Hinge Health, a nine-year-old company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, cut approximately 10% of its workforce on Thursday, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company said people who were laid off worked across various functions; according to employees posting on LinkedIn, some were engineers.
Before the layoffs, Hinge had more than 1,700 employees, according to a LinkedIn estimate.
The company has raised a total of $828 million, according to PitchBook data.
The company’s main competitor is General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures-backed Sword Health, which was last valued at $2 billion in November 2021.
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent.
TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday.
“In response to economic conditions that have impacted companies’ hiring, we made the difficult and painful decision to reduce the size of our team.
This will allow us to operate more efficiently and ensure the long-term health of our business,” a Checkr spokesperson said in the statement.
The job cuts — which affected 32% of the company’s workforce — came nearly two years after Checkr announced the acquisition of Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and mid-sized businesses.
Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.
Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March when it raised $6.5 billion in Series I funding at a $50 billion valuation.
But it is also still lower than the $95 billion valuation achieved in March of 2021.
A Stripe IPO has been long anticipated and was widely expected to happen in 2024.
But with this deal, it appears that an initial public offering may not take place until next year.
Media startup Dailyhunt is in advanced stages of talks to acquire the Bengaluru-headquartered social network Koo, two sources familiar with the matter told me.
The potential deal under discussion involves a share-swap agreement and could be finalized within weeks, the sources added, requesting anonymity as the matter is private.
The deliberation follows Koo, which has sought to become a Twitter rival, aggressively hunting for new capital throughout last year.
The social network, available in India and Brazil, is betting on the idea that its approach of supporting multiple local languages will help the eponymous app resonate broadly with the larger masses.
Dailyhunt, which was last valued at $5 billion, and Koo declined to comment.
Fidelity has cut the value of its holding in Meesho by 33.6% since the original investment, giving the Indian social commerce startup a valuation of $3.5 billion, adjusted for outstanding shares.
Fidelity had marked down the valuation of Meesho to $4.1 billion at the end of October.
That sale valued Meesho at $3.5 billion, a factor that may have contributed to Fidelity’s assessment.
In a statement to TechCrunch, a Meesho spokesperson said: “Funds attribute value to their portfolio investments, considering various factors such as the valuation of comparable companies.
Based on Fidelity filings, the number of shares held and the current number of total outstanding fully diluted shares, the valuation is assessed at $3.5 billion.
startup, takes an all-in view when it comes to identity security in an organization.
So the best way to protect against malicious exploits is to secure identity authentication between any and all of them.
“We believe we can actually be that focused identity security layer that covers all the silos,” CEO and co-founder Hed Kovetz said in an interview.
As those familiar with security technology know, the space can be sliced and diced into many different domains and approaches.
Each point of interactivity essentially involves authentication between apps and therein lies the challenge: each of these can become a potential vulnerability.
ZestMoney, the Goldman Sachs-backed Indian fintech startup once valued at $450 million, has sold itself to financial services firm DMI Group, the two said late Wednesday, in a fire sale that caps 12 tumultuous months for the once-hot new age lender.
In a statement, DMI Group said the deal grants it with the exclusive right to the use of all Zest brands and make the NBFC arm DMI Finance a preferred lender on the Zest platform.
“DMI will also bring its customer base, balance-sheet strength and significant risk-management experience to drive growth across Zest’s online and offline merchant network,” DMI said in a statement.
ZestMoney founders quit the startup in May last year after acquisition talks with fintech giant PhonePe didn’t materialize.
We firmly believe that this acquisition will be an important step in our journey to provide digital financial inclusion at scale across India.”
BlackRock has yet again cut the value of its holding in Byju’s, slashing the implied valuation of the Indian startup to $1 billion from $22 billion in early 2022, according to disclosures made by the asset manager.
At the end of October last year, BlackRock said it valued Byju’s shares at about $209.6 apiece, down from the peak of $4,660 in 2022.
This isn’t the first time BlackRock has cut the worth of its holding in Byju’s — and BlackRock isn’t the only investor that has severely downgraded how they value Byju’s, but the new adjustment is by far the most drastic.
Prosus, which owns about 9% in Byju’s, said late last year that it valued Byju’s at “sub $3 billion.” At $22 billion, Byju’s ranked as India’s most valuable startup.
The valuation markdown is a stunning reversal in fortune for Byju’s, once the poster child of the Indian startup ecosystem.
The investors surveyed clearly aren’t the only ones who are excited about a potential Stripe exit in 2024, either.
According to secondary data tracker Caplight, there has been an absolute flurry of buyers looking to get shares in the company in recent months.
On Tuesday, literally the day after New Year’s Day, a secondary sale closed that valued Stripe shares at $21.06 apiece; that values the startup at $53.65 billion, according to Caplight data.
There are a few reasons why this deal is worth paying attention to.
For one, Stripe’s $53 billion value marks an increase from the company’s most recent primary round last March, when Stripe was valued at $50 billion.
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with gen AI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up.
Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, previously worked at OpenAI, where he researched language and gen AI models along the lines of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.
This reporter is skeptical about the longevity of gen AI search tools for a number of reasons, not least of which AI models are costly to run.
Concerns around misuse and misinformation inevitably crop up around gen AI search tools like Perplexity, as well — as they well should.
Some plaintiffs, like The New York Times, have argued gen AI search experiences siphon off publishers’ content, readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means.
