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Arena raises money from Peter Thiel and David Petraeus for its decision-making AI

Can AI automate enterprise decision-making? It’s an exceptionally broad and challenging task — assuming it’s within the realm of possibility. But…

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Can AI automate enterprise decision-making? It’s an exceptionally broad and challenging task — assuming it’s within the realm of possibility. But that’s what startup Arena claims to do, fueled by a round of funding ($32 million) led by Initialized Capital and Goldcrest Capital along with Founders Fund, Flexport and a colorful cast of characters, including retired general David Petraeus, Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel.

New York–based Arena is the brainchild of Pratap Ranade and Engin Ural, who co-founded the company in 2020. The two were inspired to build a platform that could, leveraging predictive algorithms, help businesses formulate strategies to navigate “uncertain” environments — like a global pandemic.

Ranade, who attended Stanford and Columbia, was previously an associate partner at McKinsey and co-founded web-scraping startup Kimono Labs, which was acquired by Palantir in 2016. Ural was an app developer at Goldman Sachs before joining Palantir as an engineer, where he met Ranade.

Arena’s services are wrapped up in a lot of hyperbolic language, but they’re relatively straightforward in execution. One of the startup’s tools uses AI techniques to simulate an economy, testing out millions of product pricing configurations to arrive at an optimal model for a company. It brings to mind the AI Economist, a Salesforce-developed research environment that similarly runs millions of simulations to come up with plausible fiscal policy.

Beyond pricing, Arena can ostensibly simulate things like inventory management. Ranade also claims it can account for “deviations” in the economic environment, like headwinds stemming from snarled supply chains, in making recommendations to customers (i.e., execs).

Image Credits: Arena

“Without Arena, enterprises traditionally approach such decisions in a few ways: Hiring large teams of people to make these decisions, buying decision assistance software to help people in operational roles make data-driven decisions, or do nothing and continue pushing through with traditional processes,” Ranade told TechCrunch via email. “Each of these approaches has merit, but they are a far cry from the full promise of AI: truly intelligent machines that operate autonomously, on our behalf, to elevate human potential.”

Arena clients feed the platform data like SKU-level sales, pricing, inventory at the location level and shopper behavior during e-commerce sales. Arena augments that data with context from what Ranade calls the “demand graph,” which provides broader, real-time market signals. Together, these inputs are used to create the aforementioned simulations, which in turn produce models for pricing, inventory and marketing that are then fine-tuned world data.

“Today, when the most sophisticated, data-centric business-to-business companies run a promotion, data scientists analyze past data to determine the best type of promotion to run for a specific product in a specific market. They then load the promotion into their enterprise resource planning system, and weeks after, will analyze its performance,” Ranade said. “With Arena, this entire process is autonomous … Under the hood, Arena’s AI actively adapts to changing price elasticity and personalizes to customer behavior, making adjustments as it learns in real-time to drive bottom line impact.”

Ranade makes the remarkable claim that Arena’s customers — which include Anheuser-Busch InBev and other “select” Fortune 500 brands in e-commerce, automotive, manufacturing and financial services — have been able to lower the costs of goods and services and make their supply chains more resilient thanks to its technology. It’s unclear to what extent that’s true. But for what it’s worth, Ranade says that Arena is currently making “millions” of decisions across both digital and physical channels.

“We’ve found that Arena drives a step change in value because we’re not only introducing a new paradigm of decision-making for the enterprise, but also meeting C-suite and their companies’ existing infrastructure where they are,” Ranade said. “The pandemic was actually a reaffirming moment for us. Our technology is expressly designed to handle shocks — cases where past data no longer represents the future. The pandemic showed that our technology drives significant, measurable results for our customers, especially in highly volatile decision environments.”

Arena

Image Credits: Arena

The closing of Arena’s Series A today marks the company’s first external raise, Ranade tells TechCrunch. The business had grown “profitably” up to this point. But Ranade and Ural believed that going the venture route would allow them to expand Arena’s core technology while growing into industries such as manufacturing, renewable energy and financial services.

It’ll certainly need a substantial war chest to compete in the growing market for data analytics products. O9 Solutions, which applies analytics to the supply chain and inventory planning and management, recently raised $295 million in a funding round that values the company at $2.7 billion. Unsupervised, Pecan.ai and Noogata compete more directly with Arena, delivering tools designed to make predictions about metrics like customer lifetime value, churn and retention, sales and on-time deliveries.

xCash flows freely where it concerns enterprise analytics — the global big data and business analytics segment could be worth nearly $700 billion by 2030, depending on which analyst you place your faith in. But the challenge for vendors like Arena is convincing potential customers that they can deliver on their promises. A recent NewVantage Partners survey found that many established companies continue to struggle in their efforts to become “data-driven,” with less than a third saying that they have a “well-articulated” data strategy. For many — particularly small- and medium-sized businesses — the return on investment remains unclear.

Arena’s headcount stands at 50 people today, 90% of whom are members of the engineering, data science and product development staff at the startup’s downtown office. Ranade didn’t respond to a question about whether Arena plans to hire within the next year.

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Study: Life’s building blocks are surprisingly stable in Venus-like conditions

If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet’s blisteringly inhospitable surface,…

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If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet’s blisteringly inhospitable surface, Venus’ cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the surface, hosts milder temperatures that could support some extreme forms of life. 

Credit: Credit: JAXA/J. J. Petkowski

If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet’s blisteringly inhospitable surface, Venus’ cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the surface, hosts milder temperatures that could support some extreme forms of life. 

If it’s out there, scientists have assumed that any Venusian cloud inhabitant would look very different from life forms on Earth. That’s because the clouds themselves are made from highly toxic droplets of sulfuric acid — an intensely corrosive chemical that is known to dissolve metals and destroy most biological molecules on Earth. 

But a new study by MIT researchers may challenge that assumption. Appearing today in the journal Astrobiology, the study reports that, in fact, some key building blocks of life can persist in solutions of concentrated sulfuric acid. 

The study’s authors have found that 19 amino acids that are essential to life on Earth are stable for up to four weeks when placed in vials of sulfuric acid at concentrations similar to those in Venus’ clouds. In particular, they found that the molecular “backbone” of all 19 amino acids remained intact in sulfuric acid solutions ranging in concentration from 81 to 98 percent.  

“What is absolutely surprising is that concentrated sulfuric acid is not a solvent that is universally hostile to organic chemistry,” says study co-author Janusz Petkowski, a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

“We are finding that building blocks of life on Earth are stable in sulfuric acid, and this is very intriguing for the idea of the possibility of life on Venus,” adds study author Sara Seager, MIT’s Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in EAPS and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “It doesn’t mean that life there will be the same as here. In fact, we know it can’t be. But this work advances the notion that Venus’ clouds could support complex chemicals needed for life.”

The study’s co-authors include first author Maxwell Seager, an undergraduate in the Department of Chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Seager’s son, and William Bains, a research affiliate at MIT and a scientist at Cardiff University.

Building blocks in acid

The search for life in Venus’ clouds has gained momentum in recent years, spurred in part by a controversial detection of phosphine — a molecule that is considered to be one signature of life — in the planet’s atmosphere. While that detection remains under debate, the news has reinvigorated an old question: Could Earth’s sister planet actually host life? 

In search of an answer, scientists are planning several missions to Venus, including the first largely privately funded mission to the planet, backed by California-based launch company Rocket Lab. That mission, on which Seager is the science principal investigator, aims to send a spacecraft through the planet’s clouds to analyze their chemistry for signs of organic molecules. 

Ahead of the mission’s January 2025 launch, Seager and her colleagues have been testing various molecules in concentrated sulfuric acid to see what fragments of life on Earth might also be stable in Venus’ clouds, which are estimated to be orders of magnitude more acidic than the most acidic places on Earth.

“People have this perception that concentrated sulfuric acid is an extremely aggressive solvent that will chop everything to pieces,” Petkowski says. “But we are finding this is not necessarily true.”

In fact, the team has previously shown that complex organic molecules such as some fatty acids and nucleic acids remain surprisingly stable in sulfuric acid. The scientists are careful to emphasize, as they do in their current paper, that “complex organic chemistry is of course not life, but there is no life without it.” 

In other words, if certain molecules can persist in sulfuric acid, then perhaps the highly acidic clouds of Venus are habitable, if not necessarily inhabited. 

In their new study, the team turned their focus on amino acids — molecules that combine  to make essential proteins, each with their own specific function. Every living thing on Earth requires amino acids to make proteins that in turn carry out life-sustaining functions, from breaking down food to generating energy, building muscle, and repairing tissue. 

“If you consider the four major building blocks of life as nucleic acid bases, amino acids, fatty acids, and carbohydrates, we have demonstrated that some fatty acids can form micelles and vesicles in sulfuric acid, and the nucleic acid bases are stable in sulfuric acid. Carbohydrates have been shown to be highly reactive in sulfuric acid,” Maxwell
Seager explains. “That only left us with amino acids as the last major building block to
study.”

A stable backbone

The scientists began their studies of sulfuric acid during the pandemic, carrying out their experiments in a home laboratory. Since that time, Seager and her son continued work on chemistry in concentrated sulfuric acid. In early 2023, they ordered powder samples of 20 “biogenic” amino acids — those amino acids that are essential to all life on Earth. They dissolved each type of amino acid in vials of sulfuric acid mixed with water, at concentrations of 81 and 98 percent, which represent the range that exists in Venus’ clouds. 

The team then let the vials incubate for a day before transporting them to MIT’s Department of Chemistry Instrumentation Facility (DCIF), a shared, 24/7 laboratory that offers a number of automated and manual instruments for MIT scientists to use. For their part, Seager and her team used the lab’s nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer to analyze the structure of amino acids in sulfuric acid. 

After analyzing each vial several times over four weeks, the scientists found, to their surprise, that the basic molecular structure, or “backbone” in 19 of the 20 amino acids remained stable and unchanged, even in highly acidic conditions.

“Just showing that this backbone is stable in sulfuric acid doesn’t mean there is life on Venus,” notes Maxwell Seager. “But if we had shown that this backbone was compromised, then there would be no chance of life as we know it.” 

The team acknowledges that Venus’ cloud chemistry is likely messier than the study’s “test tube” conditions. For instance, scientists have measured various trace gases, in addition to sulfuric acid, in the planet’s clouds. As such, the team plans to incorporate certain trace gases in future experiments. 

“There are only a few groups in the world now that are working on chemistry in sulfuric acid, and they will all agree that no one has intuition,” adds Sara Seager. “I think we are just more happy than anything that this latest result adds one more ‘yes’ for the possibility of life on Venus.”

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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News

Paper: “Stability of 20 Biogenic Amino Acids in Concentrated Sulfuric Acid: Implications for the Habitability of Venus’ Clouds”

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2023.0082


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Bacteria subtype linked to growth in up to 50% of human colorectal cancers, Fred Hutch researchers report

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have found that a specific subtype of a microbe commonly found in the mouth is able to travel to the gut and…

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Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have found that a specific subtype of a microbe commonly found in the mouth is able to travel to the gut and grow within colorectal cancer tumors. This microbe is also a culprit for driving cancer progression and leads to poorer patient outcomes after cancer treatment.

Credit: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have found that a specific subtype of a microbe commonly found in the mouth is able to travel to the gut and grow within colorectal cancer tumors. This microbe is also a culprit for driving cancer progression and leads to poorer patient outcomes after cancer treatment.

The findings, published March 20 in the journal Nature, could help improve therapeutic approaches and early screening methods for colorectal cancer, which is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in adults in the U.S. according to the American Cancer Society.

Examining colorectal cancer tumors removed from 200 patients, the Fred Hutch team measured levels of Fusobacterium nucleatum, a bacterium known to infect tumors. In about 50% of the cases, they found that only a specific subtype of the bacterium was elevated in the tumor tissue compared to healthy tissue.

The researchers also found this microbe in higher numbers within stool samples of colorectal cancer patients compared with stool samples from healthy people.

“We’ve consistently seen that patients with colorectal tumors containing Fusobacterium nucleatum have poor survival and poorer prognosis compared with patients without the microbe,” explained Susan Bullman, Ph.D., Fred Hutch cancer microbiome researcher and co-corresponding study author. “Now we’re finding that a specific subtype of this microbe is responsible for tumor growth. It suggests therapeutics and screening that target this subgroup within the microbiota would help people who are at a higher risk for more aggressive colorectal cancer.”

In the study, Bullman and co-corresponding author Christopher D. Johnston, Ph.D., Fred Hutch molecular microbiologist, along with the study’s first author Martha Zepeda-Rivera, Ph.D., a Washington Research Foundation Fellow and Staff Scientist in the Johnston Lab, wanted to discover how the microbe moves from its typical environment of the mouth to a distant site in the lower gut and how it contributes to cancer growth.

First they found a surprise that could be important for future treatments. The predominant group of Fusobacterium nucleatum in colorectal cancer tumors, thought to be a single subspecies, is actually composed of two distinct lineages known as “clades.”

“This discovery was similar to stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone in terms of genetics,” Johnston explained. “We have bacterial strains that are so phylogenetically close that we thought of them as the same thing, but now we see an enormous difference between their relative abundance in tumors versus the oral cavity.”

By separating out the genetic differences between these clades, the researchers found that the tumor-infiltrating Fna C2 type had acquired distinct genetic traits suggesting it could travel from the mouth through the stomach, withstand stomach acid and then grow in the lower gastrointestinal tract. The analysis revealed 195 genetic differences between the clades.

Then, comparing tumor tissue with healthy tissue from patients with colorectal cancer, the researchers found that only the subtype Fna C2 is significantly enriched in colorectal tumor tissue and is responsible for colorectal cancer growth.

Further molecular analyses of two patient cohorts, including over 200 colorectal tumors, revealed the presence of this Fna C2 lineage in approximately 50% of cases.

The researchers also found in hundreds of stool samples from people with and without colorectal cancer that Fna C2 levels were consistently higher in colorectal cancer.

“We  have pinpointed the exact bacterial lineage that is associated with colorectal cancer, and that knowledge is critical for developing effective preventive and treatment methods,” Johnston said.

He and Bullman believe their study presents significant opportunities for developing microbial cellular therapies, which use modified versions of bacterial strains to deliver treatments directly into tumors.

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Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center unites individualized care and advanced research to provide the latest cancer treatment options while accelerating discoveries that prevent, treat and cure cancer and infectious diseases worldwide.

Based in Seattle, Fred Hutch is an independent, nonprofit organization and the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Washington. We have earned a global reputation for our track record of discoveries in cancer, infectious disease and basic research, including important advances in bone marrow transplantation, immunotherapy, HIV/AIDS prevention and COVID-19 vaccines. Fred Hutch operates eight clinical care sites that provide medical oncology, infusion, radiation, proton therapy and related services. Fred Hutch also serves as UW Medicine’s cancer program.


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Fashion needs stronger storytelling that is more inclusive, relevant and responsible

Representing 2% of global GDP, the fashion industry must use its cultural reach to drive a shift towards a more sustainable and equitable industry.

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The fashion industry could not exist without storytelling. Compelling and aspirational stories conveyed through catwalks, campaigns and social media are the stuff that make garments fashionable, fostering a strong desire to be seen wearing them.

Fashion’s stories can spread positive messaging about issues that affect us all. In 2020, Stella McCartney’s Paris show featured models wearing cartoonish animal costumes. This humorous stunt emphasised a serious point about the “planet-friendly” brand’s pledge not to use leather, fur, skins, feathers or animal glues.

But more often, the darker, more unpalatable truth is that fashion’s storytelling drives overconsumption. And it defines unrealistic beauty expectations that exclude many by perpetuating western standards about what is normal and acceptable.

As a cultural historian who researches fashion, I believe the industry has to do better to effect change, and this can be achieved through stronger, more inclusive and responsible storytelling.

Fashion and world problems

According to recent fashion industry reports, storytelling is becoming more prominent as brands seek to demonstrate their social responsibility by forging deeper relationships with consumers. The increased significance of storytelling within fashion can be linked to two themes that have defined social and political debate about the world’s post-COVID recovery: self and society.

Consumers want more meaningful experiences that enable them to explore their identities and connect with others. Fashion is the ideal medium for this, especially during a time of social and political unease. The industry’s global reach means that visual cues and messaging conveyed through clothing campaigns can be easily shared and understood.

The Business of Fashion’s report, The State of Fashion 2024, links the increased importance of storytelling to consumers being “more demanding when it comes to authenticity and relatability”. People want to buy brands that share and support their values.

The consumer group most concerned to align their lifestyle choices and beliefs with the companies that clothe them is Gen-Z – people born between 1996 and 2010 – who “value pursuing their own unique identities and appreciate diversity”.

The increasing prominence of storytelling in fashion is also linked to the industry’s global sway and corresponding social responsibility. Organisations like the UN are increasingly clear that the fashion industry will only help tackle the global challenges emphasised by COVID if it uses its influence to change consumers’ mindsets.

The uneven social impact of the pandemic, which emphasised longstanding inequalities, provided a wake-up call to take action on many global problems, including climate change, overconsumption and racial discrimination. This makes the fashion industry, which contributes 2% to global GDP, a culprit but also a potential champion for driving change.

The British Fashion Council’s Fashion Diversity Equality & Inclusion Report, published in January 2024, highlights “fashion’s colossal power to influence, to provide cultural reference and guide social trends”. Similarly, the UN’s Fashion Communication Playbook, published last year, urges the industry to use its “cultural reach, powers of persuasion and educational role to both raise awareness and drive a shift towards a more sustainable and equitable industry”.

To do this, the UN’s report urges storytellers, imagemakers and role models to change the narrative of the fashion industry. They are asked to educate consumers and inspire them to alter their behaviour if it can help create positive change.

Fashion’s new stories

Since the pandemic, there is evidence the fashion industry has begun to change the content and form of the stories it tells, chiefly by putting a human face on current global challenges. Large-scale, entrenched social problems are being explored through real-life stories. This can help people to understand the problems that confront them, and grasp their role in working towards overcoming them.

One example is Nike’s Move to Zero campaign, a global sustainability initiative which launched during the pandemic in 2020. Instead of endless statistics and apocalyptic warnings about crisis-point climate emergency, Nike encourages people to “refresh” sports gear with maintenance and repair. Old Nike products that have been recreated by designers are sold through pop-ups. When salvage is not possible, Nike provides ways for people to recycle and donate old products.

By encouraging relatively small changes that align the lifecycle of a product with consumers’ everyday lives, Nike’s campaign challenges the traditional idea of clothes being new, immediate and ultimately disposable by making change aspirational.

Narrative hang-ups

While some fashion brands are rethinking the stories they tell, my recent book, Hang-Ups: Reflections on the Causes and Consequences of Fashion’s Western Centrism, explains that some of fashion’s most powerful and harmful stories are deep-rooted.

Concepts defined during the 18th and 19th centuries – civilisation, anthropology, sexology – still influence how the fashion industry engages with age, gender, race and sex. Its drive for newness and the way it pushes the idea that purchasing expensive brands brings automatic status is also based on traditional western social values that fit poorly with 21st-century perspectives and priorities.

The persistence of centuries-old attitudes is apparent too in Nike’s Move to Zero campaign, however well-intentioned. While the initiative is clearly conceived to influence consumer behaviour in a positive way, it still doesn’t fundamentally address what the fashion industry is and does. But at the very least, it accepts that fashion functions through high consumption and the sense of status that owning and wearing a brand confers.

Throwing everything out

One of the key points I make in my book is that effective change will be more likely if we understand how the industry developed into what it is today. This calls for more audacious storytelling that critiques notions of normality, acceptability and inclusivity.

One example is Swedish brand Avavav, which commits itself to “creative freedom driven by humour, entertainment and design evolution”. In February 2024, the brand’s Milan catwalk show concluded with models being pelted with litter. This experimental performance explored prevailing social media stories by calling out online trolls and highlighting the hurt of hate speech, within and beyond the fashion industry.

Naturally, it caused a sensation and was widely covered in the media. A stunt perhaps, but it got people talking and drew attention to designer Beate Karlsson’s message about online hate. Clearly, compelling and innovative storytelling has the power to change minds and behaviour.


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Benjamin Wild does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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