Start-ups

A new iOS social wellness app called Exist wants to help middle-aged consumers connect and build meaningful communities with one another as they navigate their lives and the stresses that come with it. The app describes itself as the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace, and its main feature is social journaling. The idea behind the app’s social and community-driven journaling is to help people heal together, rather than alone. Exist also features a daily

Google’s parent company Alphabet is again in advanced talks to acquire cloud cybersecurity startup Wiz, a person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The two companies were close to securing a deal at a $23 billion valuation last summer, but the transaction failed to materialize.  This time, the price being discussed is higher, the person said. A price of around $30 billion was reported by The Wall Street Journal. Thomas Kurian, head of Google’s cloud

It’s gloves off in one of the more tense rivalries in the world of startups. HR company Rippling Monday morning announced a lawsuit against Deel, another big player in the same space. The dramatic 50-page complaint alleges racketeering, misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty. The lawsuit is largely centered on an employee whom Rippling claims was working as a spy for Deel. Deel has

The fintech segment, which saw massive growth during the pandemic and immediately after, had a fairly rough 2024, ending with the abrupt shutdown — and then unexpected acquisition — of accounting startup Bench. Though the rapid pace of funding has slowed, some fintechs are continuing to see growth and expand their teams. In an effort to better understand just how many fintechs might fit into this category, I put out a call last year asking

Creating a startup that competes with your former employer can be risky. Apple, for example, once sued a former chip design executive who founded his own chip startup in a case that was dropped in 2023. A recent case involving logistics unicorn Flexport and a new competitor formed by two former employees sheds light on those risks. Flexport is suing the pair alleging that they stole thousands of its documents along with its source code to create their

Artificial intelligence continues stirring things up in chemistry. To wit: Y Combinator-backed Cambridge, U.K.-based ReactWise is using AI to speed up chemical manufacturing — a key step in bringing new drugs to market. Once a promising drug has been identified in the lab, pharma firms need to be able to produce much larger amounts of the material to run clinical trials. This is where ReactWise is offering to step in with its “AI copilot for

No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT over two years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared.  During that period, the world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups. The

After Employer.com acquired bankrupt accounting startup Bench in a fire-sale late last year, CEO Jesse Tinsley pledged on LinkedIn and elsewhere to honor past customer payments. “We’re honoring all prepaid Bench services even though we will not have the revenue from that directly ourselves,” Tinsley said in an interview with founder and investor Julian Weisser. But some Bench customers say they’re being charged to get books or tax returns they previously paid for. A lawsuit

Swedish fintech Klarna took the next step in its highly anticipated U.S. IPO on Friday when it made its F-1 prospectus public. We are sifting through the document now. Klarna hopes to raise at least $1 billion at a $15 billion valuation with this IPO, Bloomberg reported last week. The public documents don’t yet reveal how many shares it plans to sell or the price range, so we won’t know if this IPO will meet

We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning.  Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate the position of a vehicle using only map information and a vehicle’s existing sensor data. The company’s pitch: It’s a