A loop of misfortune: Car insurance company Loop is the latest to be forced to lay off staff. The company has apparently been trying to raise capital for 20 months now, and the layoffs come after an investor pulled out at the last moment. Loop started off as a project that sought to move away from structurally biased metrics like credit scores and education used by legacy models for pricing insurance. Read More
Quick commerce is thriving in India: Remember all those 10-minute delivery startups that cropped up and just as quickly died off? Well, they're having a moment in India. Companies like Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy's Instamart are already charting a path towards profitability, and they're expanding beyond grocery delivery and into e-commerce. Read More
Finbourne raises $70M to help banks use their data in AI: London-based Finbourne has its roots in how the founder met the challenge of building more efficient data services at his institutional bank following the 2008 financial crisis. That eventually evolved into a startup that shapes how financial companies buy IT today, and how they organize and use their data in AI models. Read More
A search engine for materials: CuspAI just raised a cool $30 million round led by Hoxton Ventures to boost its genAI software for materials. The startup's platform functions like a search engine for materials, enabling the fast evaluation of a "vast number of novel structures." Read More
SUSE tries on AI to get into the U.S.: Luxembourg-based open-source company SUSE is hoping that AI will reshuffle the playing field in IT, giving it a new entryway into the U.S. A major part of its new AI strategy is SUSE AI solutions, a new vendor- and LLM-agnostic genAI platform. Read More
Threads launches API for developers: Finally! Meta has at last launched its much-awaited API for Threads so developers can build cool stuff around the app. Developers can now use the API to publish posts, fetch their own content and deploy reply management tools. Read More
Bringing AI to the sewers: What can't you apply AI to? The aptly named SewerAI has raised $15 million to use AI to spot defects in sewers. This may sound super unsexy, but you know what's less sexy? Floods caused by climate change that lead to sewage backups that overwhelm wastewater treatment systems. Read More
Helping homeowners save on energy costs: Brought to you by Dandelion's co-founder, Balto Energy has come out of stealth to help homeowners manage their energy system as a whole – including solar panels, backup batteries, heat pumps – and save money. To provide recommendations that make sense, Balto models energy usage for homes using customer-provided utility data. Read More
Is radar making a comeback?: South Korea's Bitsensing certainly thinks so. The startup has just raised $25 million for its high-res 4D imaging radar, that's being used to boost the sensor suite in autonomous vehicles. The company is also looking to apply its tech to smart cities and digital healthcare. Read More
