Author: TechBrunch

Globally, health IT systems are groaning under the weight of legacy platforms. Thankfully, a new wave of startups is entering the space. British startup Anima is a “care enablement” platform that works almost like a combination of Slack, Salesforce, and Figma, but for medical clinics and hospitals. The company recently raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Molten Ventures and includes existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Amino Collective, and Y Combinator, as well as Peak Games founder Sidar Sahin New angel investors also participated. An alumnus of Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, Anima launched in September 2022…

Intel has been a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to expand domestic chip manufacturing long before President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law in August 2022. This morning, the White House announced an agreement with the Commerce Department that will provide silicon giants with up to $8.5 billion to ramp up production at U.S. sites. The CHIPS Act can be seen as a direct result of a number of pressing geopolitical issues. The first is supply chain bottlenecks that have persisted since Asia was hit hard early in the pandemic. The second is the US-China conflict that…

India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group. The company, which counts Tencent and Times Internet as backers, is looking to expand into Europe and Latin America after seeing positive results in the US market. The company has now raised $196 million across multiple rounds at a valuation of $750 million, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. TechCrunch reported last year that the company was in talks with Lightspeed to lead the funding round announced today. How does the platform work? Pocket FM offers audio series consisting of…

India’s Ultrahuman is prepping for a growth tear. Today it’s announcing the close of $35 million in Series B* funding, a mix of equity ($25M) and debt. The smart ring startup is a less familiar name than category veteran — and market leader — Oura. But founder Mohit Kumar tells TechCrunch he sees a route to snatching the No.1 position from the US rival — in as little as 12 or 15 months, by his reckoning. Currently Ultrahuman believes its smart ring sits in second place vs sales of Oura. The new funding is about stepping on the gas. “Oura…

Have you ever needed to take a copy of your medical images to your doctor or other health care provider and they gave you a CD? You're not alone. Many radiologists still use CDs and similar outdated technology to share patient image files. A startup called PocketHealth has taken issue with this. The company has built a medical image exchange platform that digitizes all patient and provider processes without the use of CDs. The Toronto-based company announced Wednesday that it has secured $33 million (C$45 million) in a Series B funding round. PocketHealth's journey began after one of its co-founders,…

Rather than rigorously collecting data on cancer deaths to predict treatment outcomes, Cure51's founders had a different idea in mind. They decided to rotate the model 180 degrees. Instead, the company hopes to collect data on long-term cancer survivors and crack the code on the mechanisms that keep people alive. It has now raised €15 million in a seed round led by Paris-based Sofinnova Partners. Other investors in this round include Hitachi Ventures GmbH, Life Extension Ventures, Xavier Niel, and Olivier Pomel, his CEO and co-founder of Datadog. The company will now use the funding to build “cohorts” of data…

Cowboy is best known for its sleek electric bikes that can be found in many major European cities. And when you see these cowboys riding their bikes, you almost always see young adults with laptops in their backpacks heading to the office. That's why the company is launching an all-new bike called the Cowboy Cross. This is an all-road model that pursues comfort for long-distance travel. Last week I had a chance to see the new Cowboy Cross and test drive it for a few minutes. As for the design, it looks exactly like a cowboy bike, with its pill-shaped…

The Pokémon Company announced that it detected a hacking attempt against some users and reset the passwords for those user accounts. Last week, a warning appeared on Pokémon's official support website, saying, “Following an attempt to compromise our account systems, Pokémon has proactively locked the accounts of potentially affected fans.” The content was A warning about a hacking attempt posted by The Pokémon Company on its official support website. As of Tuesday, the warning has been lifted. A company spokesperson said there was no breach, just a series of hacking attempts against some users. “The account system was not compromised.…

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), often referred to as “strong AI,” “full AI,” “human-level AI,” or “general intelligent action,” represents a major future leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence. I am. Unlike narrow AI that specializes in specific tasks (such as detecting product defects, summarizing news, or building websites), AGI will be able to perform a wide range of cognitive tasks at or above the human level. Addressing the press this week at NVIDIA's annual GTC developer conference, his CEO Jensen Huang seemed genuinely tired of discussing the subject. Especially, he says, because he found himself being misquoted a…

“I want you to understand that this is not a concert,” Nvidia President Jensen Huang said in front of a crowd so large that it filled the SAP Center in San Jose. This is how he introduced the company's GTC event, which is perhaps the exact opposite of a concert. “You've come to a developer conference. There's going to be a lot of science explaining algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. You feel a very heavy weight in the room. Suddenly you've come to the wrong place. It is.” It may not have been a rock concert, but the 61-year-old leather-jacketed CEO…