Tech
Carbon Robotics built an AI model that detects and identifies plants
What is and isn’t a weed that needs to be eliminated in the field is determined by the eyes of the farmer — and now, increasingly, by a new AI model from Carbon Robotics.
Seattle-based Carbon Robotics, which builds the LaserWeeder — a robot fleet that uses lasers to kill weeds — announced a new AI model, the Large Plant Model (LPM), on Monday. This model recognizes plant species instantly and allows farmers to target new weeds without needing to retrain the robots.
The LPM is trained on more than 150 million photos and data points collected by the company’s machines across the more than 100 farms in 15 countries where the robots currently operate. The model now powers Carbon AI, the AI system that serves as the brains inside the company’s autonomous weed-killing robots.
Paul Mikesell, the founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics, told TechCrunch that prior to LPM, every time a new type of weed would show up on a farm — or even the same type of weed in different soil or with a slightly different appearance — the company would have to create new data labels to retrain its machines to recognize the plant.
This process took about 24 hours each time, Mikesell said. Now, LPM can learn a new weed instantly, even if it’s never seen it before.
“The farmer can live in real time and say, ‘Hey, this is a new weed. I want you to kill this,’ and that was something that had never been done before,” Mikesell said. “There’s no new labeling or retraining because the Large Plant Model understands, at a much deeper level, what it’s looking at and the type of plant.”
Mikesell said that the company, which was founded in 2018, started developing this model shortly after it began shipping its first machines in 2022. Mikesell has years of experience building these types of neural networks from previous roles at Uber and working on Meta’s Oculus virtual reality headsets.
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This new model will reach the company’s existing systems through a software update. From there, farmers can tell the machine what to kill and what to protect by selecting photos that the machine has collected in the robot’s user interface.
Carbon Robotics has raised more than $185 million in venture capital from backers including Nvidia NVentures, Bond, and Anthos Capital, among others. Now, the company will look to continue to fine-tune the model as the machines continue to feed the LPM new data.
“We have over 150 million labeled plants now in our training set,” Mikesell said. “We have enough data now that we should be able to look at any picture and decide what kind of plant that is, what species it is, what it’s related to, what its structure is like, without having ever even seen that particular plant before, because we have so much data going into the neural net.”
Tech
Granola raises $125M, hits $1.5B valuation as it expands from meeting notetaker to enterprise AI app
Users might not like bots in meetings visibly taking notes, but a lot of them don’t mind if an app on someone’s computer is doing the transcription. That’s the core reason behind Granola’s popularity, which helped it secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This has tipped the company’s valuation to $1.5 billion, it said, up from $250 million as of the last round.
The company said that existing investors like Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG participated in the round as well. With this round, which comes less than a year after its $43 million round, the startup has raised $192 million.
From being a prosumer app that sits on your computer, transcribes meetings, and generates notes, Granola has been building features to suit an enterprise stack. For instance, last year, it started allowing teammates to collaborate on notes. It has now made inroads into enterprises such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, it says.
With the fundraising announcement, Granola is also adding a feature called Spaces, which are essentially workspaces for a team. You can also create Folders within this workspace. Spaces have granular controls around who can access what part. Users can query notes from Spaces and folders separately.
The company understands that AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity at this point, with many players offering this feature. That is why, after introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is introducing two new APIs for integrating the context of notes into AI workflows.
Granola now has a personal API that lets people access their notes and notes shared with them, and an enterprise API to let admins work with team context. The personal API is available to users on business and enterprise plans and the enterprise API is available only to enterprise users.
The API launch comes after a bunch of users, including an a16z partner, were mad at Granola for locking down its local database and breaking on-device AI agent workflows they had set up. Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal clarified that the company didn’t want to lock down data, but its local cache was not designed to handle AI workflows, and the startup decided to change how it stored the data. That move broke the agent workflows. Pedregal promised at that time that Granola would launch APIs for users to access data in bulk. He also said that the company will figure out a way to work with local AI agents.
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The company said that it is also updating its MCP server to let users see notes in folders and notes shared with them. It noted that its app already connects with tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, and the startup is working on bringing more partners on board.
As meeting note-taking becomes a commonplace feature, the value for startups in this category is to enable users and companies to take actions based on the notes and transcripts. This could range from drafting follow-up emails, or finding time for the next set of meetings, or drawing knowledge from the company database and CRMs to get closer to finalizing a lead. Some companies, such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill, have already started working in this direction.
Tech
Harvey confirms $11B valuation: Sequoia triples down
One of the blockbuster hits of the AI age is, without a doubt, legal tech startup Harvey. On Wednesday, the company confirmed that it had closed a new raise at an $11 billion valuation, after reports circulated last month that it was working on another monster round.
The company confirmed it inhaled $200 million from this round, co-led by returning investors Singapore’s GIC and Sequoia. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Elad Gil, Evantic, and Kleiner Perkins also participated.
With this new funding, the company has raised more than $1 billion in total, and its valuation jumped over 3.5x in a year. Harvey was valued at $8 billion from a round announced in December, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Before that, it was valued at $5 billion from a round led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, announced in June, and was at $3 billion from a Sequoia-led raise announced in February 2025.
Sequoia has now co-led three of its rounds since its Series A, a move even Sequoia partner Pat Grady acknowledged was an unusually large show of faith for the VC firm, Grady said in the press release. A few months ago, founder and CEO Winston Weinberg described to TechCrunch EIC what a wild ride it’s been.
Tech
How soap opera-TikTok hybrids became a billion-dollar business
Over the past few years, a new category of mobile apps has quietly exploded into a multi-billion dollar business. They’re called “micro dramas” — short-form, mobile-first scripted shows designed to be watched vertically on your phone. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading app, ReelShort, made $1.2 billion in consumer spending last year alone.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan and TechCrunch senior reporter Amanda Silberling sit down with Henry Soong, founder of Watch Club, who thinks the micro drama industry is still “in its MySpace era.” He has a vision for what the Facebook moment could look like.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Starfleet Academy Is Dead, Schrödinger’s Fans Blamed
Granola raises $125M, hits $1.5B valuation as it expands from meeting notetaker to enterprise AI app
