Tech
Synex founder, once detained at the border with a 80-pound magnet, is building portable MRIs to test glucose
Back in 2019, Synex Medical founder Ben Nashman spent the night detained by US customs. Nashman tried to explain he was simply transporting materials from Buffalo to Toronto for his homemade MRI. Customs, however, took issue with the label on the package: “nuclear magnetic resonance.”
Nashman spent hours in a bright waiting room before he finally convinced them that he was really just a run-of-the-mill 18-year-old scientist with an obsession with MRI technology. They let him take his roughly 80-pound magnet and he zoomed back to Toronto. “I got back at like 3 or 4 am and got a few hours of sleep before classes,” he said.
Nashman, now 24, might have landed himself on a list of suspicious individuals, but he insists it was worth it: that one very long night was part of his years-long journey to build a portable MRI capable of testing glucose and other important molecules without the need to extract blood. Today, the company is one step closer to that goal, announcing a $21.8 million Series A fundraise, with investors like Accomplice, Radical Ventures, Fundomo and Khosla Ventures. It brings the company’s total haul up to over $36 million, with includes seed funding from Sam Altman.
Right now, Synex’s prototype is the size of a toaster, although Nashman hopes to one day have it fit in your palm. It works by first using MRI to create a 3D image of the finger to find the best spot to test. It then uses something called magnetic resonance spectroscopy to send radio pulses that “excite the different molecules,” Nashman said. The machine then takes the signals from all the molecules and filters for a specific one. Synex will start with glucose testing, but will eventually track things like amino acids, lactate and ketones.
The company introduced me to Diane Morency, a woman based in Massachusetts who has suffered from Type 2 diabetes for years. “I’ve got holes in my fingers,” she told me, adding she can no longer play her ukulele because of the pain. “It would be a godsend to not have to prick my [fingers] anymore.”
But there’s a reason non-invasive glucose testing hasn’t been commercialized: it’s difficult to track glucose accurately without drawing blood, and it’s even harder to make the device portable or affordable. “We believed that was going to be an absolute moonshot,” said Jun Jeon, an investor at Khosla Ventures focusing on healthcare.
Jeon has yet to try Nashman’s prototype but said that, if Nashman can deliver on his promises, then “this was a bet worth taking.”
An obsession with longevity
Nashman was always curious about living forever.
When he was about 16, he walked into his vet’s office armed with printed-out scientific studies. He had determined that his dog should be put on the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin, a drug controversially heralded by longevity enthusiasts. The vet had no idea what Nashman was talking about. “He was just like, ‘this is just way too experimental for me,’” Nashman recalled.
The vet’s refusal didn’t deter him. “Later, I got my parents on it and I got on it,” he laughed. “Honestly, I think everything should be on it.”
It was the first of several longevity self-experiments. Nashman briefly took diabetes drug arcarbos, forked over thousands for a Prenuvo full body scan, and, like so many in Silicon Valley before him, got his hands on a continuous glucose monitor. His health obsession coincided with a fascination with physics — particularly the “elegant” science behind MRIs, and how much they could reveal about the human body.
By 17, he had ordered materials online to make a makeshift MRI in his bedroom (it was “really crap,” he said). By 18, he had held an internship working on brain imaging at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and enrolled at the University of Toronto for engineering science. “I think I have the record for most MRIs ever, probably,” he said. “I’ve probably scanned my finger honestly 1000s of times at this point.”
He realized that MRI technology could be the ultimate longevity hack, giving him more information about his body than an Oura Ring or Whoop ever could. He first sold his dreams to Altman, whom he met in 2019, and then Peter Thiel, landing the Thiel Fellowship in 2021.
Nashman may have Silicon Valley’s overlords on his side, but he’s still entering a very crowded space with well-capitalized competition. Startups like Know Labs and Berlin-based DiaMonTech are both making their own non-invasive products. Apple has reportedly been quietly working on a non-invasive glucose monitor, and Google too once tried to make its own glucose monitoring contact lens before pausing the project in 2018.
Synex Medical faces an uphill battle from here. The company will have to undergo rigorous clinical trials to prove to the FDA that its machine can accurately isolate glucose molecules. There’s also the lingering question of whether Nashman can really get technology to a portable size. If not, “It wouldn’t be too useful,” Morency said. “It would do us no good outside of the house.”
But let’s say Nashman nails all of that. Let’s say Synex soars through its FDA-approved trials and successfully shrinks its current metal toaster down to something that fits in your palm. It will still debut in a healthcare industry that has long struggled to make new technology affordable, according to Khosla investor Jeon. “There’s not a lot of good infrastructure and reimbursement that will allow for all patients to have access to the technology,” Jeon said.
For Nashman, the chance for a longer life is worth dedicating his own life to. “I want to know exactly what my body needs. I want to know what my parents need,” he said. “A technology like this is just needed to usher in that age of predictive medicine.”
Tech
AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users, per Have I Been Pwned
A cyberattack at AI music generator Suno last year allowed a hacker to steal the personal information of more than 55.3 million people, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, offering the first glimpse into the scale of the data theft.
Per Have I Been Pwned, which obtained a copy of the breached dataset, the stolen data included customers’ names, physical addresses and email addresses, phone numbers, purchases, and partial payment card numbers taken from the company’s Stripe account, including card expiry dates.
The breach happened in November 2025, but was only recently revealed thanks to reporting by independent news outlet 404 Media.
The data theft also included Suno’s source code, which revealed how the company allegedly scraped millions of songs and lyrics from popular streaming sites, including Deezer, Genius, and YouTube, to train its AI models. Several major record labels are currently suing Suno, claiming that its mass-scraping efforts violate copyright law.
Suno has not yet publicly disclosed the cyberattack, or notified individuals that their information was taken. Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment about the incident.
Tech
After TikTok, Snap settles social media addiction case
Snap is the latest big tech company to settle a lawsuit that claimed social media platforms are harmful to children and young adults. The company has reached a “tentative” agreement in a case that was set to go to trial later this month.
TikTok recently settled its portion of the case with the plaintiff, known by the initials “R.K.C.,” ahead of a jury trial that starts next week in Los Angeles.
YouTube has also reached a deal, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant.
Meta has lost similar child safety lawsuits focused on social media, including one in New Mexico earlier this year, which marked its first courtroom defeat over the matter. In March, a Los Angeles jury also handed the social media giant, along with Google, another defeat, and awarded the defendant in that case, who went by “K.G.M,” or Kaley, $6 million in damages.
The precedents set by these cases are encouraging a wave of lawsuits against social media platforms over their purported harms, including their addictive nature and algorithms that negatively impact children and teens’ mental health. The results of these lawsuits could see the companies reshaping their platforms with more robust child safety measures, parental controls, and other design choices that could help them avoid future litigation.
The terms of Snap’s agreement weren’t disclosed, but Bloomberg reports that Snap confirmed the settlement has been achieved.
Snap did not immediately return a request for comment.
Tech
Light made a flip phone. It’s colorful and it’s cheap.
Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr over 20 years ago. Now, 10 years into building Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Light Phone, he’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are begging for a flip phone.
“We’ve been interviewing young people that use flip phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept running into: Gen Z users love their flip phones but say the build quality is bad. “They’re describing the flip phones in negative language, but they stick with it, and they feel proud.”
So Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from its last three touch screen phones and put it into a flip phone? That’s how they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device that Light has ever released.
“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with our SDK developer program, all of the tools we already have today: alarm, calculator, calendar…” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s kind of the exact same experience, just one is fully tactile, no touch screen, and [the other] one is a complete touch screen experience.”
Pricing has always been Light’s hardest problem as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a “less” phone for a price people will actually pay, when the whole pitch is fewer features? Its previous release, the unlocked Light Phone III, retails at $799. But the Light Flip brings the cost down to $299 by dropping a touch screen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made of plastic, rather than sturdier aluminum, but that means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a range of colors: black, red, yellow, pink, navy blue, and light grey.
“I thought I was fully QWERTY, but I was having fun with the T9 predictive texting [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number], so I can see myself going flip phone also for the colors,” Hollier said. “Just having a yellow phone gets me so jazzed.”
Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing play. It recently piloted phone contracts with Andrew Yang’s anti-doomscrolling carrier Noble Mobile. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get the Light Flip for a two-year contract at $39 per month; the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month over the same time frame.
The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen on the inside and no screen on the outside, as requested by users. There will be a small light on the front of the phone, however, so that you can see if you have notifications without flipping open the device. With 5G and 4GLTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download podcasts online and play music that you upload to your phone, which you can listen to via either a 3.5mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with both eSIM and physical Nano SIM cards, and includes a 12-megapixel camera on the back.
The Light Flip is expected to ship in April 2027, which Light acknowledges is a long lead time. To keep preorder customers engaged (and, practically, to keep them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, including bi-weekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment of ditching a smartphone. It’s a community-building move as much as a marketing one. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes that the transition to using its products will be less jarring and that it sticks.
While Light believes that its phones can help people reclaim the time they may regret spending on mindless scrolling, the founders acknowledge that it’s not easy to quit smartphones cold turkey. It’s hard to sacrifice the convenience of instant internet access, Apple Pay, music streaming, and convenient communication tools like WhatsApp and iMessage, and it’s easier for the flip phone-curious to make this transition when they’re not going through it alone.
“I think something that’s so inspiring about this movement is it’s not coming from a place of just anger and hatred… It’s a movement of optimism, as well as skepticism,” Hollier said. “I think that’s what we’ve always tried to do with Light. We’re anti big tech in all these ways, but we’re always trying to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”
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