Why India’s most valuable startup became worthless

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There’s more bad news for Byju’s: In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth zero. The estimated impairment makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular declines of a startup in recent history and comes after an extremely tough year for what was until recently India’s most valuable startup.
After raising $100 million, AI mortgage startup LoanSnap is facing a torrent of lawsuits and being forced out of its headquarters. At least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo, claim the company owes them more than $2 million. Employees who spoke to TechCrunch are now worried about the company’s future.
An appeals court has ruled that venture capital film Fearless Fund cannot give grants to black female founders, sparking outrage among diversity advocates within the startup and venture ecosystem. Fearless Fund CEO Ariane Simone said in a statement that the foundation is committed to continuing to fight the lawsuit.
news
What to expect at WWDC 2024: Apple’s annual developers conference kicks off at 10am PST on June 10. Here’s what to expect, from iOS 18 to the debut of macOS 15 and all things AI. read more
Rivian’s Path to Survival: Rivian has unveiled fully revamped versions of its first two consumer vehicles, and for the first time since the company broke stealth in 2018, the electric vehicle maker’s immediate future has become surprisingly clear. read more
Carta’s valuation is being significantly reduced: TechCrunch has learned that Carta is pursuing a secondary sale that would value it at $2 billion, potentially reducing its valuation by a massive $6.5 billion. read more
Artists flee to Cala: An anti-AI social media app for creative people has rocketed to the top of the Apple App Store this week as artists cringe at Meta’s AI training policies. read more
Robinhood Acquires Bitstamp: The stock trading app is furthering its cryptocurrency efforts with its acquisition of cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp, which the company expects to ultimately value the deal at around $200 million. read more
Meet Apple’s recycling robots: TechCrunch visited Apple’s manufacturing facility to learn more about the company’s efforts to develop better recycling robots, with the goal of making its supply chain processes carbon neutral by 2030. read more
These ads cannot be skipped: Instagram has drawn criticism after confirming that it is testing a new feature that will block users from browsing the social media platform until they have watched the entirety of an unskippable ad. read more
“Don’t bully parents of young children” A Cameo fundraiser hosted by popular children’s YouTuber Rachel ended up in a frustrating situation after the company’s output policy meant that fans were credited instead of the video. read more
Trump is big on TikTok: Donald Trump has joined TikTok in a bid to better engage with younger voters, marking a sharp shift in his opinion towards the short-form video app that he once tried to ban. read more
Revel takes a different turn. Revel will shut down its moped-sharing business and switch to a ride-hailing service run entirely by Tesla employees, then lay off more than 1,000 staff drivers and adopt a gig worker model similar to Lyft and Uber. read more
Walkie-talkie improvements: French startup ten ten has been making waves with its walkie-talkie app that lets teenagers send voice messages to friends even when their phones are locked. read more
analysis
Can generative AI save Siri? Apple was expected to announce a partnership with OpenAI at WWDC, with the ambitious goal of deeply integrating generative AI into Siri. Brian Heater reports that Siri has fallen short of the revolution Apple promised 13 years ago, and at this stage it doesn’t seem like Apple can beat OpenAI on the field. read more
After all, AI models have their favorite numbers. Gramener engineers ran an informal experiment in which they asked several leading LLM chatbots to randomly select numbers between 0 and 100. But as Devin Coldewey points out, the results were not random: All three models had “favorite” numbers and showed human-like biases toward other numbers. read more
A VC with many unicorn companies tells us all: Throughout his career in venture capital, Wesley Chan has invested in over 20 unicorn companies, including Canva, Flexport, and Robinhood. In conversation with Christine Hall, Chan credits his success to a hardworking immigrant family and a job washing lab beakers on Craigslist. read more
Test for AI bias: In a recent study, the researchers tested several open text analytics models to see how they answered questions about LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, surrogacy, and more, and found that the models tended to answer the questions inconsistently, reflecting biases embedded in the data used to train the models. read more
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