Tech
Watch Club is producing short video dramas and building a social network around them
Henry Soong is trying to make vertical microdrama series that don’t suck. That makes the Watch Club founder quite unique within this multibillion-dollar industry of apps that churn out formulaic, cringe-worthy content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending.
“Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl! I fell in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf, and his mother is a vampire, and she disapproves of me!’” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this can be so much bigger than just sloppy, AI-adjacent romance soap operas.”
Soong’s comments are a little combative, but they’re not wrong. Competitor ReelShort made $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year, while DramaBox made $276 million. The quality, he said, is so milquetoast that it could feasibly be made using AI-generated scripts.
What would be the earning potential for a microdrama app that makes shows that are actually good and worth talking about?
Soong is trying to answer that question with Watch Club, an app with microdrama stories made by SAG and WGA actors and writers (leading apps like DramaBox and ReelShort do not use union talent).
Soong, a former Meta product manager who describes himself as “a fangirl, through and through,” thinks that what makes TV so special is the communities that form around them. Given his experience working on social products, he’s also seeking to differentiate Watch Club from existing microdrama apps by embedding a social network within it.
“I think you can actually build such a more interesting business if you take what makes TV truly the most fun,” he said, pointing out “Heated Rivalry” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You watch it, and then you just want to gossip with your three best friends about it, or see what 100,000 funny, clever other young women or gay people on the internet are saying.”
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Right now, people chat about “Severance” theories on Reddit, or they react to the “Stranger Things” finale on Tumblr. Before Twitter became the cesspool that is X, you had to work hard to avoid “Succession” or “White Lotus” spoilers. Soong sees the potential of housing both the show and the fan forums in one place.
How will that app make money? Like most early-stage, venture-funded companies, that’s a question to punt for now, until it’s clear how users are engaging with the app. The answer may be ads, but the idea alone was interesting enough to secure seed funding led by GV. Watch Club also received checks from individuals like Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte, as well as current and former executives from Hulu, HBO Max, and Meta. Upside Ventures, the firm run by major U.K. YouTubers the Sidemen, also participated.
Soong doesn’t have a background in film, which is why he brought in Devon Albert-Stone as founding producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a slate of 10 shows.
“We work with brilliantly talented people when they have a few months free to go work on something that may not be huge budget because we offer them huge creative latitude to go do something that Amazon would never let them do at a speed and velocity that feels way more exciting than the glacial pace of the television industry,” Soong said.
He added: “I’m really good at figuring out how to monetize businesses that seem almost impossible to monetize.”
At Meta, his mission from 2016 to 2019 was to figure out how to make money in China, a country where no one could use Meta’s products. By 2019, Soong said, Meta generated $5 billion per year of ad sales for companies within China who wanted to advertise to audiences outside of the country.
Chinese ad sales may not be as glamorous as film and TV, but that job gave him additional context to understand the business model behind microdrama apps, which boomed in China at the end of the last decade.
“Right around the time that I was leaving Meta [in 2019] is when these Chinese micro drama apps started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so that Americans and Germans would download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know this business playbook. I know how expensive and capital-intensive it is, and I think you can build a way better microdrama business if you aren’t 100% dependent on paid user acquisition.”
Watch Club will have its first opportunity to test its concept when it releases its first show, “Return Offer,” which it plans to distribute on its app with daily episodes. On Tuesday, the company shared the first trailer for the show — which is about a group of tech interns in San Francisco competing for a return offer.
“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can give birth to the thing that supplants streaming television, and part of doing that is by building welcoming, creative sets with talented professionals, where people are having fun, despite small budgets, making something wonderful,” Soong said.
Tech
Peak XV says internal disagreement led to partner exits as it doubles down on AI
Peak XV Partners, a leading venture capital firm in India and Southeast Asia, has seen a fresh round of senior departures. These follow other leadership exits over the past year as it pushes ahead with plans to deepen its focus on AI investing and expand its footprint in the U.S., while keeping India as its largest market.
The latest departures stem from an internal disagreement with senior partner Ashish Agrawal (pictured above, left) that led to a mutual decision to part ways, Managing Director Shailendra Singh told TechCrunch. He added that two other partners, Ishaan Mittal (pictured above, right) and Tejeshwi Sharma (pictured above, center), chose to leave alongside him.
Singh said Peak XV did not want to go into the specifics of the disagreement and was focused on moving forward. “Just out of privacy, and out of, like, trying to be classy about it,” he said. Singh added that such departures were not uncommon at large, multi-stage venture firms and that Peak XV wanted to move on quickly after several years of working together.
All board seats held by the departing partners would be transitioned “imminently,” Singh said, noting that the firm already had overlapping representation across several portfolio companies. He said Peak XV was not concerned about continuity, noting that multiple general partners and operating partners were already involved across many of those boards.
The departures mark the exit of long-tenured investors from the firm. Agrawal had been with Peak XV for more than 13 years, while Mittal spent over nine years at the firm and Sharma more than seven years, per their LinkedIn profiles.
Agrawal wrote in a LinkedIn post that he had decided to “take the entrepreneurial plunge” and was teaming up with Mittal and Sharma to start a new venture capital firm. He described the move as an opportunity to build a new institution with longtime partners and thanked Peak XV’s leadership for what he called a “truly wonderful partnership.”
During his time at Peak XV, Agrawal led investments across fintech, consumer, and software, including Groww, one of the firm’s most prominent IPO exits in 2025. He also backed multiple early- and growth-stage companies alongside Mittal and Sharma, contributing to Peak XV’s broader portfolio build-out over the past decade.
Agrawal, Mittal, and Sharma did not respond to messages for comments.
Peak XV has also moved to strengthen its senior leadership from within. The firm on Tuesday promoted Abhishek Mohan to general partner, expanding its investment leadership bench, while Saipriya Sarangan was elevated to chief operating officer, taking charge of firm-wide operations.
The leadership changes come amid a standout year for Peak XV’s portfolio exits. Five of its companies — Groww, Pine Labs, Meesho, Wakefit, and Capillary Technologies — went public in November and December 2025, generating roughly ₹300 billion (around $3.33 billion) in unrealized, mark-to-market gains for the firm, in addition to about ₹28 billion (about $310.61 million) in realized gains from share sales during the IPOs.
In addition to the latest departures, Peak XV has seen a broader churn in its senior ranks over the past 12 months. Last year, long-time investment leaders Harshjit Sethi and Shailesh Lakhani exited the India team, while Abheek Anand and Pieter Kemps departed from the firm’s Southeast Asia operations. The firm has also seen leadership changes across its marketing, policy, and operations teams in recent months.
Singh dismissed a view circulating in the market that many of the partners who drove Peak XV’s largest exits were no longer at the firm, calling the narrative “not statistically true.” He said several of the firm’s most significant outcomes had been led by long-tenured partners who remained at Peak XV, and argued that the firm’s exit track record did not hinge on any single individual.
Peak XV currently has seven general partners, along with multiple partners and principals, according to Singh.
The VC firm, which split from Sequoia Capital in 2023 and currently manages over $10 billion in capital across 16 funds, has made about 80 investments linked to AI, Singh said, highlighting its push to deepen its focus on AI funding. It is also preparing to open a U.S. office within the next 90 days as it expands its global footprint, per Singh, while continuing to view India as its largest and most important market.
Singh stated the firm believed AI would reshape venture investing more profoundly than previous technology shifts, arguing that successful AI investing required investors with deep technical understanding rather than “generalist” experience. He added that Peak XV was looking to add more AI-native talent, including researchers and engineers with backgrounds in machine learning and large-scale model development.
The firm has invested in more than 400 companies, and its portfolio has seen over 35 initial public offerings and several M&As to date.
Tech
PayPal hires HP’s Enrique Lores as its new CEO
PayPal said on Tuesday it is hiring HP’s Enrique Lores as its CEO and president, replacing current chief executive Alex Chriss. Lores, who has been the chair of PayPal’s board since July 2024, will also take up the role of president.
PayPal said the appointment was made because the company’s pace of change and execution was “not in line with the Board’s expectations” given broader market trends.
Chriss joined PayPal in September 2023 from Intuit, succeeding Dan Schulman. PayPal’s CFO and COO, Jamie Miller, will take over as interim CEO until Lores joins the company.
The appointment comes as PayPal on Tuesday reported lower than expected revenue and profit in the fourth quarter, as consumer spending dipped amid a broader cost of living crisis and a softening labor market. The company also forecast a dip in its full-year profit, which surprised investors, as Wall Street had broadly expected the company to forecast growth instead.
PayPal’s shares were down about 17.9% in premarket trading on Tuesday.
Lores, who served as president and CEO of HP for over six years, said that apart from product innovation, PayPal will hold itself accountable for delivering quarterly accounts.
“The payments industry is changing faster than ever, driven by new technologies, evolving regulations, an increasingly competitive landscape, and the rapid acceleration of AI that is reshaping commerce daily. PayPal sits at the center of this change, and I look forward to leading the team to accelerate the delivery of new innovations and to shape the future of digital payments and commerce,” Lores said in a statement.
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Tech
Fitbit founders launch AI platform to help families monitor their health
Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman have announced the launch of a new AI startup called Luffu that aims to help families proactively monitor their health. The duo are developing an “intelligent family care system” that will start with an app experience and then expand into hardware devices.
Two years after their exit from Google, Park and Friedman are betting on AI to help lighten the mental burden of caregiving. According to a recent report, 63 million, or nearly 1 in 4, U.S. adults are family caregivers, up 45% from 10 years ago.
Luffu uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so families can stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.
“At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself,” Park said in a press release. “I was caring for my parents from across the country, trying to piece together my mom’s health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it hard to get complete, timely context from her about doctor visits. I didn’t want to constantly check in, and she didn’t want to feel monitored. Luffu is the product we wished existed—to stay on top of our family’s health, know what changed and when to step in—without hovering.”

The pair note that today’s consumer health market is filled with tools for individuals, but that real life health is shared across partners, kids, parents, pets, and caregivers. Family information is scattered across devices, portals, calendars, attachments, spreadsheets, and paper documents.
With Luffu, people will be able to track the whole family’s details, including health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, doctor visits, and more. Users can log health information using voice, text, or photos. Luffu proactively watches for changes, and surfaces insights and alerts, such as unusual vitals or changes in sleep.
The pair told Axios that people can ask questions using plain language to ask about their family’s health, such as “Is Dad’s new meal plan affecting his blood pressure?” or “Did someone give the dog his medication?”
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“We designed Luffu to capture the details as life happens, keep family members updated and surface what matters at the right time—so caregiving feels more coordinated and less chaotic,” Friedman said in the press release.
People who are interested in Luffu can join the waitlist for the limited public beta.
