Cat-sitting startup Meowtel clawed its way to profitability despite trouble raising from dog-focused VCs

June 9, 2024

Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anterior grabs $20M from NEA to expedite health insurance approvals with AI

June 8, 2024

Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

How India’s most valuable startup ended up being worth nothing

June 8, 2024

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. There’s more bad news for Byju’s. In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing. The write-down in its […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bereave wants employers to suck a little less at navigating death

June 8, 2024

If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies so prepared for taxes, but not for death? “I lost both of my parents in college, and it didn’t initially spark this interest to go start a business around my experience,” said Bereave co-founder Elijah Linder. In the immediate aftermath of Linder’s loss, founding a company […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple needs to focus on making AI useful, not flashy

June 8, 2024

Google and Microsoft have made their developer conferences a showcase of their generative AI chops, and now all eyes are on next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which is expected to mark the debut of Apple Intelligence. The Cupertino-based company is facing a lot of pressure. Apple has fallen behind its peers in the AI race, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Deal Dive: Human Native AI is building the marketplace for AI training licensing deals

June 8, 2024

AI systems and large language models need to be trained on massive amounts of data to be accurate but they shouldn’t train on data that they don’t have the rights to use. OpenAI’s licensing deals with The Atlantic and Vox last week show that both sides of the table are interested in landing these AI-training […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Wazer Pro is making desktop water jetting more affordable

June 8, 2024

Before Wazer came along, “water jet cutting” and “affordable” didn’t belong in the same sentence. That changed in 2016, when the company launched the world’s first desktop water jet cutter, pre-selling $1.3 million worth of units. Fast-forward to today, and Wazer says it has over 3,000 cutters in the field across 60 countries, used by […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.