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.
Read MoreThe Unexpected Downfall of India’s Most Successful Startup: From Riches to Ruin
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 that helped the company launch in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A financing.
The company has built an LLM-powered co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours on gathering medical documentation required by insurance.
While Anterior’s initial offering is in prior authorization automation, the company eventually plans to expand into other medical administrative functions.
Makhzoimi also backed Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup that launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
Read MoreNEA Invests $20M in Anterior to Accelerate AI-powered Health Insurance Approvals
If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies so prepared for taxes, but not for death?
In the immediate aftermath of Linder’s loss, founding a company would have been a long shot.
So Bereave built a B2B product to sell to employers, which they can offer their employees in times of need.
The platform catalogs resources for people experiencing loss, walking them through the steps of closing out a loved one’s affairs.
Tall Poppy, a company that offers digital safety guidance for employees navigating online harassment and hacks, also uses step-by-step checklists.
Read MoreEmployers, Ease Up: Bereave Urges Improved Sensitivity Towards Death
Reliability firstApple makes some of the most popular devices on the planet, and its AI features should serve to make them more useful.
A lot of AI-powered features rely on going back to the cloud to get answers or inputs back.
Rumors on the street are that Apple will announce a deal with OpenAI to power AI features across its operating systems.
Given AI’s hallucination problems, Apple might not want to be directly involved in content-related AI features just yet.
Companies like Google and OpenAI have had to walk back on AI features because of errors or copyright issues.
Read More“Prioritizing Practicality over Pizzazz: The Imperative for Apple’s AI Development”
Before Wazer came along, “water jet cutting” and “affordable” didn’t belong in the same sentence.
For existing Wazer Desktop users, the company says the transition to the Wazer Pro will be seamless.
Additionally, Wazer offers a trade-up program, enabling current customers to receive a significant discount on the Wazer Pro by trading in their old machines.
Priced at $18,999, the Wazer Pro remains significantly more affordable than traditional water jet cutters, costing upward of $100,000.
With the launch of the Wazer Pro, Wazer continues to make life interesting for the water-cutting incumbents.
Read More“Revolutionizing Desktop Water Jetting: Wazer Pro Brings Accessibility to the Table”
Human Native AI is a London-based startup building a marketplace to broker such deals between the many companies building LLM projects and those willing to license data to them.
Human Native AI also helps rights holders prepare and price their content and monitors for any copyright infringements.
Human Native AI takes a cut of each deal and charges AI companies for its transaction and monitoring services.
Human Native AI announced a £2.8 million seed round led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, two British micro VCs, this week.
It is also a smart time for Human Native AI to launch.
Read More“Human Native AI: Revolutionizing the Marketplace for AI Training Licensing Deals”
Snowflake’s security problems following a recent spate of customer data thefts are, for want of a better word, snowballing.
TechCrunch earlier this week found online hundreds of Snowflake customer credentials stolen by password-stealing malware that infected the computers of employees who have access to their employer’s Snowflake environment.
It’s not yet known how many Snowflake customers are affected, or if Snowflake knows yet.
Snowflake said it has to date notified a “limited number of Snowflake customers” who the company believes may have been affected.
Snowflake declined to say what role, if any, the then-Snowflake employee’s demo account has on the recent customer breaches.
Read MoreUncovering the Untold Truth: Snowflake’s Concealed Customer Data Breaches
He had been accused of falsely inflating revenues at the UK startup ahead of its $11 billion sale to HP in 2011.
This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch.
Mr Lynch made £500M from the sale of Autonomy to HP.
Prosecutors accused Lynch and Chamberlain of illegally inflating revenues prior to the acquisition and hiding high-margin software revenues inside unprofitable hardware sales.
In the trial, Lynch successfully argued that he had not been involved in accounting and contract matters, instead focusing on technical and marketing issues.
Read MoreJudge Robles finds Mike Lynch innocent of HP’s fraud trial
Sources tell TechCrunch that employees at those companies received no information about the tender offer, but heard about their exclusion through the grapevine.
None of the former employees TechCrunch spoke to were surprised to hear one name on the list: Deel.
“Rippling put together a tender offer for the benefit of its employees, ex-employees, and early investors.
To be sure, as a private company, Rippling certainly has the freedom to place restrictions on participation in its stock sales.
In addition to the price of the stock, employees may face huge tax bills on options they exercise from the paper gains of the value of the stock.
Read More.
Forbidden: Former Deel and Workday employees banned from Rippling’s stock sale offer
It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars.
Announced today, NASA has awarded $1.5 million contracts to seven companies to further develop their plans for the revamped Mars Sample Return mission.
According to the request for proposal, studies could be for complete overhauls of the mission design, or for designs that include elements of NASA’s MSR mission or NASA’s Artemis program.
NASA turned to private industry after finally admitting that its architecture for MSR is incredibly complicated.
Last year, an independent review board recommended that NASA revisit the mission design given the concerns about the technical features and the high costs.
Read More“Blue Origin, SpaceX, and More: NASA Invests $10M for Mars Sample Return Proposals”
