December 30, 2025

The ascent of the AI therapist

We’re in the midst of a global mental-­health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Given the clear…

The Download: Google’s new AI agent, and our tech pessimism bias

May 15, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent What’s happening: Google is set to launch a new system called Astra later this year. It promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type…

If You Want Funding, These Are the Financial Reports VCs Need to See

May 15, 2024
When you’re trying to attract new investors, there are several financial reports and metrics you’ll need to have ready before you have a chance at potential funding. As the CEO of a venture capital firm and investment group, here’s what you need for the best pitch.

Meet PayHOA, a profitable and once-bootstrapped SaaS startup that just landed a $27.5M Series A

May 15, 2024

PayHOA, a previously bootstrapped Kentucky-based startup that offers software for self-managed homeowner associations (HOAs), is an example of how real-world problems can translate into opportunity. It just raised a $27.5 million Series A round in an environment where nearly $30 million Series A rounds are no longer common. PayHOA founder and CEO Mike Bollinger has […]

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Restaurant365 orders in $175M at a $1B+ valuation to supersize its food service software stack 

May 15, 2024

The restaurant industry in the U.S. is expected to pass $1 trillion in sales for the first time this year, despite wider economic pressures on consumers. Now Restaurant365, a startup building tech to manage those businesses, has raised a hot round of $175 million to capitalize on that growth.  The funding is being led by […]

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Hong Kong is safe from China’s Great Firewall—for now

May 15, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. We finally know the result of a legal case I’ve been tracking in Hong Kong for almost a year. Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits…

LanceDB, which counts Midjourney as a customer, is building databases for multimodal AI

May 15, 2024

Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. But when She began working in the AI space, he quickly ran into problems with traditional data infrastructure — problems that prevented him from bringing AI models into production. “Machine learning engineers and […]

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Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think

May 15, 2024
MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology.  Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think.…