Grace, an insurance company for luxury goods, announced on Wednesday a $6.4 million (€5.9 million) seed round led by FinTech Collective and Speedinvest.
An insurance company for luxury goods, Grace works with luxury brands to protect purchased consumer goods. If an item is stolen or damaged, a consumer can create a claim through the Grace app. For the brand, the Grace app also provides fraud detection, claim processing, and logistic coordination.
The company confirmed that it is working with at least one major luxury brand in Europe, though it declined to share the name.
Co-founder and president Lou Dana said that she and her co-founders — Quentin Roy, CEO, and Martin Lenweiter, Grace’s CTO — decided to launch this company after seeing how unprotected many luxury goods still are, especially when people are traveling abroad.
“There was clearly a massive gap between the service levels luxury brands promise and what happens post-purchase when something goes wrong,” Dana said.
The number of stolen luxury goods has just about tripled in the past few years, and it’s becoming costly for fashion houses to keep up. Grace says it is already working with Chubb, a world leader in insurance, to underwrite and secure its services.
But convincing luxury houses to adopt new technology hasn’t always been the easiest of tasks to complete. Roy said that brands have struggled to control what happens to their products after a sale, especially when it goes wrong. “We weren’t just offering protection,” Roy said about the company’s pitch. “We were helping elevate their brand.”
There are other types of insurance companies for consumer goods, such as Zing Cover, which also provides specialist insurance for luxury goods. Roy said that Grace doesn’t compete with just one company, as it stands at the intersection of embedded insurance, luxury services, and post-purchase protection. Kima, Bpifrance, and Firstminute Capital all participated in the round.
Dana said the fresh capital would be used to help the company scale across Europe and hire more people in product engineering. It hopes to cover more than 200,000 luxury items by the end of this year.
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The quality of AI-generated voices is good enough for things like creating audiobooks and podcasts, having articles read aloud to you, and basic customer support. But many businesses don’t think AI voice tech is quite reliable enough to deploy.
That’s why two MIT grads, Moin Nadeem and Nikhil Murthy, founded Phonic, a company offering an end-to-end voice stack to increase synthetic voice reliability while decreasing latency.
Nadeem and Murthy met at MIT, and have known each other for more than seven years. When the duo started building Phonic last year, they felt there weren’t many companies crafting complete voice tech solutions.
“Voice AI is at a place where you tie up different parts, such as automatic voice recognition [and] text-to-speech, and [then integrate] intelligence,” Murthy told TechCrunch. “However, when we talked to actual customers, we found that there is a lack of [solutions] that [are] reliable at scale.”
Nadeem, who previously worked at MosaicML, a company Databricks acquired for $1.3 billion in 2023, said that a lot of companies that are building in the voice AI space (e.g. Vapi, Rounded) are creating workflows to piece together separate AI models.
Phonic takes a different approach: it trains its models in-house end-to-end. Murthy said that there are a few advantages to this.
“Owning the models allows us to deeply integrate some […] reliability pieces into the [models themselves],” he said. “If you don’t own that layer […] you’re just tying disparate pieces that don’t really fit seamlessly.”
Murthy added that Phonic’s method also allows the company to host and run models cost-efficiently. He claims that Phonic trains its models on a range of recordings, including recordings of accented and muffled speech, to make the models highly robust.
Phonic is currently working with a limited set of partners, including companies in the insurance and healthcare spaces, but plans to launch its product broadly in a few months. Soon, prospective clients will be able to try out Phonic’s tech from its website, Nadeem said.
Phonic has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Lux with participation from Replit co-founder Amjad Masad, Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue, Applied Intuition co-founder Qasar Younis, and Modal Labs founder Erik Bernhardsson.
Grace Isford, a partner at Lux Capital, said that the company’s in-house way of training models was appealing to the investment firm.
“We think both Moin and Nikhil are incredible technologists,” he said. “They founded [a] machine learning club at MIT. And they have worked on training models for a while now. Plus, their approach of combining diffusion and proprietary models in the voice AI sector is novel.
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Runway, a startup developing a range of generative AI models for media production, including video-generating models, has raised $308 million in a Series D funding round.
General Atlantic led the round, which had participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank, and others. The fresh capital will be put toward AI research and hiring, Runway said in a press release, as well to expand its Runway Studios film and animation production arm.
To date, Runway has raised $536.5 million, according to Crunchbase.
“Today marks an important milestone as Runway announces a significant next step towards our goal of creating a new media ecosystem with world simulators,” the company wrote in the press release. “[Our recent] advancements aren’t merely incremental improvements; they form the foundation for an entirely new approach to media — an ecosystem built on AI systems that can simulate our world.”
Runway offers a suite of AI media tools, including video- and image-generating models. It faces stiff competition in the video generation space, including from OpenAI and Google. But the company has fought to differentiate itself, inking a deal with a major Hollywood studio and earmarking millions of dollars to fund films using AI-produced footage.
This week, Runway released Gen-4, a video-generating model that the company claims can create consistent characters, locations, and objects across scenes, maintain “coherent world environments,” and regenerate elements from different perspectives and positions within scenes. With products like Gen-4 and its recently launched API for video models, Runway hopes to hit $300 million in annualized revenue this year.
One possible roadblock is a lawsuit brought by artists against Runway and other generative AI companies that accuses the defendants of training their models on copyrighted artwork without permission. Runway argues that the doctrine known as fair use shields it from legal repercussions. It isn’t yet clear whether the company will prevail.
Updated 6:21 a.m. Pacific: The original version of this story mistakenly indicated that Runway had raised $300 million in its Series D. It has, in fact, raised $308 million. We regret the error.
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