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PayZen secures $23M Series B, $200M debt facility to grow its “care now, pay later” product

The cost of healthcare in the U.S. has been rising rapidly, but the portion of those costs footed by patients has increased even faster. Just two decades ago, fees paid by patients accounted for only 5% of hospitals’ and doctors’ revenue, but by 2017, those fees made up 35% of revenue. This trend inevitably led millions […]

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Prediction marketplace Polymarket partners with Perplexity to show news summaries

Prediction marketplace Polymarket, which lets users bet on real-world events, is partnering with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to display news summaries of events. When users click on an event on Polymarket, they will now see a summary of news related to the event based on search results from Perplexity. There’s also a search box that

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India’s Kazam powers up to roll out EV charging in Southeast Asia

EV charging station startup Kazam plans to expand beyond India, where it already holds a significant share of the market, and into Southeast Asia to gain an early mover’s advantage, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, which has offices in Delhi and Pune and city managers in 4,000 postal codes across India, is set

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Why Scott Painter is selling a beach house to start a new vehicle software company

Serial entrepreneur Scott Painter’s plan to build an all-electric vehicle subscription company called Autonomy has not worked out. So he’s pivoting once again to what he calls the “hardest build” of his career. While Autonomy will continue operating the small 1,000-car fleet it assembled over the last few years — far from the stated goal

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YouTube is testing a feature that lets creators use Google Gemini to brainstorm video ideas

YouTube is testing an integration with Google Gemini to help creators brainstorm video ideas, titles and thumbnails. The Google-owned company announced the launch of the new Brainstorm with Gemini feature in a video posted to its Creator Insider channel. A YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch that the feature is available to select creators as a part

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Fintech Payoneer is buying 5-year-old global payroll startup Skuad for $61M in cash

New York-based fintech Payoneer has acquired Skuad, a Singapore-based global HR and payroll startup, for $61 million in cash, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.  Payoneer said it could also pay up to another $10 million, contingent on if Skuad meets various performance goals within the first 18 months of the acquisition. Payoneer also committed to

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AI-powered water heater could banish cold showers and carbon pollution

Chances are you’ve been there: Your formerly hot shower suddenly turns cold, darkening your mood in the process.  Maybe someone in your household took an extra shower or you did a few too many loads of laundry. It’s a classic case of supply not meeting demand. Michael Rigney thinks he can predict when a household

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Why Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and other investors are scouring universities for founders

The humble garage is so steeped in Silicon Valley lore it’s almost cliché. Yet that’s exactly how Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush started Molten Industries: in the garage of the Stanford professor’s on-campus home, where Kevin rented an apartment. It had everything they needed: space and, most importantly, power. The two wanted to break methane’s

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Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google

In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed startup. In his previous stint, Shazeer spearheaded the team of researchers that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that was used for conversational AI tools. Character.AI co-founder Daniel

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