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Current is a new RSS reader that’s more like a river than an inbox

A new app called Current is rethinking the RSS reader, aiming to offer a reading experience that feels more like dipping into a stream of news, and less like a task to be completed. In doing so, the app could make using RSS feeds to consume news and information a more approachable experience for those who aren’t consuming news for work or consider themselves information junkies.

Current’s developer, Terry Godier, said he noticed that he always felt guilty when returning to his feed reader after a few days away. He attributed his feelings to how most readers were built to resemble email inboxes, with unread counts, and bolded text for new items.

“Email’s unread count means something specific: these are messages from real people who wrote to you and are, in some cases, actively waiting for your response. The number isn’t neutral information. It’s a measure of social debt,” Godier wrote in a blog post about how he came to create Current, which is a side project he worked on during his free time.

“But when we applied that same visual language to RSS…we imported the anxiety without the cause,” he said.

Image Credits:Current

For those unfamiliar, RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a format that allows users to access updated information from websites in a structured format. For instance, new headlines and articles from your favorite news site would appear as new, unread entries in the RSS reader (aka news reader or feed reader) of your choice.

The format was hugely popular in the early 2000s until the 2006 arrival of Twitter shifted people to another platform for real-time news and information sharing. Within a few years, people were ditching Google’s popular RSS reader, Google Reader, in favor of Twitter’s 140-character posts. Another few years later, Google Reader shut down for good. (We still miss it.)

But RSS itself never died. In addition to being the underlying tool for podcast distribution, you can still use the format to syndicate from websites through RSS apps like Feedly, NetNewsWire, Inoreader, Reeder, and others.

Current, however, proposes a different RSS experience. Instead of structuring feeds as lists to be processed, or unread counts driven to zero, the app’s main screen is a river.

ScreenshotImage Credits:Current on the App Store

“You’re not watching content drift past like a screensaver. It’s a river in the sense that matters: content arrives, lingers for a time, and then fades away,” writes Godier.

Each piece of content ages differently, with items dimming before fading out entirely and becoming invisible. Breaking news, for instance, remains bright for three hours, while daily news articles may stick around for around 18 hours. Essays sit for longer (three days), and articles like evergreen tutorials remain in the river for a week. As you scroll through the river, you keep up with what’s new and interesting without the pressure of marking things as read.

When you set up Current, you pick one of five speeds per source: Breaking, News, Article, Essay, or Tutorial. As you read, you don’t have to physically mark them as read; instead, you just push cards off the screen with a long left swipe, or tap the release button at the end of the article you’ve finished, which brings you back to the river. (There’s also an undo button.)

Image Credits:Current

Current also offers a number of other clever features that will thrill RSS enthusiasts.

It can fetch the full article text from the web even if the website itself is set to truncate its feeds (as many sites do to motivate people to visit), and you can mark sources as webcomics to unlock an image-first reader experience. You can also mute sources for a week and pin those you can’t miss to the top of the river.

The app adds some intelligence to your reading experience, too: If a site is flooding your feed, the app will prompt you to quiet or rate-limit them. It also notices when you regularly skip specific content or enthusiastically read it, and will suggest you either remove feeds you don’t read often or pin those that you do.

Notably, Current lets you follow individual writers in a space called Voices, which differentiates blogs or newsletters written by individuals from feeds belonging to larger news publications. You can tap on any Voice to filter your feed to focus on just their content.

(You can potentially follow individuals within larger publications if their writers have individual RSS feeds. Here’s mine!)

Image Credits:Current

Godier is interested in identifying voices behind the news, having authored a specification called Byline that adds author context to RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds.

“Voices” is just one of three built-in categories, which Current simply calls “currents” (hence the app’s name). There’s also the main feed, or “River,” and the “Read Later” category. You can even create your own currents (like “tech” or “design,” for example), or wait for the app to suggest some based on your reading patterns.

Overall, the app uses subtle touches and design elements like font choices, gestures, and themes to make the reading experience feel less stressful. That’s something even news junkies can appreciate.

Current is available as a one-time purchase costing $9.99 on Apple’s App Store for iOS, iPad, and Mac, and includes iCloud Sync and OPML import. There are no in-app purchases or subscriptions. A web version will be available in the future.

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India’s Snabbit closes $56M round as investor interest in on-demand home services heats up

Snabbit, an Indian on-demand home services startup, has closed a $56 million funding round, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier report.

Co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital, Mirae Asset Venture Investments’ Unicorn Growth Fund, and Bertelsmann India Investments, the company’s Series D round values the Bengaluru-based startup at around $350 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s up from $180 million about six months ago. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed also participated, alongside FJ Labs. The company has raised about $112 million in total.

Founded in 2024, Snabbit said it is now processing over 40,000 jobs daily across a network of more than 15,000 workers in five cities, offering services such as cleaning, dishwashing, and laundry as demand for rapid, on-demand home services grows in urban India.

The startup said the amount it loses on each order has fallen about 50%, while its customer-acquisition costs have shrunk roughly 65%.

Snabbit’s fundraise comes as investor interest in India’s on-demand home services sector heats up, with rival Pronto also in talks to raise fresh capital and publicly traded Urban Company reporting more than 1 million monthly bookings.

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Drizzle on top: a new high-end dog food brand is coming for the 1%

The pet food aisle has never been more crowded, which is exactly why Hilary Coles says she was skeptical when Atomic Labs came calling.

“I had the same reaction you did,” Coles told me on a call Monday afternoon, a day before her new company, Golden Child, opened for business. “Surely that can’t be what people need.”

Coles co-founded Hims & Hers with Andrew Dudum, Jack Abraham, and Joe Spector back in 2016 and spent seven years there overseeing brand, physical products, and consumer strategy before taking a year and a half off to have her children. She describes herself as “a consumer person first” who happened to land in healthcare. Dog food wasn’t “on the bingo card,” as she put it.

The pitch that won her over was rooted less in dog food specifically than in a methodology. Atomic, the startup studio founded by Abraham, runs what it calls “painted door tests” — lightweight experiments designed to reveal what consumers will actually do, not just what they say they want. When Atomic ran those tests in the pet food space, interest was clear. The team then studied 11,000 reviews of existing fresh dog food products and found recurring complaints: inconvenience, dogs getting sick, food that felt like a chore to prepare and serve. “We started to peel the onion,” Coles said.

What they found, she and her co-founder Quentin Lacornerie argue, is an industry that hasn’t innovated in about 12 years — a claim that strains credulity, given how crowded the premium and human-grade segment has become — but one they say ties to 11,000 customer reviews showing persistent complaints about existing fresh food options, even as the humans feeding their dogs have dramatically changed their expectations.

Lacornerie, who was part of the founding team at Hims & Hers and spent years spearheading its personalized growth strategy, says there are lots of parallels to the early days of that company. “Wellness has eclipsed Big Pharma by 4x in market cap,” he noted. Pet parents who take collagen for joint health, who read ingredient labels, and who track their own nutrition and increasingly want the same rigor applied to what goes in their dog’s bowl.

Golden Child is launching with two “five-star” products sold direct-to-consumer for now: a fresh frozen meal system and, more intriguingly, a “drizzle” — a shelf-stable liquid topper that can be added to whatever a dog is already eating, whether that’s Golden Child’s own food, kibble, or something else. The drizzle retails for $19.95 a bottle. The meal system starts at $3 a day and is sold primarily on subscription, though a starter box is available for people who want to ease into the relationship.

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The drizzle is the more novel idea and, presumably, the higher-margin one. I asked Coles whether the company had considered just focusing on that product. “Like all entrepreneurs, we have a lot of opportunities to build out worlds,” she answered. “This is just the first inning.”

The food itself is made in the U.S. across multiple manufacturing facilities, using human-grade supply chains — a harder thing to establish than it sounds, said Lacornerie. The recipes were developed by a PhD in animal nutrition; Megan Sprinkle, who is one of only roughly 80 board-certified veterinary nutritionists in the country; and (naturally) a classically trained chef, one who has work ties to Ina Garten and Guy Fieri, says Lacornerie.

The company also developed what it’s calling a “protein block,” a way of delivering chicken and beef with an enhanced amino acid profile that standard meat cuts alone don’t provide, says Coles.

Golden Child is announcing $37 million in total funding today as it comes out of stealth — a seed round and a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, with Atomic and A* also participating. That’s a meaningful amount for a company selling dog food, but Lacornerie says that doing it right requires actual experts who don’t just dial it in. Indeed, among the company’s 12 employees, the nutritionists and chef are all on staff, not advisors.

The brand name is broad by design. When I asked whether Golden Child might eventually expand into shampoos, travel gear, even some form of veterinary access — getting medication for a dog is its own particular bureaucratic headache — Coles didn’t deny it. “There’s a lot of interest and excitement from pet parents to involve their dogs in all aspects of their life,” she said. The goal, eventually, is to earn a place as a household brand, not just a food company.

Atomic has had notable successes along with some stumbles. Hims & Hers, now 10 years old, is a publicly traded company with a nearly $7 billion market cap. OpenStore, the e-commerce roll-up co-founded in 2021 by Abraham and venture investor Keith Rabois, tells a different story: After years of splashy coverage and more than $150 million in venture funding, it last year slashed its valuation by 95% and pivoted to focus on one of its brands, Jack Archer.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that OpenStore had shut down entirely.

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Otter’s new feature lets users search across their enterprise tools

AI meeting notetaker app companies have realized that transcribing meetings and providing summaries alone is not enough to justify their business models and valuations. They now want the apps to act as a full workspace where users bring in data from different sources, search across all of it, and make decisions about their business. Following notetakers like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, and Fathom, Otter is now launching enterprise search by acting as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. That means it can connect to and pull data from outside apps and services using a common standard that AI tools are rapidly adopting.

Otter has been around for nearly a decade now, but it has been making moves toward becoming an enterprise productivity tool in the last few months. Last October, the company launched a way for organizations to build custom MCPs to access Otter data outside the app. The company’s latest move is more about bringing outside data into the app.

With this launch, users can connect their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and query that data along with existing meeting data. The company said that it will soon allow connections with Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Slack. Users can not only search for data across these tools but also push meeting summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message.

The company said that it has also redesigned its AI assistant to be consistently present across the whole interface, so users can ask questions anytime. The assistant can understand the context of the screen, such as a particular meeting or a channel, and answer questions accordingly.

Meanwhile, most notetakers are following Granola’s lead and allowing for a botless meeting capture — recording meetings using a device’s system audio rather than having a bot join the call. Otter said that it brought this feature to the Mac app late last year and is now launching a Windows app with a similar feature.

There has been a debate around notetaking with bots (where a bot joins the meeting) or without bots. Otter CEO Sam Liang said that the company’s enterprise customers prefer when a meeting notetaker joins the call.

“When we talk to enterprise customers, most of them actually prefer the notetaker that joins the Zoom meeting because it provides the transparency. They also prefer the meeting notes to be shared with all the meeting attendees, so that the note is not limited to one person,” he told TechCrunch over a call.

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Otter said that it has a deduplication feature that prevents a swarm of bots from joining a meeting simultaneously to avoid situations where there are more bots than humans on a call.

Last year, the company said it had 25 million users and $100 million in annual recurring revenue. While the company didn’t provide a new set of financials, it said that the platform now has 35 million users.

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