标签：#startup

Travel agency Fora announced a $60 million Series D round led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, valuing the company at $1 billion.

The startup, founded in 2021, lets enterprise customers use smartphones to scan and spot vehicle damage.

While everyone in AI is chasing "superintelligence," Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of Yann LeCun’s world model startup, AMI Labs, dismisses the word.

Aina is going to pilot a new device in the coming weeks.

Applied Computing has raised a $20M Series A to build a foundation AI model for the oil, gas and petrochemical industry.

Syntetica, a French startup that has developed a novel approach to recycling nylon, has already obtained big-name partners and investors.

Neko Health has developed proprietary body-scanning technology, which it couples with bloodwork, to assess a person's health.

DPDP compliance costs for Indian startups: what to budget before 13 May 2027 Summary. Full compliance with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act is due on 13 May 2027. That is the date consent, notice, security safeguards, breach intimation and data-principal rights all become enforceable, and it is roughly 10 months away. The DPDP Rules 2025 were notified on 13 November 2025 and land in three phases: the Data Protection Board of India stood up immediately, penalties and Consent Manager registration begin on 13 November 2026, and everything else bites on 13 May 2027. The penalty schedule is not proportionate to your size: up to ₹250 crore for failing reasonable security safeguards, ₹200 crore for failing to notify a breach, and ₹150 crore for missing Significant Data Fiduciary obligations. There is no revenue or headcount exemption. The cost gap is where founders get hurt. Vendors routinely quote ₹15 lakh to ₹2 crore for DPDPA compliance, while a startup under 10,000 users can be substantively compliant for under ₹50,000 a year. India's privacy and data governance market is worth roughly $1 billion to $1.5 billion today, per IDfy founder Ashok Hariharan speaking to Inc42 in April 2026, and a lot of that revenue depends on you not reading the rules yourself. This is a budgeting guide, not a legal opinion. The rules are short. Read them, then price the work. The deadline that actually matters There are three dates, and only one of them is a real deadline for most startups. Phase Date What switches on Does it affect a typical startup? Phase 1 13 November 2025 Data Protection Board of India established, Rules notified No direct obligation, but the Board can already receive complaints Phase 2 13 November 2026 Consent Manager registration opens, penalty framework and enforcement powers begin Only if you intend to register as a Consent Manager Phase 3 13 May 2027 Notice, consent, security safeguards, breach intimation, retention, children's data, data-principal righ

Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has acquired AI startup Shaped, a machine learning company focused on real-time recommendations and search. The deal will bolster Whatnot’s personalization and discovery features as it expands into new product categories.

Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, […]

Anthropic-backed Ode launches as AI labs bet that embedding forward-deployed engineers inside enterprises is the key to accelerating enterprise AI adoption.

The app is designed for people who want to create social content, but find traditional video editing tools too complex or time-consuming.

The startup has reached a $120 million annualized revenue run rate and more than 200,000 paying customers.

Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, Israeli identity management startup Oak is emerging out of stealth with $60 million in seed funding.

DeepSeek, the Chinese large language model developer, is said to be preparing for a 2027 IPO debut as it also looks to raise around $1.5 billion in new funds at a $71 billion valuation.

Kid-friendly tech company Pinwheel announced the launch of a new landline phone designed to let children stay connected without the distractions of a smartphone.

The company is raising at least $75 million, led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors.

Every workout tracker I've tried has the same limitation: it records what you did, but it doesn't...

Someone would ask a question in a public Slack channel. Every so often a couple of people would start to answer. Then the manager would step in, say what was going to happen, and the thread would go quiet. On its own, it looks like nothing. A decisive manager keeping things moving. But it was a team going quietly into debt, and the dead Slack thread was one of the interest payments. You already know tech debt. You cut a corner in the code to ship faster, and you pay interest on it later in bugs, slow changes, and the one file nobody wants to touch. Culture debt works the same way, except the corners you cut aren't in the code. They're in the norms, the expectations, and the relationships that decide how people actually work together. But tech debt is visible. You can see it, point at the file, write a ticket, argue about whether it's worth paying down. Culture debt is more dangerous because it gives you none of that. You don't watch it accruing. You see the symptoms, and by the time they show up, the debt has already compounded. Let me tell you how a team I joined got there. The reward was volume. The only thing that reliably got praised was pushing a lot of code. The manager was open about it...their whole framing of the job was being able to out ship anyone on the team. Everyone else stayed quiet. Nobody ever stood up and argued against quality. If you'd asked, the manager would have agreed that testing mattered and that quality mattered. Those things just never got prioritized. So over and over, what actually got rewarded (volume) quietly beat what everyone said they wanted. This didn't happen out loud. The reward silently won every time. You can guess what that bought. Planning went first, so features shipped in half finished states and got abandoned there. Testing basically didn't exist. We had a QA person, but things slipped through constantly. Bugs were everywhere. Plenty of features barely worked, and some just didn't. The human side hollowed out at the same

Most people assume better AI performance means a bigger bill. That assumption is quietly being proven wrong. The "Don't Touch It" Trap in AI Products There's a psychological pattern that shows up in almost every team running a live AI-powered product: once something works, nobody wants to mess with it. And honestly, that instinct makes sense. You've tuned your prompts, worked out the edge cases, trained your users, and finally gotten the thing stable. The idea of swapping out the underlying model - the engine of the whole operation - feels like pulling a thread that might unravel everything. So teams stay put. They watch new model releases come out, read the benchmark comparisons, and quietly decide it's not worth the risk. The phrase you hear most often is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The problem is that this logic made sense when model upgrades were expensive and disruptive. That's no longer the default reality. What's actually happening now is that AI providers are competing hard on price-per-token while simultaneously improving quality. That combination - better output, lower cost - breaks the old mental model most product people are still operating with. What a Model Migration Actually Involves Let's be clear: switching AI models isn't a one-click operation. But it's also not the months-long project many teams imagine it to be. At its core, a model migration for an AI agent involves three things: re-evaluating your prompts (because different models respond differently to the same instructions), running parallel tests to compare output quality on your real use cases, and updating any API parameters that differ between versions. That's the actual work. For most small-to-medium deployments, that's days of effort, not weeks. The bigger shift is in how you think about model versions. Rather than treating the model as permanent infrastructure, it helps to think of it more like a dependency in your software stack - something you update deliberately, test careful