TECH NEWS

Rejected by 180 investors, Bland just raised $50M to prove voice AI is the future

Isaiah Granet spent three weeks at Y Combinator getting turned down by 180 investors. Their reason was always the same: phone calls would not exist in a year. He has now raised more than $100mn to prove them wrong.

His startup, Bland, has closed a $50mn Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital, Fortune reported. HubSpot Ventures, Archerman and Tribeca joined, along with existing backers including Emergence Capital, Upfront Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Y Combinator.

The angel list is a who’s who of the field: Affirm’s Max Levchin, Twilio founder Jeff Lawson, and Piotr Dabkowski, the chief technology officer of voice-AI giant ElevenLabs.

Owning the model

Most voice AI tools wrap around someone else’s model. Bland does the opposite. The platform runs only on its own in-house voice models, and it will not let customers plug in OpenAI or Anthropic, even if they ask.

“We are one of...

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From the bank branch to the mobile phone: India’s core banking journey

By L S Subramanian, Board Advisor and Management consultant in Banking, Financial Services & Capital Markets A retrospective on the technology transformation that quietly changed Indian banking There was a time when a bank customer in India was, for all practical purposes, a customer of a particular branch. The account

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Dimension Capital’s $800M third fund shows the intersection of science and compute is booming

In Brief 6:27 PM PDT · July 21, 2026 While many newer VC firms are still struggling to raise fresh capital, Dimension Capital, founded in late 2022, has been raising increasingly larger funds in quick succession. On Tuesday, the New York firm — which invests at the intersection of science and

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and

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Today’s Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for July 22, #1859

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today’s Wordle puzzle is tricky. It’s not a word Americans use much,

Owning the model

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From the bank branch to the mobile phone: India’s core banking journey

Dimension Capital’s $800M third fund shows the intersection of science and compute is booming

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

Today’s Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for July 22, #1859