A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’
The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.
The trustee is asking to convert the company’s debt reorganization Chapter 11 bankruptcy into a liquidation Chapter 7, according to court documents.
The trustee wrote that the need for Chapter 7 resulted from Synapse “grossly” mismanaging its estate so that losses were continuing with little “reasonable likelihood of reorganization” that would allow the company to emerge on the other side and carry on.
This new development is significant because Synapse founder Sankaet Pathak earlier this month alleged that its former partners owe it millions, by its own accounting, and were not paying up. Those partners have been insisting that Synapse’s allegations have “no merit.”
San Francisco-based Synapse, which operated a platform enabling banks and fintech companies to develop financial services, was founded in 2014 by Bryan Keltner and Pathak. It was providing those types of services as an intermediary between banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust and business banking startup Mercury, among others.
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The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.
The trustee is asking to convert the company’s debt reorganization Chapter 11 bankruptcy into a liquidation Chapter 7, according to court documents.
The trustee wrote that the need for Chapter 7 resulted from Synapse “grossly” mismanaging its estate so that losses were continuing with little “reasonable likelihood of reorganization” that would allow the company to emerge on the other side and carry on.
This new development is significant because Synapse founder Sankaet Pathak earlier this month alleged that its former partners owe it millions, by its own accounting, and were not paying up. Those partners have been insisting that Synapse’s allegations have “no merit.”
San Francisco-based Synapse, which operated a platform enabling banks and fintech companies to develop financial services, was founded in 2014 by Bryan Keltner and Pathak. It was providing those types of services as an intermediary between banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust and business banking startup Mercury, among others.
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With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back
When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many others wanted in, he could have ordered over 100 units.
The post didn’t just hit a nerve with other X users who wanted a nap at work. Some people joked about the hygiene of sharing a bed with office mates. One replied, “The last thing I want to do is share bedsheets with my software developer coworkers.”
Many admired the particular features of these nap pods, or applauded the whole idea of office napping. “every modern office should have one no different than napping on a 15 hour flight some task require the better inference that rem sleep gets you [sic]” responded another.
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When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many others wanted in, he could have ordered over 100 units.
The post didn’t just hit a nerve with other X users who wanted a nap at work. Some people joked about the hygiene of sharing a bed with office mates. One replied, “The last thing I want to do is share bedsheets with my software developer coworkers.”
Many admired the particular features of these nap pods, or applauded the whole idea of office napping. “every modern office should have one no different than napping on a 15 hour flight some task require the better inference that rem sleep gets you [sic]” responded another.
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Pine Labs gets Singapore court approval to shift base to India
Pine Labs, a merchant commerce startup, has received approval from a Singapore court to merge its local entity with its Indian unit, and transfer all its assets and properties, effectively permitting the firm to shift its operations to India.
Pine Labs disclosed the court order in a recent regulatory.
Pine Labs offers a range of products and services to merchants, such as cloud-connected point-of-sale machines and working capital. It is backed by Peak XV, Fidelity, Invesco, Temasek, PayPal and Alpha Wave and is valued at over $5 billion.
It is among the handful of Indian startups that have been shifting their domiciles to India of late. Meesho, Zepto, Flipkart, Razorpay and Udaan are also in the process of evaluating a similar move. Fintech startups PhonePe and Groww have already relocated their overseas holding entities to India.
Pine Labs declined to comment.
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Pine Labs, a merchant commerce startup, has received approval from a Singapore court to merge its local entity with its Indian unit, and transfer all its assets and properties, effectively permitting the firm to shift its operations to India.
Pine Labs disclosed the court order in a recent regulatory.
Pine Labs offers a range of products and services to merchants, such as cloud-connected point-of-sale machines and working capital. It is backed by Peak XV, Fidelity, Invesco, Temasek, PayPal and Alpha Wave and is valued at over $5 billion.
It is among the handful of Indian startups that have been shifting their domiciles to India of late. Meesho, Zepto, Flipkart, Razorpay and Udaan are also in the process of evaluating a similar move. Fintech startups PhonePe and Groww have already relocated their overseas holding entities to India.
Pine Labs declined to comment.
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Alchemist’s latest batch puts AI to work as accelerator expands to Tokyo, Doha
Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Read on for our picks of the batch.
Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day (today at 10:30 a.m. Pacific) about this cohort, it was clear that ambitions for AI startups have contracted, and that’s not a bad thing.
No early-stage startup today is at all likely to become the next OpenAI or Anthropic — their lead is too huge right now in the domain of foundational large language models.
“The cost of building a basic LLM is prohibitively high; you get into the hundreds of millions of dollars just to get it out. The question is, as a startup, how do you compete?” Belani said. “VCs don’t want wrappers around LLMs. We’re looking for companies where there’s a vertical play, where they own the end user and there’s a network effect and lock-in over time.”
That was also my read, as the companies selected for this group are all highly specific in their applications, using AI but solving for a specific problem in a specific domain.
An example of this is healthcare, where AI models for assisting diagnosis, planning care and so on are increasingly but still cautiously being tested out. The specter of liability and bias hang heavy over this heavily regulated industry, but there are also lots of legacy processes that could be replaced with real, tangible benefit.
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Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Read on for our picks of the batch.
Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day (today at 10:30 a.m. Pacific) about this cohort, it was clear that ambitions for AI startups have contracted, and that’s not a bad thing.
No early-stage startup today is at all likely to become the next OpenAI or Anthropic — their lead is too huge right now in the domain of foundational large language models.
“The cost of building a basic LLM is prohibitively high; you get into the hundreds of millions of dollars just to get it out. The question is, as a startup, how do you compete?” Belani said. “VCs don’t want wrappers around LLMs. We’re looking for companies where there’s a vertical play, where they own the end user and there’s a network effect and lock-in over time.”
That was also my read, as the companies selected for this group are all highly specific in their applications, using AI but solving for a specific problem in a specific domain.
An example of this is healthcare, where AI models for assisting diagnosis, planning care and so on are increasingly but still cautiously being tested out. The specter of liability and bias hang heavy over this heavily regulated industry, but there are also lots of legacy processes that could be replaced with real, tangible benefit.
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VCs wanted FarmboxRx to become a meal kit, the company bootstrapped instead
Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional VC.
FarmboxRx decided to bootstrap because founder Ashley Tyrner didn’t like the advice she was getting from potential backers.
Tyrner told that when she went out to raise money for FarmboxRx, a direct-to-consumer produce box company meant to solve food deserts at the time, she found that venture investors were interested if, and only if, she agreed to pivot her company toward a hot trend of the moment.
“Every VC we talked to, any of them that were actually even remotely nice to us at the time wanted us to become a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “That’s not what our focus was. We did not want to jump on the meal kit bandwagon. Now looking back, I’m really glad that I never raised any capital and we still haven’t raised any capital to this day. Most of the meal kits are, you know, they’ve slowly died.”
Instead, the company leaned into its existing produce box-focused model and the supply chain it built around that strategy, and built a new revenue stream on top of that.
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Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional VC.
FarmboxRx decided to bootstrap because founder Ashley Tyrner didn’t like the advice she was getting from potential backers.
Tyrner told that when she went out to raise money for FarmboxRx, a direct-to-consumer produce box company meant to solve food deserts at the time, she found that venture investors were interested if, and only if, she agreed to pivot her company toward a hot trend of the moment.
“Every VC we talked to, any of them that were actually even remotely nice to us at the time wanted us to become a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “That’s not what our focus was. We did not want to jump on the meal kit bandwagon. Now looking back, I’m really glad that I never raised any capital and we still haven’t raised any capital to this day. Most of the meal kits are, you know, they’ve slowly died.”
Instead, the company leaned into its existing produce box-focused model and the supply chain it built around that strategy, and built a new revenue stream on top of that.
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ZeroPoint’s nanosecond-scale memory compression could tame power-hungry AI infrastructure
AI is only the latest and hungriest market for high-performance computing, and system architects are working around the clock to wring every drop of performance out of every watt. Swedish startup ZeroPoint, armed with €5 million ($5.5M USD) in new funding, wants to help them out with a novel memory compression technique at the nanosecond scale — and yes, it’s exactly as complicated as it sounds.
The concept is this: losslessly compress data just before it enters RAM, and decompress it afterwards, effectively widening the memory channel by 50% or more just by adding one small piece to the chip.
Compression is, of course, a foundational technology in computing; as ZeroPoint CEO Klas Moreau (left in the image above, with co-founders Per Stenström and Angelos Arelakis) pointed out, “We wouldn’t store data on the hard drive today without compressing it. Research suggests 70% of data in memory is unnecessary. So why don’t we compress in memory?”
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AI is only the latest and hungriest market for high-performance computing, and system architects are working around the clock to wring every drop of performance out of every watt. Swedish startup ZeroPoint, armed with €5 million ($5.5M USD) in new funding, wants to help them out with a novel memory compression technique at the nanosecond scale — and yes, it’s exactly as complicated as it sounds.
The concept is this: losslessly compress data just before it enters RAM, and decompress it afterwards, effectively widening the memory channel by 50% or more just by adding one small piece to the chip.
Compression is, of course, a foundational technology in computing; as ZeroPoint CEO Klas Moreau (left in the image above, with co-founders Per Stenström and Angelos Arelakis) pointed out, “We wouldn’t store data on the hard drive today without compressing it. Research suggests 70% of data in memory is unnecessary. So why don’t we compress in memory?”
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Google invests $350 million in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart
Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup.
The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as part of the deal, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup said in a brief statement Friday. The Google investment is part of a nearly $1 billion funding round that Flipkart kicked off in 2023. Walmart has led the round, having invested $600 million in it late last year. (Microsoft is also an investor in Flipkart.)
Flipkart, valued at $36 billion in the new investment, leads the e-commerce market in India, where it serves hundreds of millions of consumers in smaller cities and towns. The startup, which also owns the fashion e-commerce startup Myntra, commands about 48% of the Indian e-commerce market, according to Bernstein.
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Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup.
The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as part of the deal, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup said in a brief statement Friday. The Google investment is part of a nearly $1 billion funding round that Flipkart kicked off in 2023. Walmart has led the round, having invested $600 million in it late last year. (Microsoft is also an investor in Flipkart.)
Flipkart, valued at $36 billion in the new investment, leads the e-commerce market in India, where it serves hundreds of millions of consumers in smaller cities and towns. The startup, which also owns the fashion e-commerce startup Myntra, commands about 48% of the Indian e-commerce market, according to Bernstein.
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Expressable brings speech therapy into the home
Leanne Sherred, a pediatric speech therapist, has long encountered challenges putting caregiver-led therapy into practice in traditional care settings.
Research suggests that caregiver-led speech therapy, which involves training the caregivers of patients in skill-building therapeutic techniques to use at home, can be highly effective. But as Sherred observed in the course of her practice, therapists often have limited access to caregivers and face serious educational and tech roadblocks.
In 2020, around the start of the pandemic, Sherred saw an opportunity to attempt a new, tech-forward speech therapy care model, one that put caregivers “at the center of care” (in her words). She teamed up with Nick Barbara (Sherred’s spouse), Spencer Magloff and Ryan Hinojosa to found Expressable, a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists.
“Layered on top of Expressable’s synchronous care is a platform that includes multimedia home programming, interactive weekly practice activities, therapist SMS support and more,” Magloff, Expressable’s chief marketing officer. “With Expressable, speech therapy isn’t limited to one to two times per week, void of caregiver participation.”
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Leanne Sherred, a pediatric speech therapist, has long encountered challenges putting caregiver-led therapy into practice in traditional care settings.
Research suggests that caregiver-led speech therapy, which involves training the caregivers of patients in skill-building therapeutic techniques to use at home, can be highly effective. But as Sherred observed in the course of her practice, therapists often have limited access to caregivers and face serious educational and tech roadblocks.
In 2020, around the start of the pandemic, Sherred saw an opportunity to attempt a new, tech-forward speech therapy care model, one that put caregivers “at the center of care” (in her words). She teamed up with Nick Barbara (Sherred’s spouse), Spencer Magloff and Ryan Hinojosa to found Expressable, a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists.
“Layered on top of Expressable’s synchronous care is a platform that includes multimedia home programming, interactive weekly practice activities, therapist SMS support and more,” Magloff, Expressable’s chief marketing officer. “With Expressable, speech therapy isn’t limited to one to two times per week, void of caregiver participation.”
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The biggest French startups in 2024 according to the French government
There are many ways countries can go about supporting their tech industries. In France it involves picking a yearly cohort of 120 high-potential startups — the French Tech 120 — including 40 private companies deemed as most promising, dubbed the Next40.
The French secretary of state for Digital Affairs, as of this year, Marina Ferrari, revealed this year’s laureates during VivaTech week in Paris. According to its promoters, this fifth class was the most selective since the inception of the program.
The French Tech Next40/120 program launched in 2019, and lessons have been learned along the way, especially when some unicorns turned out to be ZiRPIcorns. Following recommendations from tech insiders, criteria have changed, and half of the selection is now based on revenue metrics, rather than fundraising.
As a result, only 28 of the French Tech 120 selected in 2024 claim valuations of $1 billion or more. On the other hand, La French Tech reports that the cohort collectively had a net revenue of €10 billion in 2023, compared with €7.5 billion in 2022. Thirty-one companies reported a net revenue above €100 million.
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There are many ways countries can go about supporting their tech industries. In France it involves picking a yearly cohort of 120 high-potential startups — the French Tech 120 — including 40 private companies deemed as most promising, dubbed the Next40.
The French secretary of state for Digital Affairs, as of this year, Marina Ferrari, revealed this year’s laureates during VivaTech week in Paris. According to its promoters, this fifth class was the most selective since the inception of the program.
The French Tech Next40/120 program launched in 2019, and lessons have been learned along the way, especially when some unicorns turned out to be ZiRPIcorns. Following recommendations from tech insiders, criteria have changed, and half of the selection is now based on revenue metrics, rather than fundraising.
As a result, only 28 of the French Tech 120 selected in 2024 claim valuations of $1 billion or more. On the other hand, La French Tech reports that the cohort collectively had a net revenue of €10 billion in 2023, compared with €7.5 billion in 2022. Thirty-one companies reported a net revenue above €100 million.
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EV startup Turno raises $5.5 Mn led by BII
Commercial electric vehicle (EV) distribution and financing Turno has raised Rs 46 crore ($5.5 million) from new and existing investors. The new capital infusion for the Bengaluru-based firm came after 15 months.
The board at Turno has passed a special resolution to allot 18,057 compulsory convertible preference shares at an issue price of Rs 25,509 each to raise Rs 46 crore, its regulatory filing accessed through the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.
British International Investment invested Rs 24.94 crore while existing investors and Quona Accion, Stellaris Ventures, and B Capital participated with 6.89 crore, Rs 9.27 crore, and Rs 4.95 crore respectively.
According to the filings, the company will use these funds for expansion and to meet working capital requirements as decided by the board.
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Commercial electric vehicle (EV) distribution and financing Turno has raised Rs 46 crore ($5.5 million) from new and existing investors. The new capital infusion for the Bengaluru-based firm came after 15 months.
The board at Turno has passed a special resolution to allot 18,057 compulsory convertible preference shares at an issue price of Rs 25,509 each to raise Rs 46 crore, its regulatory filing accessed through the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.
British International Investment invested Rs 24.94 crore while existing investors and Quona Accion, Stellaris Ventures, and B Capital participated with 6.89 crore, Rs 9.27 crore, and Rs 4.95 crore respectively.
According to the filings, the company will use these funds for expansion and to meet working capital requirements as decided by the board.
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Avendus, India’s top venture adviser, confirms it’s looking to raise a $350M fund
Avendus, the top investment bank for venture deals in India, confirmed on Wednesday it is looking to raise up to $350 million for its new private equity fund.
The new fund, called Future Leaders Fund III, will enable the Mumbai-headquartered firm to write larger checks and maintain a meaningful position in the startups it backs.
A regular fixture in most growth-stage deals in India, Avendus has established itself as the largest venture adviser for startups in the country. It provided services in over 30 deals last year, including merger-and-acquisition transactions, according to Venture Intelligence, a private market insight platform. The growing size of its private equity unit underscores the firm’s ambitions to extend its tentacles even more deeply into the ecosystem and see more upside from the winnings.
The firm’s rise to prominence was aided by the fact that many of its well-established global rivals, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan, initially paid less attention to the Indian market, allowing Avendus to gain a foothold and build relationships with the country’s burgeoning tech entrepreneurs.
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Avendus, the top investment bank for venture deals in India, confirmed on Wednesday it is looking to raise up to $350 million for its new private equity fund.
The new fund, called Future Leaders Fund III, will enable the Mumbai-headquartered firm to write larger checks and maintain a meaningful position in the startups it backs.
A regular fixture in most growth-stage deals in India, Avendus has established itself as the largest venture adviser for startups in the country. It provided services in over 30 deals last year, including merger-and-acquisition transactions, according to Venture Intelligence, a private market insight platform. The growing size of its private equity unit underscores the firm’s ambitions to extend its tentacles even more deeply into the ecosystem and see more upside from the winnings.
The firm’s rise to prominence was aided by the fact that many of its well-established global rivals, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan, initially paid less attention to the Indian market, allowing Avendus to gain a foothold and build relationships with the country’s burgeoning tech entrepreneurs.
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MARS doubles down on India’s Infra.Market with new $50M investment
Infra.Market, an Indian startup that helps constructions and real estate firms procure materials, has raised $50 million from MARS Unicorn Fund as it looks to expand operations overseas.
MARS Unicorn Fund, a joint venture between AI-driven fund Liquidity Group and Japanese bank MUFG, is an existing backer of the Mumbai-headquartered startup, having invested $50 million in it in 2022. The new investment, a primary fundraise (structured with both debt and equity) by Infra.Market’s Singapore unit, values the startup at $2.5 billion — retaining the 2021 Series C’s valuation.
Infra.Market is attempting to transform the way small businesses in India’s manufacturing sector operate. By installing its load cells in manufacturing facilities, for instance, Infra.Market helps companies have a better grip on quality control and assists them source better raw materials. It also helps customers work with other businesses that can provide them with better raw material and provide guidance on pricing.
This is a major problem in India, where the construction industry is highly fragmented and dominated by small players that lack the resources and expertise to optimize their operations. The startup says its tech has helped small manufacturers attract larger clients and expand their reach beyond India, attracting clients in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai.
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Infra.Market, an Indian startup that helps constructions and real estate firms procure materials, has raised $50 million from MARS Unicorn Fund as it looks to expand operations overseas.
MARS Unicorn Fund, a joint venture between AI-driven fund Liquidity Group and Japanese bank MUFG, is an existing backer of the Mumbai-headquartered startup, having invested $50 million in it in 2022. The new investment, a primary fundraise (structured with both debt and equity) by Infra.Market’s Singapore unit, values the startup at $2.5 billion — retaining the 2021 Series C’s valuation.
Infra.Market is attempting to transform the way small businesses in India’s manufacturing sector operate. By installing its load cells in manufacturing facilities, for instance, Infra.Market helps companies have a better grip on quality control and assists them source better raw materials. It also helps customers work with other businesses that can provide them with better raw material and provide guidance on pricing.
This is a major problem in India, where the construction industry is highly fragmented and dominated by small players that lack the resources and expertise to optimize their operations. The startup says its tech has helped small manufacturers attract larger clients and expand their reach beyond India, attracting clients in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai.
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Former Priceline execs debut Plannin, a booking platform that uses travel influencers to help plan trips
Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner, co-founders of Hotelsbycity.com and former Priceline executives, just announced their latest project: Plannin, a global travel booking platform that empowers creators to monetize their hotel recommendations and share travel-focused content.
As the creator economy continues to ramp up in value, estimated to generate $250 billion in revenue, Plannin wants to put a twist on travel booking by using influencers as an alternative to travel agents.
With Plannin, creators can tell their audience about their latest trip, which hotels they liked and post photos of their travels. To earn income, they share an affiliate link across social platforms for their followers to sign up on Plannin. Meanwhile, travelers can access thousands of creator recommendations and can directly book hotels through the platform.
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Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner, co-founders of Hotelsbycity.com and former Priceline executives, just announced their latest project: Plannin, a global travel booking platform that empowers creators to monetize their hotel recommendations and share travel-focused content.
As the creator economy continues to ramp up in value, estimated to generate $250 billion in revenue, Plannin wants to put a twist on travel booking by using influencers as an alternative to travel agents.
With Plannin, creators can tell their audience about their latest trip, which hotels they liked and post photos of their travels. To earn income, they share an affiliate link across social platforms for their followers to sign up on Plannin. Meanwhile, travelers can access thousands of creator recommendations and can directly book hotels through the platform.
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OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway
When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window. Now, as the CEO of OneScreen.ai, he’s helping startups like fintech Ramp and technical recruiter Karat advertise on billboards and beyond.
“I think billboards are cool and help bring creativity back into marketing. They are like canvases for marketers in a way a digital screen isn’t.”
Ewing joined Boston-based OneScreen last year. The company acts as a software-enabled middleman in between startups and out-of-home (OOH) advertising slots like billboards, subway ads and others. OneScreen helps startups find the right placement for their ads based on the potential customers companies want to reach paired with the demographic and historical data on the platform. The company also uses anonymized location data to help companies track how successful their campaigns are, too.
OneScreen has raised $4.7 million from investors including Asymmetric Capital Partners, Techstars and Impellent Ventures, among others. The company is currently profitable and tripled its revenue last year.
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When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window. Now, as the CEO of OneScreen.ai, he’s helping startups like fintech Ramp and technical recruiter Karat advertise on billboards and beyond.
“I think billboards are cool and help bring creativity back into marketing. They are like canvases for marketers in a way a digital screen isn’t.”
Ewing joined Boston-based OneScreen last year. The company acts as a software-enabled middleman in between startups and out-of-home (OOH) advertising slots like billboards, subway ads and others. OneScreen helps startups find the right placement for their ads based on the potential customers companies want to reach paired with the demographic and historical data on the platform. The company also uses anonymized location data to help companies track how successful their campaigns are, too.
OneScreen has raised $4.7 million from investors including Asymmetric Capital Partners, Techstars and Impellent Ventures, among others. The company is currently profitable and tripled its revenue last year.
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General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff
Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce. Engineering and product design were among the departments impacted by the cuts, according to posts on LinkedIn from impacted employees.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Adam Pellegrini, didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. TechCrunch’s attempts to reach Jasper Health’s chief operating officer, chief growth officer, and head of marketing via email were unsuccessful, with messages bouncing back.
A little over two years ago, in February 2022, Jasper Health raised a $25 million Series A led by General Catalyst, with participation from Human Capital, W Health Ventures, Redesign Health and 7wireVentures. At that time, the company said it raised a total of $31 million in venture capital.
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Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce. Engineering and product design were among the departments impacted by the cuts, according to posts on LinkedIn from impacted employees.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Adam Pellegrini, didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. TechCrunch’s attempts to reach Jasper Health’s chief operating officer, chief growth officer, and head of marketing via email were unsuccessful, with messages bouncing back.
A little over two years ago, in February 2022, Jasper Health raised a $25 million Series A led by General Catalyst, with participation from Human Capital, W Health Ventures, Redesign Health and 7wireVentures. At that time, the company said it raised a total of $31 million in venture capital.
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Iceland’s startup scene is all about making the most of the country’s resources
With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital. Both are good reasons to pay attention to what’s going on and coming out of this unique island nation.
“We need more pillars to our economy,” Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, recently told TechCrunch at Iceland Innovation Week in Reykjavík.
Some diversification is already underway, and the country’s export revenues from IP-driven industries have been rising steadily. But more than being its own pillar, Icelandic innovation ties into what’s already there: Startups are building tech to help the country make the most of its resources and economic activities — fisheries and heavy industry top that list, but they’re also marketing the local talent and culture.
However, it is hard to infer trends from meager data on the handful of startup deals that are done in Iceland each year. Here’s what you need to know about the types of startups that have taken root and are flourishing in the island nation:
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With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital. Both are good reasons to pay attention to what’s going on and coming out of this unique island nation.
“We need more pillars to our economy,” Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, recently told TechCrunch at Iceland Innovation Week in Reykjavík.
Some diversification is already underway, and the country’s export revenues from IP-driven industries have been rising steadily. But more than being its own pillar, Icelandic innovation ties into what’s already there: Startups are building tech to help the country make the most of its resources and economic activities — fisheries and heavy industry top that list, but they’re also marketing the local talent and culture.
However, it is hard to infer trends from meager data on the handful of startup deals that are done in Iceland each year. Here’s what you need to know about the types of startups that have taken root and are flourishing in the island nation:
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How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items
The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills in 2022 alone, according to data from return logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)vive wants to help companies find a better ending for their returned items.
(Re)vive takes in products that retailers have deemed too damaged to sell and fixes them up — whether that means washing them, reattaching a button, or lint-rolling off some dog hair. The items are then sold through various channels, and (Re)vive’s data platform helps retailers monitor and manage their waste.
The underlying tech is quite interesting. The startup’s founder and CEO, Allison Lee, said the company’s software lets its employees sort, label and determine the outcome of a box of returned items in about three minutes. The software will also show retailers how much of a certain SKU — a product’s identifying number — was returned and how much money they can potentially make from saving and selling the returned items.
Refreshed items that are still in season head back to stores, while (Re)vive sells out-of-season goods on third-party channels like eBay and Poshmark on behalf of retailers and takes a cut from each sale.
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The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills in 2022 alone, according to data from return logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)vive wants to help companies find a better ending for their returned items.
(Re)vive takes in products that retailers have deemed too damaged to sell and fixes them up — whether that means washing them, reattaching a button, or lint-rolling off some dog hair. The items are then sold through various channels, and (Re)vive’s data platform helps retailers monitor and manage their waste.
The underlying tech is quite interesting. The startup’s founder and CEO, Allison Lee, said the company’s software lets its employees sort, label and determine the outcome of a box of returned items in about three minutes. The software will also show retailers how much of a certain SKU — a product’s identifying number — was returned and how much money they can potentially make from saving and selling the returned items.
Refreshed items that are still in season head back to stores, while (Re)vive sells out-of-season goods on third-party channels like eBay and Poshmark on behalf of retailers and takes a cut from each sale.
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Engineer brothers found Forge to modernize hardware procurement
Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you eventually do select, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your HQ. It’s exactly as complex as it sounds – but it doesn’t have to be, or so say two brothers who just scored funding to update the procurement process for hardware companies.
Like so many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in an otherwise cutting-edge industry. CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin, and Stoke Space. And at each one, he ran into the same infuriating problem: actually getting the parts they needed.
“I just kept getting more and more frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview. “It really came down to the point where I felt the thing that was holding back hardware was the software tooling that everybody was using. It was making everyone way more inefficient.”
He teamed up with his brother, former Meta software engineer Haris Sahmanovic, to found Forge in May 2023. The pair joined Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort, and this $2.1 million seed round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures includes participation from YC and other angel investors.
Emir characterized today’s hardware procurement process as confusing, overly complicated, and wasteful. At larger firms, engineers are typically kept out of the process — the procurement request gets put in a “black box,” he said — but they’re also generally unaware of other team members’ procurement orders, too.
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Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you eventually do select, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your HQ. It’s exactly as complex as it sounds – but it doesn’t have to be, or so say two brothers who just scored funding to update the procurement process for hardware companies.
Like so many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in an otherwise cutting-edge industry. CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin, and Stoke Space. And at each one, he ran into the same infuriating problem: actually getting the parts they needed.
“I just kept getting more and more frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview. “It really came down to the point where I felt the thing that was holding back hardware was the software tooling that everybody was using. It was making everyone way more inefficient.”
He teamed up with his brother, former Meta software engineer Haris Sahmanovic, to found Forge in May 2023. The pair joined Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort, and this $2.1 million seed round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures includes participation from YC and other angel investors.
Emir characterized today’s hardware procurement process as confusing, overly complicated, and wasteful. At larger firms, engineers are typically kept out of the process — the procurement request gets put in a “black box,” he said — but they’re also generally unaware of other team members’ procurement orders, too.
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SoftBank-backed grocery startup Oda lays off 150, resets focus on Norway and Sweden
It’s not just instant-delivery startups that are struggling. Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.
Oda, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was once valued as high as $900 million in a round led by SoftBank in its Vision Fund investment heyday, now saysits aim is to become profitable in the two countries sometime next year.
Oda’s retreat mirrors what we’ve seen play out in the instant grocery delivery space, where a number of startups have either sold down or been acquired for pennies on each dollar raised as they have struggled to get the unit economics to work amid sluggish growth. That all appeared to come to a major head in April, when Getir, the startup out of Turkey that raised $2.3 billion, announced layoffs and a retreat to its home market in pursuit of getting out of the red.
“Grocery is the largest category in retail, but even the most capable organizations in the world have struggled to find an online model that works. Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced).
Poad’s very presence at the company is part of its efforts to get out of that “struggle”.
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It’s not just instant-delivery startups that are struggling. Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.
Oda, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was once valued as high as $900 million in a round led by SoftBank in its Vision Fund investment heyday, now saysits aim is to become profitable in the two countries sometime next year.
Oda’s retreat mirrors what we’ve seen play out in the instant grocery delivery space, where a number of startups have either sold down or been acquired for pennies on each dollar raised as they have struggled to get the unit economics to work amid sluggish growth. That all appeared to come to a major head in April, when Getir, the startup out of Turkey that raised $2.3 billion, announced layoffs and a retreat to its home market in pursuit of getting out of the red.
“Grocery is the largest category in retail, but even the most capable organizations in the world have struggled to find an online model that works. Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced).
Poad’s very presence at the company is part of its efforts to get out of that “struggle”.
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Greptile raises $4M to build an AI-fueled code base expert
When you look at how generative AI is being implemented across developer tools, the focus for the most part has been on generating code, as with Github Copypilot. Greptile, an early stage startup from a group of recent Georgia Tech grads, decided to take a different approach: using AI to help developers understand the code base.
And rather than solely using a chat interface, as most vendors have done, the startup provided another unique twist by building an API that developers could connect to the code base and build custom apps based on an AI-driven query. On Thursday, the company announced a $4 million seed round.
Greptile CEO and co-founder Daksh Gupta says the Greptile bot is like having a highly experienced coworker who has a deep understanding of your code. “So we’re building AI tools that understand large code bases at companies because as time goes on, and multiple programmers work on the codebase, it tends to get very difficult to understand,” Gupta told.
“The API has essentially two parameters: One is you connect the repositories that you want referenced, and it makes sure they’re indexed. Once the repositories have been indexed by the system, you add a natural language query such as, how does the authentication work in this code base,” he said.
The startup launched last July after the founders came up with the idea for the company at a hackathon. They released the product, quickly grew to around 100 customers paying $10-$20 a month and applied and got into Y Combinator for the Winter 24 batch.
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When you look at how generative AI is being implemented across developer tools, the focus for the most part has been on generating code, as with Github Copypilot. Greptile, an early stage startup from a group of recent Georgia Tech grads, decided to take a different approach: using AI to help developers understand the code base.
And rather than solely using a chat interface, as most vendors have done, the startup provided another unique twist by building an API that developers could connect to the code base and build custom apps based on an AI-driven query. On Thursday, the company announced a $4 million seed round.
Greptile CEO and co-founder Daksh Gupta says the Greptile bot is like having a highly experienced coworker who has a deep understanding of your code. “So we’re building AI tools that understand large code bases at companies because as time goes on, and multiple programmers work on the codebase, it tends to get very difficult to understand,” Gupta told.
“The API has essentially two parameters: One is you connect the repositories that you want referenced, and it makes sure they’re indexed. Once the repositories have been indexed by the system, you add a natural language query such as, how does the authentication work in this code base,” he said.
The startup launched last July after the founders came up with the idea for the company at a hackathon. They released the product, quickly grew to around 100 customers paying $10-$20 a month and applied and got into Y Combinator for the Winter 24 batch.
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Carta’s valuation to be cut by $6.5 billion in upcoming secondary sale
Carta, a once-high-flying Silicon Valley startup that loudly backed away from one of its businesses earlier this year, is working on a secondary sale that would value the company at $2 billion, TechCrunch has learned.
Carta is working with the investment bank Jeffries on the sale and initially hoped to find demand for the offering at a valuation of $4 billion, but according to our sources, even $2 billion may prove ambitious.
That’s a massive, if not entirely unexpected, drop in valuation for Carta, which originally focused on cap table management software but began over time to evolve into a “private stock market for companies.” Its goal was to take advantage of the network of companies and investors that use its platform and into which it has insights. The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.
As part of that narrative, Carta launched an exchange that aimed to find buyers for shares using an auction-style system, and it later used this same system to bolster its own value in the eyes of investors. Indeed, after big leaps in valuation, from $1.7 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion in 2020, Carta announced in the summer of 2021 that it was worth a whopping $7.4 billion after first selling $100 million worth of its shares at a $6.9 billion valuation on its own platform.
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Carta, a once-high-flying Silicon Valley startup that loudly backed away from one of its businesses earlier this year, is working on a secondary sale that would value the company at $2 billion, TechCrunch has learned.
Carta is working with the investment bank Jeffries on the sale and initially hoped to find demand for the offering at a valuation of $4 billion, but according to our sources, even $2 billion may prove ambitious.
That’s a massive, if not entirely unexpected, drop in valuation for Carta, which originally focused on cap table management software but began over time to evolve into a “private stock market for companies.” Its goal was to take advantage of the network of companies and investors that use its platform and into which it has insights. The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.
As part of that narrative, Carta launched an exchange that aimed to find buyers for shares using an auction-style system, and it later used this same system to bolster its own value in the eyes of investors. Indeed, after big leaps in valuation, from $1.7 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion in 2020, Carta announced in the summer of 2021 that it was worth a whopping $7.4 billion after first selling $100 million worth of its shares at a $6.9 billion valuation on its own platform.
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