How India’s most valuable startup ended up being worth nothing
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There’s more bad news for Byju’s. 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. Employees who spoke to TechCrunch are now left worried about the company’s future.
An appeals court ruled that the VC film Fearless Fund cannot issue grants to Black women business owners, causing outrage among diversity advocates within the startup and venture ecosystem. Fearless Fund CEO Arian Simone released a statement saying the foundation was determined to continue fighting the lawsuit.
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Meet Apple’s recycling robots: TechCrunch paid a visit to Apple’s manufacturing facilities to learn more about the company’s efforts to build a better recycling robot in its bid to make its supply chain process carbon neutral by 2030. Read More
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Trump takes off on TikTok: Donald Trump has joined TikTok to better engage with young voters, signaling a strong reversal of opinion on the short-form video app he once tried to ban. Read More
Revel makes another pivot: After ditching its moped-sharing business for an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, Revel is laying off its 1,000+ staff drivers to embrace a gig worker model akin to that of Lyft and Uber. Read More
The walkie-talkie gets a revamp: French startup ten ten has gone viral for its walkie-talkie app that allows teens to send voice messages to their friends — even when their phone is locked. Read More
Can generative AI save Siri?: Apple is expected to announce a partnership with OpenAI at WWDC and had larger goals of a deep integration of generative AI within Siri. As Brian Heater reports, Siri has fallen short of the revolution Apple promised 13 years ago — and at this stage, Apple can’t seem to beat OpenAI at its own game. Read More
Turns 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. But as Devin Coldewey notes, the results were not random. All three models had a “favorite” number and even demonstrated human-like bias toward other numbers. Read More
A unicorn-rich VC tells all: Over the course of his career in venture capital, Wesley Chan has invested in over 20 unicorns like Canva, Flexport and Robinhood. In a conversation with Christine Hall, Chan says he owes his success to his hard-working immigrant family and a Craigslist job washing lab beakers. Read More
Putting AI bias to the test: A recent study tested several open text-analyzing models to see how they’d respond to questions relating to LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, surrogacy and more. They found that the models tended to answer questions inconsistently, which, they say, reflects biases embedded in the data used to train the models. Read More
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HSBC and BlackRock estimate that the Indian edtech giant Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing.
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