In a typical organization, finance is one of the most important functions. Yet teams are often bogged down by manual workflows. According to a survey by Paylocity, an HR software provider, 38% of finance teams spend more than a fourth of their time on manual jobs, like reviewing invoices.
Matthieu Hafemeister, an ex-fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, says he’s seen many finance orgs struggle to scale up as a result of all the work they’re doing by hand.
“The status quo for finance is countless point solutions that are cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister told TechCrunch. “Excel continues to be the lowest common denominator, limiting the promise of automation.”
To Hafemeister’s point, most finance departments are indeed heavily reliant on spreadsheets. One survey found that 82% still use Excel files for budgeting, forecasting, and other core financial planning activities.
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After experiencing these frustrations firsthand while leading growth at fintech firm Jeeves, Hafemeister decided to team up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves’ previous head of finance and an old friend, to launch a platform to automate financial tasks.
Called Concourse, the platform connects to a businesses’ financial systems to let finance teams retrieve and analyze data, generate charts, and ask ad-hoc questions such as “What’s our non-GAAP revenue?”
“Concourse can proactively surface insights that allow finance teams to be better prepared by enabling them to stay ahead of trends,” Hafemeister said. “Instead of a tool that tries to improve the speed or efficiency of completing a task, Concourse can be given discrete tasks to do entirely on its own.”
Concourse’s back-end dashboard, which shows the status of its various AI integrations and settings to fine-tune them.Image Credits:Concourse
Now, finance automation isn’t exactly new technology. Linq recently emerged from stealth with AI to automate aspects of research for financial analysts. Ledge and Doopla are also building a range of finance-specific generative modeling tools.
But what makes Concourse different, according to Hafemeister, is its ability to execute financial workflows with “complex, multi-step operations.” For example, the platform can retrieve data from a company’s NetSuite dashboard to download CSV files, then copy that data to an Excel spreadsheet.
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“We leverage large language models to do what they are best suited for and pair them with more traditional methods of data analysis,” Hafemeister explained.
There’s great interest in AI for finance. One poll found that 58% of finance teams are now using some form of AI technology, up 21% from 2023. Grand View Research estimates that the “AI in fintech” segment, worth $9.45 billion three years ago, is growing 16.5% annually.
But to stand a chance of making a dent in the market for finance automation tech, Concourse will have to demonstrate its product’s ROI — a challenging feat. Per Gartner, showing or estimating the value of AI is a top barrier to adopting it for close to half of companies.
Concourse will also have to assuage potential customers’ fears of AI-introduced errors and hallucinations. In a poll of U.K.-based executives by HR specialist Peninsula, 40% said inaccuracies from AI tools were a key concern, followed by concerns around data confidentiality.
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Hafemeister said that Concourse employs “a variety of tools and techniques” for fact-checking and validation to try to ensure its AI performs tasks as intended. He added that Concourse doesn’t use companies’ data to train its AI models — at least not without explicit permission — and that the platform only collects data customers share with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance, where answers are typically either entirely correct or entirely incorrect,” Hafemeister said. “As such, at Concourse we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on delivering AI that can accurately perform the task it’s been assigned. We also take data privacy and security very seriously, and have built Concourse using industry best practices.”
Folks seem willing to be take Hafemeister at his word.
Concourse, which is still in beta ahead of a broader launch planned for next year, has several customers, including Instabase and Shef, and $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister’s ex-employer, a16z, has invested in the startup, along with Y Combinator, CRV, and Box Group.
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Hafemeister says the focus at the moment is product development and growing New York-based Concourse’s six-person staff.
“We raised money to hire more engineers, build out more workflows that our AI can take on, increase coverage on data integrations, and start to scale our go-to-market function,” he said. “The strong focus on engineering recruiting is to hire backend, machine learning, and AI engineers.”
The UK government is considering whether to require all new electronic devices to use the same type of charging cable.
A call for evidence launched in October is asking for views on the benefits of using a particular charging cable – such as USB-C, which is used by many modern devices.
The UK government said at the time it was not considering similar rules.
The EU’s law aims to cut electronic waste by requiring small to medium electronic device manufacturers to use USB-C chargers.
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Apple criticised the decision, but ultimately ditched its proprietary lightning charging cables for iPhones in 2023.
Electronic goods, from mobile phones to e-readers and headphones, still vary in their charging port and cable requirements.
Following the EU’s law, many devices now use USB-C charging cables, although some still require other cables such as micro-USB.
Apple introduced its own proprietary lightning connectors with the iPhone 5 in 2012.
But after more than a decade of use it was phased out and replaced with USB-C ports in more recent versions of its gadgets, starting with the iPhone 15 last September.
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Consumer groups have frequently pointed to the amount of different cables needed and discarded based on the varying options for connectors on devices as a source of e-waste.
Materials Focus, a charity encouraging the reuse and recycling of electricals, has been encouraging people to recycle old cables to meet growing demand for their copper contents.
Future Samsung phones may use AI to replace frequent visits to the Settings menu, with the phone anticipating, learning, and altering aspects of the device without you having to dig through different options and menus to make the phone operate in the way you want.
Samsung has already pushed AI functionality as a selling point on its smartphones through Galaxy AI, but the features focus on summaries, translations, notes, and photo editing. By using AI to change the phone’s operation by learning our preferences, or anticipating what we may require during a task, Galaxy AI may be about to take a far more active role in our phones, should several reports prove to be accurate.
According to a report from a South Korean business publication, Samsung is exploring this new AI feature within the keyboard and camera on its phones at this stage, but details on how it will work or what the AI will be able to change have not been revealed. It’s possible the keyboard may automatically change languages or build on its existing ability to generate messages and writing styles, while the camera may activate different filters or set timers, based on circumstances, which are actions that currently require accessing different menus.
Smartphones already adapt to our environments automatically with features like auto brightness enabled by ambient light sensors, and we can use voice control to activate different features without digging into different settings menus. But it’s easy to miss specific features purely because we don’t know they exist, or miss them in large, congested menu pages. If AI could learn how we use our phones, particularly in the early stages, and introduce different features that may improve our experience without us needing to prompt it, it could prove very helpful.
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It’s not the first time we’re hearing about what Samsung big plans for its mobile AI future. Samsung’s Head of Customer Experience Patrick Chomet said his dream for Galaxy AI was where he “didn’t need to go to Settings,” in an interview with TechRadar earlier this year, where he also stated he wanted the accessibility menu to be a thing of the past because the, “AI intelligently adapts to me and my needs.” Samsung Mobile’s Head of Business TM Roh wrote the company is, “only getting started” with AI earlier this year following the announcement of the Galaxy S24 series, and these reports indicate interesting things may arrive in the future.
No timeline has been indicated for when this type of feature will arrive in the Galaxy AI suite, but it’s expected Samsung’s next major smartphone release will be the Galaxy S25 series sometime in early 2025.
The Xiaomi 15 Ultra launch timeframe has just been tipped, and the phone’s 200MP camera detailed. This information comes from Digital Chat Station, one of the best-known tipsters out there.
The Xiaomi 15 Ultra launch timeframe has appeared, along with 200MP camera details
Let’s start with the launch timeframe, shall we? While responding to a user question, he said that the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is coming “after the New Year”, meaning the Chinese New Year, of course. That means after January 25.
He did not say when exactly, but this kind of points to the first quarter of the year, probably February. That makes all the sense in the world as the Xiaomi 14 Ultra also arrived in February, so… it fits.
The tipster also detailed the 200-megapixel periscope telephoto camera that will be included on the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. That camera will come with a 100mm lens, and allow for 4.3x optical zoom. We’re looking at an f/2.6 aperture here.
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In addition to that periscope telephoto camera, the device will also include a 50-megapixel telephoto camera. That camera will offer a 3x optical zoom. It will be the same as on the Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi 15 Pro.
The Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi 15 Pro are coming later this month
While the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is coming next year, its siblings, the Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi 15 Pro will launch later this month. All three of those phones are expected to use Qualcomm’s new flagship chip. That processor will be announced soon, and it will be called either the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 or Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Based on the renders that we’ve seen recently, and the real-life image of the Xiaomi 15 Pro, Xiaomi will tweak the design a bit, but not much. It’s sticking with its design language from the Xiaomi 14 series.
Both of those smartphones will be quite powerful, though the ‘Ultra’ will trump them in the camera department. It will be a more versatile shooter, even though the ‘Pro’ model is getting a periscope telephoto camera too.
NASA has launched its Europa Clipper spacecraft, the biggest one it has ever built for a mission heading to another planet, on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have confirmed that the Europa Clipper successfully separated from the rocket’s second stage and has already deployed the two solar arrays flanking its main body. Now, the spacecraft has started its 1.8 billion-million journey Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons and one of the most promising habitable worlds outside our own planet, which will take it five-and-a-half years to reach.
The Europa Clipper will not be heading straight to Jupiter — it will instead fly by Mars and, in 2026, by Earth to use the planets’ gravity to boost its momentum. NASA’s plan is to use that momentum to slingshot the spacecraft towards the outer solar system. Europa has a thick icy shell that’s estimated to be around 10 to 15 miles thick, covering a saltwater ocean that could have twice the water in our planet’s oceans combined. Since scientists believe that life on our planet originated from the ocean, Europa’s could also host organic compounds and contain energy sources.
“Scientists believe Europa has suitable conditions below its icy surface to support life. Its conditions are water, energy, chemistry and stability,” said Sandra Connelly, the Deputy Associate Administrator in the NASA Science Mission Directorate.
Upon reaching Europa in 2031, the Clipper will fly by the moon 49 times, coming as close as 16 miles to its surface. NASA equipped the spacecraft with nine instruments, including an ice-penetrating radar, cameras and a thermal instrument, housed inside a vault made of titanium and aluminum to protect them from the intense radiation produced by Jupiter. The Clipper will operate its instruments simultaneously every time it passes by the moon to investigate how thick Europa’s outer shell truly is and how deep the ocean underneath all that ice is. It will also look for areas with warmer ice and find any plumes of water vapor that could be escaping from Europa’s icy shell.
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In case you missed it: Today, NASA’s largest planetary spacecraft launched on a 5.5-year, 1.8-billion mile voyage to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
NetEase Games announced today that it is developing a free-to-play mobile RPG called Destiny: Rising, set in the same universe as Bungie’s first-person shooter franchise. Bungie itself has licensed the Destiny brand to NetEase, which will develop and publish the title. According to the latter, Destiny: Rising features familiar Destiny characters in unfamiliar settings, as well as both returning and new game modes. At present, the game has no release date.
Destiny: Rising is set in an alternate universe to the primary Destiny canon, in a time after the collapse of civilization and the Dark Age. The game features single-player and co-op play, as well as competitive multiplayer. Players can switch between first-person and third-person modes, and Rising is compatible with both controllers and touch-based controls. It features multiple playable characters, explorable biomes and weapons from which to choose.
Ethan Wang, SVP of NetEase Inc, said in a statement, “With Destiny: Rising, NetEase Games is honored to partner with Bungie to deliver a Destiny-caliber experience to mobile devices. Destiny is an incredible franchise with a passionate and dedicated global fanbase. As huge fans ourselves, we are humbled and thrilled for the opportunity to bring gamers an action-packed RPG shooter set within the Destiny Universe.”
Bungie’s collaboration with NetEase goes back several years, as the two first announced they were working together on a new game in 2018. NetEase also invested over $100 million in Bungie and obtained a minority stake in the developer the next year. At the time, all it revealed about the game was that it wouldn’t affect the development of the mainline Destiny titles.
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Larsen, who’s backed candidates across the aisle for the last few years, told CNBC in an interview on Monday that his comfort level with Harris comes from conversations he’s had with people inside the campaign and what he’s seen from the vice president since she replacedPresident Biden at the top of the ticket in July.
It helps that Harris is from the Bay Area.
“She knows people who have grown up in the innovation economy her whole life,” Larsen said. “So I think she gets it at a fundamental level, in a way that I think the Biden folks were just not paying attention to, or maybe just didn’t make the connection between empowering workers and making sure you have American champions dominating their industries.”
Larsen’s affection for the Democratic nominee isn’t brand new. In February, he gave the maximum personal contribution of $6,600 to Harris (which would cover the primary and general election), about five months before she became the Democratic presidential nominee, FEC filings show. At the same time, he contributed $100,000 to the Harris Action Fund PAC.
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In total, Larsen has given around $1.9 million to support Harris’ campaign directly and through PACs, according to FEC data compiled by crypto market and blockchain analyst James Delmore and independently verified by CNBC.
Larsen, 64, has a net worth of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership of XRP and involvement in Ripple, which provides blockchain technology for financial services companies.
He’s part of an industry that’s become suddenly prominent in political fundraising, though more heavily in support of Republicans. Nearly half of all the corporate money flowing into the election has come from the crypto industry, according to a recent report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen.
Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she arrives at Erie International Airport ahead of a campaign rally, in Erie, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 14, 2024.
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Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
The sum was raised from a mix of contributors, with Coinbase, Ripple, and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz accounting for most of those business donations. The industry has raised roughly 13 times the amount it brought in during the last presidential election year.
Close to two-thirds of crypto contributions have gone either to supporting Republicans or opposing Democrats, according to Delmore’s compilation of FEC data. Trump has received more than $4 million in virtual tokens, an FEC filing shows, and in July, the ex-president keynoted a major bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
Larsen’s recent contributions include $1 million to Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in December, and almost $7,000 in February to John Deaton, the Massachusetts Republican who’s taking on Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a vocal crypto critic. He also donated $250,000 in 2022 to the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund and contributed to a pro-Biden PAC in 2020.
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Larsen told CNBC that he’s “really confident” that Harris will bring a “more pragmatic approach and clear rules” to the crypto industry, in contrast to the current situation with Gary Gensler running the SEC. Gensler’s open hostility towards much of the crypto industry and his aggressive crackdowns on companies, including Ripple, is a big reason why many in the space say they’re supporting Trump.
In January, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who has also donated to members of both parties, called Gensler a “political liability.”
“What we’ve had to date has been almost like purposeful chaos by Gensler to kind of crush the domestic industry,” Larsen said. That “has only empowered sketchier foreign operations. It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said, adding that “Gensler must be the most unpopular person in Washington, D.C.”
CNBC reached out to Gensler’s office for comment and didn’t hear back.
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Ripple’s legal chief said in June that the company has spent over $100 million on litigation to defend itself against civil charges brought by the SEC. In 2020, before Biden took office, the SEC accused Ripple, Garlinghouse and Larsen of violating securities laws by acting as unregistered brokers of digital currency tokens, which the SEC regulates as securities. The SEC later dismissed the charges against the two Ripple executives, and the company has denied it broke securities laws.They remain in active litigation.
Earlier this month, the agency filed a notice of appeal in its multi-year case with the Ripple.
Ripple has given about $50 million to the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake, which has been contributing to candidates up and down the ballot, and on both sides of the aisle.
Harris has been gaining momentum within the crypto community.
Skybridge Capital’s Anthony Scaramucci, who spent 11 days as White House communications director under Trump, has given more than $36,000 to two PACs supporting the Democratic nominee. Scaramucci says he’s among a group of crypto advocates working with Harris to develop her campaign’s policies on digital assets and to help the vice president distance the Democrats from Sen. Warren.
And then there’s venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who maintains a sizable portfolio of crypto companies. The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and his partner Marc Andreessen said in July they were planning to make significant donations to PACs supporting Trump’s run for president due to what they characterized as his friendliness to the “little tech agenda.”
That was when Biden was the nominee. By early October, Horowitz appeared to have had a change of heart. He told employees at his firm that he would be making a “significant” personal contribution to Harris’ election bid. Horowitz said that he and his wife, Felicia, “have known Vice President Harris for over 10 years and she has been a great friend to both of us during that time.”
A couple weeks earlier, in late September, Harris finally gave a nod to cryptocurrency in a public address.
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“We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting our consumers and investors,” she said at a $27 million fundraiser in New York.
On Monday, the Harris campaign unveiled its “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” in a report. The plan explicitly mentions creating a framework for cryptocurrency in the U.S. designed to safeguard those assets. The campaign said more than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned digital currencies.
Despite Larsen’s track record of donating to Democrats, he took heat on social media after his latest contribution was reported on CNBC on Friday.
“The Ripple community and even the crypto community in general has a lot of skepticism toward Kamala’s candidacy and what policies she would put into place,” Delmore said, reflecting much of the online sentiment
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Larsen blew off the criticism, and said he doesn’t pay attention to social media.
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