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Two former executives of Humane, the embattled AI hardware startup, are reemerging with a new artificial intelligence software venture that has raised $4 million at a $25 million valuation. 

Brooke Hartley Moy and Ken Kocienda, Humane’s former strategic partnerships lead and head of product engineering, respectively, are debuting Infactory, an AI fact-checking search engine. The pair departed Humane in May, weeks after its AI Pin’s lukewarm debut.  

Infactory’s tool aims to search any company’s own enterprise database, as well as the open web, in a transparent and explainable way, Kocienda told CNBC. He and Hartley Moy are marketing the startup toward enterprise customers in industries like finance, insurance, SaaS, healthcare services and media.

“It really came down to the opportunity that we saw in the enterprise side of the house,” Hartley Moy, Infactory’s CEO, told CNBC. “Building this kind of product was never going to be a fit at a consumer hardware company.”

When Humane sent the AI ​​Pin to gadget reviewers in April, it was met with a tepid reception, with many calling it untrustworthy and not very useful. But the two’s departure had to do with the business opportunities they saw when working at Humane, Hartley Moy said.

“The reality was this had been brewing for some time, unrelated to the reviews and how that unfolded,” she said. 

Humane is now seeking a buyer, and in June, it was in talks with HP and other firms, including more than one telecom company, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time. Last year, Humane raised $100 million in funding from Microsoft, LG’s venture arm and Tiger Global before announcing its device, bringing its funding total to more than $200 million. Backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Hartley Moy worked at Salesforce, Slack and Google before leaving for Humane. There, she focused on software partnerships with cloud providers. Kocienda, Infactory’s CTO, worked at Apple for more than 15 years and was the principal engineer who invented keyboard autocorrect for the original iPhone.

The company’s seed round was led by Bee Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and others. Although the majority of funding came from an institutional investor, Hartley Moy confirmed that Infactory also utilized a small special-purpose vehicle, or SPV, which is a funding type commonly used by AI companies, like Anthropic and Cohere.

A ‘facts-focused’ AI chatbot

Infactory is currently in alpha status, and the team is currently working with design partners and others to incorporate feedback before broadly launching the product later this year, Hartley Moy said. 

“There are many, many businesses that are not part of AI-native companies… who want to be participating in this ecosystem,” she said. “Their business requirements are very regimented around accuracy, around trustworthiness, about high-quality answers. The standards for building those applications are just so much higher.”

How Infactory is addressing that with a special method of preparing data in a way that AI models can better and more accurately analyze it, Hartley Moy said.

If, for instance, a doctor has a patient in their office who is on three different medications, and the doctor wants to double-check potential drug interactions before prescribing a fourth medication, they could ask Infactory and it could provide an answer from internal data, citing its sources, Kocienda said. 

“That answer has to be right, and that information exists in the data that this company has built up,” he said.

In the age of database, web and mobile applications, the data currently out there is not well-primed for natural language models, Kocienda said. Infactory is focused on using AI to study an enterprise’s data, understand what’s in it semantically and gauge which kinds of questions can be answered based on what’s in the data and refuse to answer when it can’t, rather than make something up, he said. That’s something many AI chatbots struggle with.

For instance, if a customer asked how many three-point shots Shohei Ohtani has made this season, Infactory’s tool may respond that since Ohtani is a baseball player, the question doesn’t make sense.  

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and other companies are at the helm of a generative AI arms race as companies in seemingly every industry rush to add AI-powered chatbots and agents powered by large language models. The market is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Many leading chatbots have come under fire for making up inaccurate answers in response to user queries. Almost immediately after Google debuted “AI Overview” in Google Search, for example, public criticism mounted after queries returned nonsensical or inaccurate results within the AI feature, without any way to opt out.

With Infactory, “at no moment is there a black box where a question goes into an LLM and an answer comes out and you don’t know where it came from,” Kocienda said.

WATCH: Former Apple designers launch $700 Humane AI Pin as smartphone replacement

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Former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick leaves Meta board after eight-month stint

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Former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick leaves Meta board after eight-month stint

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Dina Powell McCormick, who was a member of President Donald Trump’s first administration, has resigned from Meta’s board of directors.

Powell McCormick, who previously spent 16 years working at Goldman Sachs, notified Meta of her resignation on Friday, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing did not disclose why McCormick was stepping down from Meta’s board, but said her resignation was effective immediately.

Meta does not plan on replacing her board role, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Powell McCormick is considering a potential strategic advisory role with Meta, but nothing has been decided, the person said.

Powell McCormick joined Meta’s board in April along with Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time that the two executives “bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board.”

Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to President Trump during his first stint in office and was also an assistant secretary of state during President George W. Bush’s administration.

She is married to Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa, who took office in January.

Powell McCormick is the vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners, which formed in 2023 after the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD.

With her departure, Meta now has 14 board members, including UFC CEO Dana White, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and former Enron executive John Arnold.

WATCH: TikTok signs joint venture to create TikTok USDS Joint Venture.

TikTok signs joint venture to create TikTok USDS Joint Venture

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Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package must be restored as court rules cancellation was too extreme

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Musk's  billion Tesla pay package must be restored as court rules cancellation was too extreme

Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla pay package must be restored, Delaware Supreme Court rules

Elon Musk‘s 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.

“We reverse the Court of Chancery’s rescission remedy and award $1 in nominal damages,” the judges wrote in their opinion.

In the decision, the Delaware Supreme Court judges said a lower court’s decision to cancel Musk’s 2018 pay plan was too extreme a remedy and that the lower court did not give Tesla a chance to say what a fair compensation ought to be.

The decision on the appeal in this case, known as Tornetta v. Musk, likely ends the yearslong fight over Musk’s record-setting compensation.

Musk’s net worth is currently estimated at around $679.4 billion, according to the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List.

Dorothy Lund, a professor at Columbia Law School, told CNBC that while the Friday opinion may restore the 2018 pay plan for Musk, it leaves the rest of the lower court’s decision unaddressed and intact.

“The court had previously decided that Musk was a controlling shareholder of Tesla and that the Tesla board and he arranged an unfair pay plan for him,” she said. “None of that was reversed in this decision.”

“We are proud to have participated in the historic verdict below, calling to account the Tesla board and its largest stockholder for their breaches of fiduciary duty,” lawyers representing plaintiff Richard J. Tornetta said in an e-mailed statement.

Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Delaware Supreme Court issued the order per curiam with no single judge taking credit for writing the opinion and no dissent noted.

Read more CNBC tech news

Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, comprised of 12 milestone-based tranches of stock, was unprecedented at the time it was proposed. After it was granted, the pay plan made Musk the wealthiest individual in the world.

Tesla shareholder Tornetta sued Tesla, filing a derivative action in 2018, accusing Musk and the company’s board of a breach of their fiduciary duties.

Delaware’s business-specialized Court of Chancery decided in January 2024 that the pay plan was improperly granted and ordered it to be rescinded.

In her decision, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick also found that Musk “controlled Tesla,” and that the process leading to the board’s approval of his 2018 pay plan was “deeply flawed.”

Among other things, she found the Tesla board did not disclose all the material information they should have to investors before asking them to vote on and approve the plan.

After the earlier Tornetta ruling, Musk moved Tesla’s site of incorporation out of Delaware, bashed McCormick by name in posts on his social network X, formerly Twitter, where he has tens of millions of followers, and called for other entrepreneurs to reincorporate outside of the state.

Tesla also attempted to “ratify” the 2018 CEO pay plan by holding a second vote with shareholders in 2024.

In November, Tesla shareholders voted to approve an even larger CEO compensation plan for Musk.

The 2025 pay plan consists of 12 tranches of shares to be granted to the CEO if Tesla hits certain milestones over the next decade and is worth about $1 trillion in total. The new plan could also increase Musk’s voting power over the company from around 13% today to around 25%.

Shareholders had also approved a plan to replace Musk’s 2018 CEO pay if the Tornetta decision was upheld on appeal. That plan is now nullified.

As CNBC previously reported, a law firm that currently represents Tesla in this appeal penned a bill to overhaul corporate law in Delaware earlier this year. The bill was passed by the Delaware legislature in March, and if it had applied retroactively, it could have affected the outcome of this case.

Read the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling here.

Ron & Michael Baron on Elon Musk, Tesla and the next big, currently-overlooked opportunities in the market

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Cramer says Boeing is a buy here — plus, Wells Fargo and bank stocks keep rolling

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Cramer says Boeing is a buy here — plus, Wells Fargo and bank stocks keep rolling

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