A new AI model called Koa is one of the biggest announcements from Salesforce this week at its giant Dreamforce tech conference. Koa is the company's first reasoning model, built on Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron model. The two companies worked together to post-train Koa to excel at sales, marketing, and customer-support-related tasks. Koa is a shining example of how the enterprise world's needs for AI are diverging from what the frontier labs are offering. Proprietary AI labs would rather have enterprises uploading files, code, prompts, and feedback directly into their models and agents, and spending millions to do so. Koa will be provided as an alternative to the other models Salesforce offers in its Agentforce platform, where its customers build agents to handle rote tasks like answering customer service questions or scheduling appointments. 'We've built many small task-specific language models, which are part of Agentforce's portfolio,' Jayesh Govindarajan, EVP of Salesforce AI, told TechCrunch. 'But reasoning has always been something that we've relied on the frontier model providers for. Until now.'...

Startups across sales, marketing and customer management have raised $7.5 billion so far this year, according to Crunchbase data. The largest rounds span everything from advertising and customer data to sales software, e-commerce and customer support ' reflecting just how many companies are still trying to build a better way to market and sell. Unsurprisingly, AI-focused companies are capturing a much larger share of funding than during the prior peak, with most sales, marketing and CRM investment going to companies in Crunchbase AI-related categories. The numbers: So far in 2026, startups in sales, marketing and CRM have raised $7.5 billion globally across 830 funding rounds, Crunchbase data shows. At the current pace, funding could finish near the $9.3 billion raised in both 2023 and 2024, although potentially below last year's $11.1 billion. Deal volume, meanwhile, is on track to fall for a fourth consecutive year ' pointing to a market where investors are putting more money into fewer companies....

Sean Jacobsohn worked at HR software startups long before he began investing in them. He held senior roles at WageWorks and Cornerstone OnDemand as both companies grew from single-digit millions in revenue to tens of millions, and he also worked at Upwork. All three of which went public. He later became a venture partner at Emergence Capital before joining Norwest in 2014. As a partner at Menlo Park, California-based venture firm Norwest, Jacobsohn focuses on enterprise software, drawing on his background in finance, sales and business development. His 15 active portfolio companies range from pre-revenue startups to businesses generating more than $300 million in revenue. Much of his portfolio falls within finance and HR software, although he also invests in supply chain and construction technology ' often in companies building finance applications for those industries. The common thread, he explained, is a focus on next-generation business applications taking on entrenched providers that have struggled to keep up. Jacobsohn has found particularly fertile ground in finance, where companies already have software budgets and many categories remain dominated by aging systems....

Retro tech is making a comeback, and this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) put hard numbers to that trend in terms of music consumption habits. Surprisingly, the organization reported that CDs ' yes, the shiny, round things that Spotify supposedly killed ' are growing once again. According to the RIAA's new report, CDs generated $171.1 million in revenue during the first half of 2026 ' up 58.6% from roughly $107.9 million in the first half of 2025 ' on 17.5 million units sold, up 45.7% from about 12 million units in the same period last year. That rebound is all the more interesting because it follows a rough 2025. Last year's full-year report showed CD revenue had actually fallen 7.8% for the full year, from $338.9 million in 2024 to $312.4 million in 2025, while units sold dropped 11.6%, from 33.3 million to 29.5 million. The growth comes amid a surge of renewed interest in simpler tech, like so-called dumbphones, digital cameras, typewriters, landlines, and physical media like CDs and vinyl, among other categories. For Gen Z, the demand for these devices represents a sort of yearning for an era of tech they never got to experience ' where you had more control over when you engaged with technology and how, and tech itself had less room to invade your life with its notifications, addictive apps, and algorithms....