Technology
XP Health raises $32M to provide employees with cheaper eye care
Antonio Moraes, the grandson of a late, distinguished Brazilian billionaire, was never fascinated about joining his family’s conglomerate of construction corporations and banks. Shortly after graduating from college, he founded certainly one of Brazil’s first impact funds, which invested primarily in corporations that made health care more accessible and reasonably priced.
But while attending Stanford University, where Moraes earned a master’s degree in business administration and health policy, he realized that as a substitute of investing in influential corporations, he wanted to start his own.
As a part of an entrepreneurship class, Moraes and his co-founder, engineering student James Wong, visited plenty of eyewear factories in China. They discovered that designer frames that cost up to $600 within the U.S. were only selling for about $10. “We thought there was something seriously wrong with those margins,” Moraes told TechCrunch.
Because vision care and glasses are expensive, many staff buy frames with vision insurance, but the advantages normally don’t cover all the prices, Moraes said. “With vision insurance, people expect to pay nothing, but then they walk out of the optometrist’s office with a $300 bill out of pocket.”
Moraes and Wong began XP Health in late 2018, but in the course of the pandemic, the corporate pivoted the startup’s operations to an AI-powered digital platform that provides employees eye exams and glasses advantages at a significantly lower cost than current vision insurance coverage.
On Thursday, XP Health announced a $33.2 million Series B led by QED Investors with participation from Canvas Ventures, American Family Ventures, HC9 Ventures, Valor Capital Group and Manchester Story. The round comes lower than two years after XP Health’s $17.1 million Series A.
XP Health members who buy glasses virtually can save up to 69% off retail, Moraes said. The company says it doesn’t mark up frames or lenses directly from factories in Asia. Instead, XP Health generates revenue through recurring membership fees.
“In many cases, our members pay $0 for a pair of high-quality designer frames with best-in-class lenses, as well as an eye exam,” Moraes said.
XP Health’s AI-powered platform uses facial recognition to recommend glasses that best suit the user’s style and face shape.
Members can even buy the glasses at brick-and-mortar eyewear stores at a reduced price, but Moraes emphasizes that an identical frame can cost two to thrice less if purchased on the corporate’s online platform.
In the past two years, the corporate has expanded its list of business clients from 30 to greater than 3,000, including Docusign, Navistar, Chegg and Sequoia Consulting, which supply XP Health as a profit to their employees. XP Health has also formed strategic partnerships with insurance providers, reminiscent of Guardian Life Insurance, which provides vision care advantages to small businesses.
Of course, XP Health isn’t the one company cutting out the middleman in eyewear. It’s already a crowded market. Warby Parker sells directly to consumers, as do Eyebuydirect, Firmoo, Pair Eyewear and Zenni, to name a number of other options. But Moraes says XP Health is the one startup taking up the incumbent vision insurance providers, in a market dominated by VSP and EyeMed Vision Care.
But XP Health doesn’t consider itself an insurance company. That’s because what these corporations offer isn’t insurance in the normal sense. “There’s no real risk,” Moraes said. “It’s a corporate benefit.”
Technology
US medical device giant Artivion says hackers stole files during a cybersecurity incident
Artivion, a medical device company that produces implantable tissue for heart and vascular transplants, says its services have been “disrupted” resulting from a cybersecurity incident.
In 8-K filing In an interview with the SEC on Monday, Georgia-based Artivion, formerly CryoLife, said it became aware of a “cybersecurity incident” that involved the “compromise and encryption” of information on November 21. This suggests that the corporate was attacked by ransomware, but Artivion has not yet confirmed the character of the incident and didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s questions. No major ransomware group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Artivion said it took some systems offline in response to the cyberattack, which the corporate said caused “disruptions to certain ordering and shipping processes.”
Artivion, which reported third-quarter revenue of $95.8 million, said it didn’t expect the incident to have a material impact on the corporate’s funds.
Manufacturer of single-board computers Raspberry Pi is updating its cute little computer keyboard device with higher specs. Named Raspberry Pi500This successor to the Raspberry Pi 400 is just as powerful as the present Raspberry Pi flagship, the Raspberry Pi 5. It is on the market for purchase now from Raspberry Pi resellers.
The Raspberry Pi 500 is the simplest method to start with the Raspberry Pi because it’s not as intimidating because the Raspberry Pi 5. When you take a look at the Raspberry Pi 500, you do not see any chipsets or PCBs (printed circuit boards). The Raspberry Pi is totally hidden in the familiar housing, the keyboard.
The idea with the Raspberry Pi 500 is you could connect a mouse and a display and you are able to go. If, for instance, you’ve got a relative who uses a very outdated computer with an outdated version of Windows, the Raspberry Pi 500 can easily replace the old PC tower for many computing tasks.
More importantly, this device brings us back to the roots of the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi computers were originally intended for educational applications. Over time, technology enthusiasts and industrial customers began using single-board computers all over the place. (For example, when you’ve ever been to London Heathrow Airport, all of the departures and arrivals boards are there powered by Raspberry Pi.)
Raspberry Pi 500 draws inspiration from the roots of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit organization. It’s the right first computer for college. In some ways, it’s a lot better than a Chromebook or iPad because it’s low cost and highly customizable, which inspires creative pondering.
The Raspberry Pi 500 comes with a 32GB SD card that comes pre-installed with Raspberry Pi OS, a Debian-based Linux distribution. It costs $90, which is a slight ($20) price increase over the Raspberry Pi 400.
Only UK and US keyboard variants will probably be available at launch. But versions with French, German, Italian, Japanese, Nordic and Spanish keyboard layouts will probably be available soon. And when you’re in search of a bundle that features all the things you would like, Raspberry Pi also offers a $120 desktop kit that features the Raspberry Pi 500, a mouse, a 27W USB-C power adapter, and a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable.
In other news, Raspberry Pi has announced one other recent thing: the Raspberry Pi monitor. It is a 15.6-inch 1080p monitor that’s priced at $100. Since there are quite a few 1080p portable monitors available on the market, this launch is not as noteworthy because the Pi 500. However, for die-hard Pi fans, there’s now also a Raspberry Pi-branded monitor option available.
According to Apple, Apple desires to make its Vision Pro mixed reality device more attractive for gamers and game developers latest report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The Vision Pro was presented more as a productivity and media consumption device than a tool geared toward gamers, due partly to its reliance on visual and hand controls moderately than a separate controller.
However, Apple may need gamers if it desires to expand the Vision Pro’s audience, especially since Gurman reports that lower than half one million units have been sold to this point. As such, the corporate has reportedly been in talks with Sony about adding support for PlayStation VR2 handheld controllers, and has also talked to developers about whether they may support the controllers of their games.
Offering more precise control, Apple may also make other forms of software available in Vision Pro, reminiscent of Final Cut Pro or Adobe Photoshop.
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