NeuBird founders Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman came from PortWorx, a cloud native storage solution they eventually sold to PureStorage in 2019 for $370 million.
When they went looking for their next startup challenge last year, they saw an opportunity to combine their cloud native knowledge, especially around IT operations, with the burgeoning area of generative AI.
Rao, the CEO, says that while the cloud native community has done a good job at solving a lot of difficult problems, it has created increasing levels of complexity along the way.
“We’ve done an incredible job as a community over the past 10 plus years building cloud native architectures with service oriented designs.
At the same time, large language models were beginning to mature, so the founders decided to put them to work on the problem.
For years, the solar energy sector has grappled with interseasonal energy storage.
The claim is this tech does the storage more cost-effectively than any battery or liquid hydrogen solution on the market.
It enables hydrogen storage at densities approximately 50% greater than liquid hydrogen, presenting a significant advancement in hydrogen storage solutions.
A robust, reusable energy storage solution could bridge these timings, ensuring a stable energy supply when these renewable sources encounter unavoidable intermittent periods.
The firm certainly has investors’ attention: Photoncycle just raised $5.3 million (€5 million) to build its first few power storage devices in Denmark, which Photoncycle has chosen as its test market.
Kids’ clothing and gear is more expensive than ever.
Kidsy has a sustainable solution for discountsAll parents know that raising kids is expensive.
Enter Kidsy, a new Chicago-based e-commerce startup which aims to give consumers greater access to discounted baby and kids products by partnering with large brands, retailers and liquidation companies for their overstock and returns inventory.
At the same time, it says, it can help prevent overstock and liquidation items – such as kids’ clothing – from ending up in landfills, which is obviously not good for the environment.
Kids’ clothing: A massive marketTandon’s road to founding Kidsy started when she founded her own media production company after working as a journalist for Bloomberg TV and ABC News.
Beeper gave up on its mission after Apple blocked the app’s efforts late last year.
Each time Beeper issued workarounds and fixes to keep the service afloat, Apple knocked them down one by one.
“Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users,” the DOJ complaint reads.
When Apple launched the Apple Watch the following year, it began limiting third-party access to new and improved APIs for smartwatch functionality.
The DOJ notes that Apple prevents iPhone users from responding to notifications using a third-party smartwatch.
Chances are you may have noticed that many commercial vehicles are now electric vehicles — think about delivery vans, telecom minivans, utility maintenance trucks, etc.
That’s why Pelikan Mobility has been building a platform and a leasing solution that address this challenge caused by the switch to EVs for commercial fleets.
Many companies lease their commercial vehicles and Pelikan Mobility believes that pricing is broken for commercial EVs.
Leasing contracts — even for commercial vehicles, even for electric vehicles — end far too quickly.
It will also have to raise a debt fund for that new business as Pelikan Mobility plans to address large customers.
The Carevoice, an embedded insurance solution provider that started in Shanghai and now has a footprint across 15 countries, has apparently made that math look attractive to investors in the space.
The company just raised $10 million from a Series B financing led by U.K.-based Apis Insurtech Fund I, which contributed to most of the round.
In 2023, U.S.-based digital health startups raised a total of $10.7 billion across 492 deals, the lowest amount since 2019, according to Rock Health, a health tech-focused seed fund.
That funding slowdown also hit The Carevoice, though it weathered the storm by reaching healthy cash flow.
Embedded health solution providers like The Carevoice can find themselves competing with traditional IT and consulting service companies, such as Tata’s TCS.
TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband and CTO Ralph Gootee helped build their previous startup, PlanGrid, into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018.
Yet in spite of that success, they always felt they left business on the table because of an inability to forecast business changes accurately.
“TigerEye is a business simulation engine that helps companies predict their future,” Young told TechCrunch.
The couple was advising other startups at Y Combinator in 2021 when they decided it was time to build TigerEye.
The following year, they brought a bunch of the core members of the PlanGrid team back together and started working on the problem.
Sei Labs, a startup co-founded by a former Robinhood engineer and a former VC from Coatue, has launched a new open sourced project that offers a novel, and exciting approach to make Ethereum faster and less expensive for developers.
On Wednesday, Sei launched The Parallel Stack, a public good project – meaning free for any crypto developers to use.
“The biggest limitation of the EVM is the lack of throughput,” Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, formerly of Robinhood, told TechCrunch.
The Parallel Stack can do around 5,000 TPS, but is aiming to hit 10,000 TPS by the end of the year, Jog said.
But they use different design philosophies and Sei’s focus is on higher throughput through parallel processing, said Jeff Feng, Sei Labs co-founder, previously an investor at Coatue.
Apple says it plans to make it easier for customers to switch to Android as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into force today.
This solution is not yet available, but Apple is committing to having it ready by fall 2025, the company says.
On this front, Apple’s Data & Privacy website is being updated to allow users to export their App Store data to authorized third parties, the document says.
Today, would-be Android users can use Google’s “Switch to Android” iOS app to migrate important content, like contacts, calendars, photos, videos, messages, and more to a new Android device.
It’s unclear if Apple’s new solution will address these areas as Apple hasn’t yet said what, specifically, it aims to improve.
Doing so while complying with the growing number of child safety laws and regulations around the world is an almost insurmountable task.
Historically, game developers may have had to verify the child’s age or request ID to prove the player is not a kid.
But with k-ID, they could instead customize the game experience to be legally appropriate for a player of that age in that particular market.
Simply knowing this answer can help the game developer customize the experience for the child, teen or adult appropriately.
k-ID’s solution entered into early access in November 2023 with a handful of game publishers across platforms in markets including the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, and China.
