google-site-verification=cXrcMGa94PjI5BEhkIFIyc9eZiIwZzNJc4mTXSXtGRM Furnished rental startup Blueground defies proptech woes with revenue of $560 million, a new raise of $45 million - 360WISE MEDIA
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Furnished rental startup Blueground defies proptech woes with revenue of $560 million, a new raise of $45 million

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Alex Chatzieleftheriou founded Blueground in 2013 after being frustrated by the shortage of short-term furnished housing in Europe. He traveled as a McKinsey consultant and lived almost exclusively in hotel rooms for months.

“Once, a company needed to pay as much as €15,000 for a hotel room in Amsterdam. And there wasn’t enough space or kitchen to cook,” he said. “I attempted renting apartments for a month or longer. However, it was difficult and the owners weren’t open to purchasing furniture. So I created a company that solved my problem.

Just a few years later, at the peak of the pandemic, business in his startup’s category of short-term furnished apartment rental firms was booming as people roamed the world working from home.

Now that many employers have called staff back to offices, demand for temporary housing has dropped.

Some of his competitors didn’t survive. Life of Zeus AND Hike they locked the door and returned the keys. Some became acquisition opportunities for Blueground. In 2022, the corporate gained a strong position in Latin America, including: I purchase Tabas, operator of over 9,000 furnished apartments in Brazil. Within a few months, Blueground took over Travelers’ haven, a 15-year-old company that gives on-demand housing to staff in nearly 20,000 cities across the United States. In 2023, it acquired Nestpick, a marketplace for furnished apartment operators corresponding to Kasa and Placemakr, providing customers with access to additional 18,000 apartments.

Blueground currently operates a global network of move-in ready homes for stays of a month or longer and has raised $45 million in Series D funding from new investor Susquehanna Private Equity Investments along with other backers including WestCap, Chatzieleftheriou told TechCrunch. The New York-based company said it also secured a debt facility from Barclays with participation from Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and HSBC, which replaced and augmented Blueground’s $40 million debt facility obtained from Silicon Valley Bank in 2021.

Blueground rents apartments in popular neighborhoods after which furnishes and furnishes them to tenants. Currently, the corporate manages 15,000 apartments in 32 markets in 17 countries. In addition to stepping into its own leases, Blueground recently introduced franchising, which works with local operators in Japan and Thailand and lists units of third-party operators on its platform.

The company didn’t disclose a new valuation, but Chatzieleftheriou said the corporate’s value has increased because the previous round. This the valuation was reportedly $750 million After raising $140 million in Series C in September 2021.

It’s no secret that the fundraising environment has been extremely difficult for late-stage firms, especially those within the proptech sector, which is struggling with rising rates of interest.

Chatzieleftheriou told TechCrunch that his company’s rapid growth and near-profitability helped persuade investors to commit to the newest financing.

Chatzieleftheriou said sales increased 70% to $560 million in 2023, compared with $300 million in gross revenue in 2022. Net margin on sales – that’s, after paying landlords for rent – is around 35%, he added, and he expects that Blueground might be money flow positive in 2024.

While further acquisitions seem likely given Chatzieleftheriou’s predictions of industry consolidation, the immediate focus is to integrate recent purchases. The new financing might be used for market expansion, technology investments and maybe the last word financial goal: an initial public offering.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

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TikTok will automatically tag AI-generated content created on platforms such as DALL·E 3

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A laptop keyboard and TikTok logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this multiple exposure illustration photo taken in Poland on March 17, 2024. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The company announced Thursday that TikTok is beginning to automatically tag AI-generated content that was created on other platforms. With this modification, if a creator posts content created using a service like OpenAI’s DALL·E 3 on TikTok, it will automatically have an “AI-generated” label attached to it, informing viewers that it was created using AI.

The social video platform does this by implementing Content Credentials, a technology developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), co-founded by Microsoft and Adobe. Content credentials attach specific metadata to content, which TikTok can then use to immediately recognize and mark AI-generated content.

As a result, TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI-generated content that’s uploaded to the platform with content credentials attached. The change will go live on Thursday and will apply to all users worldwide in the approaching weeks.

While TikTok already tags content created using TikTok’s AI effects, it will now tag content created on other platforms which have implemented content credentials, such as OpenAI’s DALL·E 3 and Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator. Although Microsoft, Adobe and OpenAI already use content credentials, Google promised to handle content credentials.

Image credits: ICT Tok

While TikTok already requires creators to reveal after they post content created or enhanced using AI, the corporate told TechCrunch that it sees the brand new change as an extra technique to be sure that AI-generated content is flagged, while also considering the pressure on creators .

In the approaching months, TikTok will also begin attaching content credentials to AI-generated content created on the platform using TikTok’s AI effects. Content credentials metadata will include details about where and the way the AI-generated content was created or edited and will remain attached to the content once downloaded. Other platforms that accept content credentials will give you the option to automatically mark content as AI-generated.

So while TikTok has committed to labeling AI content on its own service, additionally it is attempting to help be sure that AI content created on TikTok can be properly labeled when published on one other platform.

“AI-generated content is an incredible way to be creative, but transparency for viewers is crucial,” Adam Presser, director of operations and trust and safety at TikTok, said in a press release. “By collaborating with others to flag content across platforms, we make it easier for creators to responsibly view AI-generated content while continuing to deter harmful or misleading AIGC, which is prohibited on TikTok.”

TikTok touts that it’s the first video-sharing platform to implement content authentication. This is value mentioning (*3*)Meta announced back in February that it plans to make use of the C2PA solution so as to add content origins.

In Thursday’s announcement, TikTok said it’s committed to combating using fraudulent AI in elections and that its policies strongly prohibit misleading AI-generated content – whether it’s flagged or unlabeled.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Serena Williams’ Husband Spends Cinco De Mayo With Early Reddit Investor Snoop Dogg, ‘Never Forget These Days’

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Serena Williams, Snoop Dogg, Alexis Ohanian


Serena Williams’ tech entrepreneur husband Alexis Ohanian spent the Cinco De Mayo holiday with certainly one of his wife’s hometown heroes, who was certainly one of the early investors on his Reddit platform.

On Sunday, May 5, Ohanian was outside celebrating a “beautiful day” in Los Angeles with certainly one of the town’s most outstanding figures. In a photograph shared on Twitter, the Reddit co-founder praised Snoop Dogg’s early support for his billion-dollar company.

“Beautiful day in Los Angeles. I appreciate this city very much. Have to meet lots of friends” wrote Ohanian.

“Some of you might know that @SnoopDogg was certainly one of our first investors in @reddit during our spin-off and pivot. Few people wanted to speculate in us then. Snoop managed to do it. And you’ll always remember the primary day.

Launched in 2005 on Reddit serves as an internet community where people from everywhere in the world can connect and communicate about any topic. Ohanian co-founded the corporate with Steve Huffman while they were each attending the University of Virginia. The company began to grow after connecting with Aaron Swartz of Infogami, who rewrote the coding for Reddit.

Just a yr after launching, Ohanian and Huffman sold Reddit to Conde Nast for about $10 million to $20 million. As user numbers and valuations continued to grow, investment flowed in. Until 2014, when Reddit was precious with a reported $500 million, Snoop Dogg has joined a bunch of investors in a $50 million funding round on the link-sharing and discussion site.

It was the investment group’s organizer who approached Snoop due to his celebrity status and recognition on the location’s “Ask Me Anything” message boards. Snoop was also high on Reddit’s wish list of investors trying to join the corporate.

“He’s like a Reddit superstar,” Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of Open AI, said of Snoop Dogg. “The site loves him. Snoop was high on the list. We asked him to speculate and he agreed.

The “Gin and Juice” rapper doesn’t actually discuss his early investment in Reddit, but he has previously shared how he got into the market.

“I went inside. Understand me? I didn’t wish to tell everyone, but I’m a part of Reddit too.” – Snoop Dogg he told Ohanian on GGN News in 2017.

Reddit is currently valued at $10.68 billion, with a share price of $67.67. This is a drastic jump from the $5 billion valuation in 2021.


This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

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Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

You can generally depend on Apple for clever and well-produced ads, but on this case it missed the mark is the latest, which presents a tower of creative tools and analog items literally squeezed into the shape of an iPad. Many people, including myself, have had a negative and visceral response to this, and we must always discuss why.

This doesn’t just occur because we witness things being destroyed. There are countless video channels dedicated to crushing, burning, exploding and customarily destroying on a regular basis objects. Plus, everyone knows that some of these incidents occur daily at transfer stations and recycling centers. So that is not it.

And it isn’t that these items themselves are so priceless. Sure, a piano is price something. But we see them blowing up in motion movies on a regular basis and we do not feel bad. I like pianos, but that doesn’t suggest we will not do with no few old, unused pianos. Same with the remainder: it’s mostly junk that you could buy on Craigslist for a couple of bucks or on the dump without spending a dime. (Maybe not an assembly station.)

The problem is not with the movie itself, which, considering the individuals who shot and shot it, is actually thoroughly made. The problem is not the media, however the message.

We all understand the supposed point of promoting: you’ll be able to do all of it on an iPad. Great. Of course, we could also do that on the last iPad, but this one is thinner (by the best way, nobody asked for it; now the cases don’t fit on this case) and by some imaginary percentage higher.

But what all of us understand, because unlike Apple’s promoting executives, is that the world we live in is that the things that get fragmented here represent material, tangible, and real. And what is true has value. A worth that Apple clearly believes it may possibly crush into one other black mirror.

This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently for a lot of others as well.

Destruction of the piano within the music video Or MythBusters episode it is actually an act of creation. Even destroying a piano (or monitor, paint can, or drum set) for no reason is wasteful at worst!

But Apple is destroying these items – all you would like is a small device from the corporate that may do all this and more, and doesn’t need annoying things like strings, keys, buttons, brushes or mixing stations.

We are all coping with the results of the mass shift of media towards digital and all the time online technology. In some ways it’s really good! I feel technology has played an enormous role.

But from one other, equally real viewpoint, the digital transformation seems harmful and compelled – a technotopic, billionaire-approved vision of a future during which every child has a man-made intelligence best friend and may learn to play a virtual guitar on a chilly glass screen.

Does your child like music? They don’t need a harp, throw it within the trash. An iPad is enough. Do they like painting? Here’s Apple Pencil, pretty much as good as pens, watercolors, oils! Books? Don’t make us laugh! Destroy them. The paper is worthless, use one other screen. In fact, why not read in Apple Vision Pro, on even faker paper?

Apple seems to forget that it’s things in the actual world – the very things that Apple destroyed – that give value to fake versions of those things in the primary place.

A virtual guitar is not going to replace an actual guitar; it’s like considering that a book can replace the creator.

That doesn’t suggest we will not value each for various reasons. But Apple’s ad sends the message that the long run it wants won’t include paint bottles, knobs to show, sculptures, physical instruments or paper books. Of course, this is the long run he has been working on for us for years, he just didn’t put it so bluntly before.

When someone tells you who they’re, imagine them. Apple is very clear about what it is and what the long run needs to be. If this future doesn’t gross you out, you are welcome.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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