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XP Health raises $32M to provide employees with cheaper eye care

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XP Health grabs $32M to bring employees more affordable vision 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.”

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly

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Google corporate logo hangs outside the Google Germany offices

The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.

Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.

In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.

The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.

The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.

Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.

The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.

Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.

If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.

Google’s answer

In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.

“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.

Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.

He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI ​​race.

“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.

The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.

Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo

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The Snowflake Inc logo, which represents the American cloud computing-based data company that offers cloud-based storage and analytics services, is being displayed on their pavilion at the Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024.

Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.

Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.

Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.

Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.

With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.

“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”

Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”

Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.

However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.

Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.

Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud

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Studio image of a padlock on top of a credit cardchampagne coloured background, could symbolize ideas around encryption, credit card safety, security and passwords

FBI yesterday he unveiled the indictment which accused Joanna Smith-Griffin, founding father of the bogus intelligence startup AllHere Education, of engaging in “securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” of nearly $10 million. The FBI alleges that from a minimum of November 2020 through June 2024, she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base and money to investors.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the corporate is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If convicted, Smith-Griffin faces prison sentences that include a maximum sentence of 20 years for securities fraud, a maximum sentence of 20 years for wire fraud, and a compulsory sentence two years for a professional identity thief. Smith-Griffin couldn’t be reached for comment.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has change into a meme over the past few years as several winners have been accused of fraud. The The Forbes-for-scam pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of (*30*) Research; Fintech founder Frank, Charlie Javice, and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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