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Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association.
Sonya Petcavich, the founder of cat-sitting app Meowtel, thinks that cats, and cat people, deserve more.
“Rover had been around for a few years, and Wag was picking up steam, but they were so dog focused.
Meowtel has made it to this point raising just under $1 million in venture capital.
ImpriMed, a dog oncology startup, raised $23 million in November, and Fi, a smart dog collar, has raised more than $40 million in venture capital.
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 estimation makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory and follows a very rough year for what was India’s most valuable startup not long ago.
After raising $100 million, AI mortgage startup LoanSnap is facing an avalanche of lawsuits and has been evicted from its main office.
At least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo, have collectively alleged that the company owes them more than $2 million.
Read MoreTurns out, AI models have favorite numbers: Engineers at Gramener performed an informal experiment where they asked several major LLM chatbots to pick a random number between 0 and 100.
BlackRock, an investor in Byju’s, estimates that its stake of Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing.
So it doesn’t come as a surprise that BlackRock has implied a zero valuation to Byju’s.
At the end of October last year, BlackRock had cut the valuation of Byju’s to about $1 billion.
However, the research’s note chart (embedded below) did use zero in the column for estimated value.
The story has also been updated to emphasize BlackRock’s valuation adjustment in its Byju’s stake.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Image Credits: OdaHardware is hard, episode 234: We already knew that Humane’s Ai Pin launch was going anything but smoothly.
Image Credits: Sword Health / CompanyLive by the sword : Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, raised a $30 million primary funding round and a $130 million secondary funding round that brought its valuation to $3 billion.
: Sword Health, an AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup, raised a $30 million primary funding round and a $130 million secondary funding round that brought its valuation to $3 billion.
Where’s your head at: Austrian startup Storyblok raised $80 million to add more AI to its “headless” content management system (CMS) for non-technical people.
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Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Seqiuoa-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website.
The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said that the Threads.com team will join Shopify.
It was thrown into the limelight after Meta launched Threads, its Twitter-like social network.
Notably, Meta also had another product named Threads, an Instagram companion app that started in 2019 and was shut down in 2021.
And on Android the app crossed the mark of a million lifetime downloads with just a few downloads prior to Meta launching its Threads social network.
The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.
Roughly 15 months later, in late 2022, the company’s CEO, Henry Ward, told Axios that Carta was worth even more – $8.5 billion – following a separate secondary sale.
(He did not disclose how many shares were sold at this valuation or who bought them.)
Now, Carta is seemingly returning to its roots – and an earlier valuation that’s probably better suited to the business.
Over the years, Carta has raised roughly $1.2 billion from investors, according to the startups tracker Tracxn.
In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing.
The write-down in its estimation makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory.
Those issues — coupled with abrupt resignations from its auditor and board members — contributed to derailing a $1 billion fundraise deliberation by Byju’s.
Prosus, one of Byju’s largest investors, publicly slammed the startup, alleging it “regularly disregarded advice” from the backer.
It stands to reason then, that in the research note HSBC also estimated the value of Prosus’ 10% stake in the Indian startup to be zero because of the ongoing legal cases and funding crunch.
And it started an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, in part so its charging infrastructure would see guaranteed utilization.
The move comes after Revel successfully piloted the model in late February with 100 Revel drivers and has since brought on 100 more.
The question of flexibility has been at the heart of the debate over whether ride-hail drivers should be classified as gig workers or employees.
That said, Rubinson says Revel’s ride-hail portion of the business recently hit gross margin positivity and was tracking to be EBITDA positive by the end of the year.
In 2022, Frank Reig, Revel’s CEO, told TechCrunch that over 90% of its charging hub utilization came from Revel’s own ride-hail fleet.
