Unicorns — Startups, Business & Enterpreneurship

Expressable brings speech therapy into the home Leanne Sherred, a pediatric speech therapist, has long encountered challenges putting caregiver-led therapy into practice in traditional care settings. Research suggests that caregiver-led speech therapy, which involves training the caregivers of patients in skill-building therapeutic techniques to use at home, can be highly effective. But as Sherred observed in the course of her practice, therapists often have limited access to caregivers and face serious educational and tech roadblocks. In 2020, around the start of the pandemic, Sherred saw an opportunity to attempt a new, tech-forward speech therapy care model, one that put caregivers “at the center of care” (in her words). She teamed up with Nick Barbara (Sherred’s spouse), Spencer Magloff and Ryan Hinojosa to found Expressable, a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists. “Layered on top of Expressable’s synchronous care is a platform that includes multimedia home programming, interactive weekly practice activities, therapist SMS support and more,” Magloff, Expressable’s chief marketing officer. “With Expressable, speech therapy isn’t limited to one to two times per week, void of caregiver participation.” Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Google invests $350 million in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as part of the deal, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup said in a brief statement Friday. The Google investment is part of a nearly $1 billion funding round that Flipkart kicked off in 2023. Walmart has led the round, having invested $600 million in it late last year. (Microsoft is also an investor in Flipkart.) Flipkart, valued at $36 billion in the new investment, leads the e-commerce market in India, where it serves hundreds of millions of consumers in smaller cities and towns. The startup, which also owns the fashion e-commerce startup Myntra, commands about 48% of the Indian e-commerce market, according to Bernstein. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

ZeroPoint’s nanosecond-scale memory compression could tame power-hungry AI infrastructure AI is only the latest and hungriest market for high-performance computing, and system architects are working around the clock to wring every drop of performance out of every watt. Swedish startup ZeroPoint, armed with €5 million ($5.5M USD) in new funding, wants to help them out with a novel memory compression technique at the nanosecond scale — and yes, it’s exactly as complicated as it sounds. The concept is this: losslessly compress data just before it enters RAM, and decompress it afterwards, effectively widening the memory channel by 50% or more just by adding one small piece to the chip. Compression is, of course, a foundational technology in computing; as ZeroPoint CEO Klas Moreau (left in the image above, with co-founders Per Stenström and Angelos Arelakis) pointed out, “We wouldn’t store data on the hard drive today without compressing it. Research suggests 70% of data in memory is unnecessary. So why don’t we compress in memory?” Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

VCs wanted FarmboxRx to become a meal kit, the company bootstrapped instead Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional VC. FarmboxRx decided to bootstrap because founder Ashley Tyrner didn’t like the advice she was getting from potential backers. Tyrner told that when she went out to raise money for FarmboxRx, a direct-to-consumer produce box company meant to solve food deserts at the time, she found that venture investors were interested if, and only if, she agreed to pivot her company toward a hot trend of the moment. “Every VC we talked to, any of them that were actually even remotely nice to us at the time wanted us to become a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “That’s not what our focus was. We did not want to jump on the meal kit bandwagon. Now looking back, I’m really glad that I never raised any capital and we still haven’t raised any capital to this day. Most of the meal kits are, you know, they’ve slowly died.” Instead, the company leaned into its existing produce box-focused model and the supply chain it built around that strategy, and built a new revenue stream on top of that. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Alchemist’s latest batch puts AI to work as accelerator expands to Tokyo, Doha Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Read on for our picks of the batch. Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day (today at 10:30 a.m. Pacific) about this cohort, it was clear that ambitions for AI startups have contracted, and that’s not a bad thing. No early-stage startup today is at all likely to become the next OpenAI or Anthropic — their lead is too huge right now in the domain of foundational large language models. “The cost of building a basic LLM is prohibitively high; you get into the hundreds of millions of dollars just to get it out. The question is, as a startup, how do you compete?” Belani said. “VCs don’t want wrappers around LLMs. We’re looking for companies where there’s a vertical play, where they own the end user and there’s a network effect and lock-in over time.” That was also my read, as the companies selected for this group are all highly specific in their applications, using AI but solving for a specific problem in a specific domain. An example of this is healthcare, where AI models for assisting diagnosis, planning care and so on are increasingly but still cautiously being tested out. The specter of liability and bias hang heavy over this heavily regulated industry, but there are also lots of legacy processes that could be replaced with real, tangible benefit. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Pine Labs gets Singapore court approval to shift base to India Pine Labs, a merchant commerce startup, has received approval from a Singapore court to merge its local entity with its Indian unit, and transfer all its assets and properties, effectively permitting the firm to shift its operations to India. Pine Labs disclosed the court order in a recent regulatory. Pine Labs offers a range of products and services to merchants, such as cloud-connected point-of-sale machines and working capital. It is backed by Peak XV, Fidelity, Invesco, Temasek, PayPal and Alpha Wave and is valued at over $5 billion. It is among the handful of Indian startups that have been shifting their domiciles to India of late. Meesho, Zepto, Flipkart, Razorpay and Udaan are also in the process of evaluating a similar move. Fintech startups PhonePe and Groww have already relocated their overseas holding entities to India. Pine Labs declined to comment. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many others wanted in, he could have ordered over 100 units. The post didn’t just hit a nerve with other X users who wanted a nap at work. Some people joked about the hygiene of sharing a bed with office mates. One replied, “The last thing I want to do is share bedsheets with my software developer coworkers.” Many admired the particular features of these nap pods, or applauded the whole idea of office napping. “every modern office should have one    no different than napping on a 15 hour flight     some task require the better inference that rem sleep gets you [sic]” responded another. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’ The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking to convert the company’s debt reorganization Chapter 11 bankruptcy into a liquidation Chapter 7, according to court documents. The trustee wrote that the need for Chapter 7 resulted from Synapse “grossly” mismanaging its estate so that losses were continuing with little “reasonable likelihood of reorganization” that would allow the company to emerge on the other side and carry on. This new development is significant because Synapse founder Sankaet Pathak earlier this month alleged that its former partners owe it millions, by its own accounting, and were not paying up. Those partners have been insisting that Synapse’s allegations have “no merit.” San Francisco-based Synapse, which operated a platform enabling banks and fintech companies to develop financial services, was founded in 2014 by Bryan Keltner and Pathak. It was providing those types of services as an intermediary between banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust and business banking startup Mercury, among others. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up construction to managing residential, commercial and retail properties. But unlike his parents, Mor also had a passion for technology. His interest in tech was reinforced when he became a commander in Unit 8200, the elite cyber intelligence division of the Israeli Defense Forces known for minting tech entrepreneurs. After leaving the army, he decided to combine his two passions: Mor noticed that many real estate investors do not have a dedicated system for keeping track of various back-office processes such as managing cash collected from rent, calculating and distributing proceeds to their LPs and many other administrative functions. “We’ve seen companies struggling with managing all of these things using a lot of spreadsheets, emails and [other] disjointed systems that don’t interact with each other,” Mor said. That realization led him, together with Unit 8200 friends Lior Dolinski and Noam Kahan, to found Agora, a software company that manages data, automates reporting, streamlines fundraising processes and provides bookkeeping and tax services for real estate investment firms of various sizes. Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures

Shipping logistics startup Harbor Lab raises $16M Series A led by Atomico Cargo ships docking at a commercial port incur costs called “disbursements” and “port call expenses.” These might include port dues, towage, and pilotage fees. It’s a complex patchwork and all ports operate their own procedures, much of it on spreadsheets. The global cost from port calls, for all vessels, is over $220 billion dollars per year. Now, a Greek maritime software startup that we last covered when it raised a €6.1 million seed round — Harbor Lab — has gone on to raise a $16 million Series A funding round led by European VC Atomico.  Harbor Lab says the costs that arise from a vessel’s port calls are the second largest expense for commercial vessels behind fuel, reaching around $2.2 million per vessel per year.  The company claims its platform can streamline those costs and reduce the margin of error in invoicing errors and overpayments from 20% to just 3% per port call.  Full Article 📌 Powered by V3V Ventures