Google launches Pixel 6; Aiven valued at $2 bln; Zoho One enhancements; and a chat with Arcana Network’s CEO Mayur Relekar

Google released its Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro smartphones on Tuesday, which are equipped with some of the AI capabilities that the internet search giant has to offer. Most notably, the new phones have an AI-powered camera system so big that it takes up an entire bar across the width of the phones, jutting out on the back. The phones run on Google’s Tensor processor, a system-on-chip designed by Google. Reports in August suggested the chip was based on an Exynos chip from Samsung. The Pixel 6 starts at around $600 dollars and the Pixel 6 Pro will set you back by about $900 dollars. The phones will be available in the US from October 28. Aiven, an open-source data management startup in Finland, has more than doubled its valuation to $2 billion in fresh fundraising, the company’s CEO Oskari Saarenmaa said in a blog post. Aiven has raised $60 million in an extension of a Series C round in which it had raised $100 million in March. The company had been valued at $800 million at the time. The company’s investors include World Innovation Lab, IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, First Fellows, Lifeline Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Zoho Corporation, an India-US software products company that makes business management and office productivity software, has introduced six new apps, three new services and seven major platform enhancements in Zoho One—the company’s flagship suite of products.  The new release helps businesses solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos, so they can become more productive, adapt more quickly to remote and hybrid work models, and be better prepared for growth, Zoho said in a press release. ConveGenius, a Singapore-India ed-tech company, has raised $5 million in funding to develop a conversational AI platform, the company said in a press release. The pre-seed round was led by new investors, BAce Capital, Heritas Capital and 3Lines Venture Capital and existing investors, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Convegenius.AI aims to expand its products on Whatsapp and other Conversational AI-based channels horizontally, to service more customers across different verticals and allow developers to launch their solutions on the platform. Devnagri, a startup that offers an Indian language translation engine of the same name, with its focus on business customers, has raised $600,000 in seed funding from Venture Catalyst, Inflection Point Ventures and other co-investors. Nakul Kundra and Himanshu Sharma, the founders of Devnagri, want to make the internet accessible to Indians in their own languages. The platform combines neural machine translation with machine learning and a community to help with translations. Its AI-human combination can help businesses scale their operations in local languages at lower costs and faster and more accurate translations, according to the company. (3:52)Interview: Mayur Relekar, CEO of Arcana Network, a blockchain tech company Mayur Relekar is probably third time lucky with his startup Arcana Network, a blockchain technologies company in Bengaluru that is building a decentralised storage and data privacy platform for developers on the Ethereum network. Relekar and his founders belive the future belongs to decentralised finance and applications and they have raised some funding to build out their first commercial product.