How India’s most valuable startup became worthless

There is more bad news for Byju. In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now value nothing. The estimated write-down makes Byju considered one of the most spectacular startup slides in memory, and comes after a really difficult 12 months for what was not way back India’s most valuable startup.

After raising $100 million, artificial intelligence startup LoanSnap is facing an avalanche of lawsuits and has been evicted from its primary office. At least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo, have collectively alleged that the corporate owes them greater than $2 million. Employees who spoke to TechCrunch now worry concerning the company’s future.

An appeals court ruled that VC film Fearless Fund cannot award grants to Black women business owners, sparking outrage amongst diversity advocates within the startup and enterprise ecosystem. Fearless Fund CEO Arian Simone released a press release saying the muse is committed to continuing to fight the lawsuit.

News

What to expect at WWDC 2024: Apple’s annual developer conference begins on June 10 at 10 a.m. PT. From iOS 18 to the debut of macOS 15 and lots of AI talk, here’s what you may expect. read more

Rivian’s Path to Survival: Rivian has announced completely revamped versions of its first two consumer vehicles. For the primary time for the reason that company broke stealth technology in 2018, the electrical automobile maker’s immediate future is really vibrant. read more

Carta gets a giant valuation cut: TechCrunch has learned that Carta is working on a secondary sale that might value the corporate at $2 billion, dramatically reducing its valuation by $6.5 billion. read more

Artists flee to Cara: The anti-AI social media app for creators skyrocketed to the highest of the Apple App Store this week as artists grow increasingly fed up with Meta’s AI training policy. read more

Robinhood acquires Bitstamp: The stock trading app is delving into cryptocurrencies with the acquisition of cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp. The company expects the ultimate deal value to be roughly $200 million. read more

Meet Apple Recycling Robots: TechCrunch visited Apple’s manufacturing facilities to learn more concerning the company’s efforts to construct a greater recycling robot to make its supply chain carbon neutral by 2030. read more

You cannot skip these ads: Instagram has confirmed it’s testing a brand new feature that can prevent users from browsing the social media platform until they’ve watched a non-skippable ad in its entirety, sparking criticism. read more

“Don’t mess with parents of little kids”: Popular kid’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel’s Cameo fundraiser resulted in frustration because, under the corporate’s results policy, fans received credits as a substitute of videos. read more

Trump runs on TikTok: Donald Trump has joined TikTok to higher connect with young voters, signaling a decisive shift in opinion on the short-video app he once tried to ban. read more

Revel makes one other twist: After abandoning its moped-sharing business in favor of an all-Tesla, all-employee passenger transportation business, Revel is shedding greater than 1,000 drivers to adopt a contract employee model much like those utilized by Lyft and Uber. read more

Walkie-talkie is undergoing modernization: This French startup went viral due to its walkie-talkie app that enables teenagers to send voice messages to friends – even when their phones are locked. read more

Analysis

Can Generative AI Save Siri?: Apple is predicted to announce a partnership with OpenAI at WWDC and has set broader goals to deeply integrate generative AI into Siri. As Brian Heater reports, Siri has did not deliver the revolution Apple promised 13 years ago — and at this point, Apple cannot beat OpenAI at its own game. read more

It seems that AI models have favorite numbers: Gramener engineers conducted a casual experiment wherein they asked several core LLM chatbots to decide on a random number between 0 and 100. But, as Devin Coldewey notes, the outcomes weren’t random. All three models had a “favorite” number and even showed human bias towards other numbers. read more

Unicorn-rich VC tells everyone: Over the course of his enterprise capital profession, Wesley Chan has invested in over 20 unicorns similar to Canva, Flexport, and Robinhood. In an interview with Christine Hall, Chan says he owes his success to his hard-working immigrant family and his job on Craigslist washing laboratory beakers. read more

AI Bias Testing: A recent study tested several open text analytics models to see how they might reply to questions on LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, surrogacy, and more. They found that the models tended to reply questions inconsistently, which they consider reflects biases embedded in the information used to coach the models. read more