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Even for people trained in sales, cold calling is hard. A new AI startup wants to make the process easier.

Cofounded by three Stanford University classmates, Nooks has raised $43 million to automate manual sales tasks like finding contact information, leaving voicemails, writing emails and conducting research.

One director of sales representative for a legal software company says the platform’s dialing assistant has helped him increase the number of conversations he has per day from two to 10. “The sales pipeline is the lifeblood of a company,” Nooks CEO Daniel Lee told Forbes.

Still, it must contend with giants in the space like Salesforce and Microsoft.

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Major League Baseball’s two most valuable franchises will face off in Game 1 of the World Series tonight, and expectations are high on both sides. Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ billionaire lead owner, and his siblings inherited the club from their late father in 2010, and their tenure has been defined by early playoff exits and a disgruntled fan base. Meanwhile, under an ownership group led by Mark Walter, the CEO of investment firm Guggenheim Partners, the Los Angeles Dodgers committed more than $1 billion last offseason to add key contributors like Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

A Colorado resident accused McDonald’s of negligence after he tested positive for E. coli shortly after consuming food from the fast food chain, the first lawsuit against McDonald’s since its hamburgers were linked to an outbreak of the bacterial infection. Attorney Ron Simon says he represents at least 10 other “victims in the outbreak” and indicated other lawsuits would be filed.

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Tesla shares spiked about 22% Thursday after its........

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