voice Cloning-Resistant Watermarking Approach Leveraging Speaker-Specific Latents
Voice cloning (VC)-resistant watermarking is an emerging technique for tracing and preventing unauthorized cloning. Existing methods effectively trace traditional VC models by training them on watermarked audio but fail in zero-shot VC scenarios, where models synthesize audio from an audio prompt without training. To address this, we propose VoiceMark, the first zero-shot VC-resistant watermarking method that leverages speaker-specific latents as the watermark carrier, allowing the watermark to…

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.

PseudoVC: Improving One-shot Voice Conversion with Pseudo Paired Data
Songjun Cao, Qinghua Wu, Jie Chen, Jin Li, Long Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01039 h…

PseudoVC: Improving One-shot Voice Conversion with Pseudo Paired Data
As parallel training data is scarce for one-shot voice conversion (VC) tasks, waveform reconstruction is typically performed by various VC systems. A typical one-shot VC system comprises a content encoder and a speaker encoder. However, two types of mismatches arise: one for the inputs to the content encoder during training and inference, and another for the inputs to the speaker encoder. To address these mismatches, we propose a novel VC training method called \textit{PseudoVC} in this paper. …

Replaced article(s) found for econ.GN. https://arxiv.org/list/econ.GN/new
[1/1]:
- Accelerating Equity: Overcoming the Gender Gap in VC Funding
Chuan Chen, Michele Fioretti, Junnan He, Yanrong Jia

Juniper Square, which offers investment management and fund administration tools for real estate, PE, VC firms, raised $130M led by Ribbit at a $1.1B valuation (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

ReFlow-VC: Zero-shot Voice Conversion Based on Rectified Flow and Speaker Feature Optimization
Pengyu Ren, Wenhao Guan, Kaidi Wang, Peijie Chen, Qingyang Hong, Lin Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01032

ReFlow-VC: Zero-shot Voice Conversion Based on Rectified Flow and Speaker Feature Optimization
In recent years, diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated remarkable performance in speech conversion, including Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) and others. However, the advantages of these models come at the cost of requiring a large number of sampling steps. This limitation hinders their practical application in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ReFlow-VC, a novel high-fidelity speech conversion method based on rectified flow. Specifically, ReFlow-VC…

Saudi startup Lucidya, which develops customer experience software, raised a $30M Series B led by Impact46, marking the largest AI funding round in the kingdom (Yassmin Jabri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

De-AntiFake: Rethinking the Protective Perturbations Against Voice Cloning Attacks
Wei Fan, Kejiang Chen, Chang Liu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02606

De-AntiFake: Rethinking the Protective Perturbations Against Voice Cloning Attacks
The rapid advancement of speech generation models has heightened privacy and security concerns related to voice cloning (VC). Recent studies have investigated disrupting unauthorized voice cloning by introducing adversarial perturbations. However, determined attackers can mitigate these protective perturbations and successfully execute VC. In this study, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of these protective perturbations against VC under realistic threat models that include perturbatio…

PitchBook: US startup funding surged 75.6% YoY in H1 2025 to $162.8B, strongest since H1 2021, driven by the AI boom and on track for the second-best year ever (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-ai-startup…

Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching
Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01014

Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching
Zero-Shot Voice Conversion (VC) aims to transform the source speaker's timbre into an arbitrary unseen one while retaining speech content. Most prior work focuses on preserving the source's prosody, while fine-grained timbre information may leak through prosody, and transferring target prosody to synthesized speech is rarely studied. In light of this, we propose R-VC, a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model. R-VC employs data perturbation techniques and discretize s…

Morgan Stanley: hyperscalers will fund about 50% of the $2.9T in future AI infrastructure through 2028, with debt, PE, VC, and other sources making up the rest (Tabby Kinder/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265473

Perplexity's unsolicited $34.5B bid for Chrome with claimed VC backing is clearly a marketing stunt and strategic signaling amid Google's antitrust uncertainty (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)
https://spyglass.org/i-offer-to-buy-jupiter/

Perplexity's Perplexing and Positively PR Offer to Buy Chrome
Why not offer a quadrillion dollars?

Perplexity offers to acquire Chrome for $34.5B, significantly more than Perplexity's estimated $18B valuation, and says large VC funds agreed to back the deal (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/perplex…

Israeli VC firm Cyberstarts has raised a $300M fund to allow long-time employees at some of its portfolio companies to cash out their vested shares (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11862 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Bounds on Functionality and Symmetric Difference -- Two Intriguing Graph Parameters
Functionality ($\mathrm{fun}$) is a graph parameter that generalizes graph degeneracy defined by Alecu et al. [JCTB, 2021]. They research the relation of functionality to many other graphs parameters (tree-width, clique-width, VC-dimension, etc.). Extending their research, we completely characterize the functionality of random graph $G(n,p)$ for all possible $p$. We provide matching (up to a constant factor) lower and upper bound for a large range of $p$. It follows from our bounds for $G(n,p)$…

In Q2 2025, global VC funding reached $91B, up from $82B in Q2 2024, driven largely by AI investments, but down from $114B in Q1 2025, the highest since Q3 2022 (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/global-funding-climbs-q2-…

Q2 Global Venture Funding Climbs In A Blockbuster Quarter For AI And As Capital Concentrates In Larger...
Global venture funding ticked up year over year in Q2 2025, reaching $91 billion, with a greater concentration of capital into the largest funding rounds compared to a year ago, Crunchbase data shows.

Agora, which offers a white-labeling service to let other companies launch their own, self-branded versions of its stablecoin, AUSD, raised a $50M Series A (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/07/10/exclu…

Exclusive: Stablecoin startup Agora raises $50 million Series A led by crypto VC giant Paradigm
Agora is run by Nick Van Eck, son of the asset management veteran Jan van Eck.

As Trump targets Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, a look at his VC firm Walden International, which has invested $5B in 600 companies, with 100 in China including SMIC (Ian King/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

Turnkey, which builds low-level infrastructure for digital wallets used to store and manage crypto, raised a $30M Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/06/09/exclus…

Exclusive: Coinbase vets raise $30 million for crypto wallet startup Turnkey
The fundraise attracted big VC names like Bain Capital Crypto, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Faction.

PitchBook: VC exits through public listings, acquisitions, and buyouts reached $67.7B in Q2 2025, up from $38.5B a year ago and the strongest showing since 2021 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations
Ryo Aihara, Yoshiki Masuyama, Gordon Wichern, Fran\c{c}ois G. Germain, Jonathan Le Roux
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08399

Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations
Neural audio codecs (NACs), which use neural networks to generate compact audio representations, have garnered interest for their applicability to many downstream tasks -- especially quantized codecs due to their compatibility with large language models. However, unlike text, speech conveys not only linguistic content but also rich paralinguistic features. Encoding these elements in an entangled fashion may be suboptimal, as it limits flexibility. For instance, voice conversion (VC) aims to con…

Sources: Meta offers to buy ~49% of Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's VC fund NFDG; about half of NFDG's first fund of ~$1.1B, raised in 2023, has been invested (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https:/…

VC firms Thrive Capital and General Catalyst are adopting the "roll-up" strategy from the PE playbook, as Khosla Ventures, 8VC, and others explore similar moves (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/74db4959-5980-4ca3-8a46-f058ef4774…

Tech venture firms deploy private equity ‘roll-up’ strategy
Thrive Capital’s backing of Savvy Wealth is part of growing effort to fund groups that go on to buy similar companies

CB Insights: Figma's IPO was the largest venture-backed IPO by market capitalization for a US tech company since Rivian's debut in November 2021 (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fig…

Stable, which is building a new Layer 1 blockchain for stablecoins, raised a $28M seed co-led by Bitfinex and Hack VC (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/364952/tether-focused-layer-1-stable-raises-28-mi…

Report: Swiss deep tech startups have created over $100B in total enterprise value, with 60% of VC funding in Switzerland from 2019 to 2025 going to deep tech (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/26/switzerlands-100b-deeptech-engine-comes-…

Switzerland’s $100B deeptech engine comes Into focus
Today, the launch of The Swiss Deep Tech Report 2025 spotlights how Switzerland has quietly become one of the world’s most advanced and efficient deeptech ecosystems. Curated in close collaboration with Dealroom.co, Startupticker and venture capital firms Founderful and Kickfund, the report is the first of its kind to map the full scope of Switzerland’s deeptech performance - from research institutions and patents to venture activity and late-stage outcomes. With over 1500 Swiss deeptech …

Q&A with Mary Meeker on publishing her first Trends report since 2019, its focus on the AI revolution, why OpenAI may have an insurmountable lead, and more (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/mary-meeker-trends-report-openai

Q&A with Mary Meeker on the AI revolution
The famed internet analyst turned VC just published her first Trends report since 2019.

Sources: Index Ventures' nearly $100M investment in Figma was worth $2.17B at the initial IPO price, while Greylock's $50M investment was worth $2.03B (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Legion, a security operations center that uses AI to detect threats within users' computer browsers, emerges from stealth with a $38M seed and Series A (Alexandra Sternlicht/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/07/30/legion-cybersecurity-st…

Cybersecurity upstart Legion emerges from stealth with $38 million from Accel, Coatue, and others
This also marks the U.S. launch of VC firm Picture Capital, who co-led the round.