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There's more bad news for Byju's. HSBC estimates in a research note that the Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing. The fall in valuation has put Byju through one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory, coming off a very difficult year when it was India's most valuable startup not long ago.
AI mortgage startup LoanSnap was forced out of its headquarters as it faced a barrage of lawsuits after raising $100 million. At least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo, have collectively claimed the company owes them more than $2 million. Employees who spoke to TechCrunch are now worried about the future of the company.
An appeals court has ruled that VC film Fearless Fund cannot make grants to black female entrepreneurs, sparking outrage among diversity advocates within the startup and venture ecosystem. Arian Simone, CEO of the Fearless Fund, issued a statement saying the foundation has decided to pursue the lawsuit.
News
What you can expect from WWDC 2024: Apple's annual developer conference begins June 10 at 10 a.m. PT. From iOS 18 to the debut of macOS 15 and tons of AI chat, here's what you can expect. Learn more
Rivian's path to survival: Rivian has announced completely revamped versions of its first two consumer vehicles. For the first time since the company broke its secret in 2018, the EV maker's immediate future is actually surprisingly clear. Learn more
Carta has seen its valuation cut significantly. TechCrunch has learned that Carta is conducting a secondary sale that would value the company at $2 billion, drastically reducing its valuation by $6.5 billion. Learn more
The artists flee to Cara. Anti-AI social media apps for creators surged to the top of the Apple App Store this week as artists grew increasingly weary of Meta's AI training policies. Learn more
Robinhood acquires Bitstamp. The stock trading app is diving deeper into cryptocurrency with the acquisition of cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp. The company expects the final transaction value to be approximately $200 million. Learn more
Meet Apple's recycling robot: TechCrunch visited Apple's manufacturing facilities to learn more about Apple's efforts to build better recycling robots to make its supply chain processes carbon neutral by 2030. Learn more
The following ads cannot be skipped: Instagram has sparked criticism by confirming that it is testing a new feature that would prevent users from browsing the social media platform until they have seen all of their non-skippable ads. Learn more
“Don’t do this with your baby’s parents”: Popular children's YouTuber Ms. The Cameo fundraiser hosted by Rachel had a disappointing launch because the company's output policy gave credits to fans instead of videos. Learn more
Trump launches TikTok: Donald Trump has joined TikTok to better connect with young voters, marking a powerful reversal of opinion on the short-form video app he once sought to ban. Learn more
Revel offers another direction. Revel, which abandoned its moped-sharing business for an all-employee ride-hailing service, is laying off more than 1,000 employee drivers to embrace a gig worker model similar to Lyft and Uber. Learn more
The radio has been revamped. French startup Ten Ten went viral with its walkie-talkie app that lets teens send voice messages to friends even when their phones are locked. Learn more
analyze
Can Generative AI Save Siri?: Apple was set to announce its partnership with OpenAI at WWDC, with the larger goal of deep integration of generative AI within Siri. As Brian Heater reports, Siri has fallen short of the revolution Apple promised 13 years ago. At this stage, Apple doesn't seem to be able to beat OpenAI at its own game. Learn more
Here are the numbers that our AI model likes the most: Gramener's engineers conducted an informal experiment asking several leading LLM chatbots to select random numbers between 0 and 100. But as Devin Coldewey points out, the results were not random. All three models had a “favorite” number and even showed human-like bias toward other numbers. Learn more
Unicorn-rich VC says: During his venture capital career, Wesley Chan invested in more than 20 unicorns, including Canva, Flexport, and Robinhood. In a conversation with Christine Hall, Chan said he owes his success to his hard-working immigrant family and a job washing lab beakers from Craigslist. Learn more
AI bias testing: Recent research has tested several open text analytics models to see how they respond to questions related to LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, surrogacy, and more. They found that the model tended to answer questions inconsistently, which they say reflects an inherent bias in the data used to train the model. Learn more
