Tech
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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Tech
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.
Tech
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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Tech
Red Hat’s OpenClaw maintainer just made enterprise Claw deployments a lot safer
On Tuesday, Red Hat principal software engineer Sally O’Malley released a new open source tool called Tank OS to make it easier to deploy and manage OpenClaw agents more safely.
“This was a fun project that I put together on the weekend that I knew would be a really good fit for AI and where we’re going,” she told TechCrunch, adding that she wanted to give it “to the masses.”
Tank OS is geared toward power users looking to run OpenClaw on their own computers and toward IT pros managing fleets of corporate OpenClaw agents. It makes OpenClaw safer and easier to maintain en masse.
Countless people, companies, and startups are already inventing better ways to work with OpenClaw — the open source project that installs an AI agent on a local computer. There is also a growing number of startups building competing claw alternatives that they say are safer (like NanoClaw).
What makes O’Malley’s project notable is that she is an OpenClaw maintainer. That means she’s among the select software engineers working with creator Peter Steinberger to decide which features and bugs get worked on. In her case, she focuses on making OpenClaw work better in enterprise use cases, and with Red Hat’s various flavors of the Linux operating system. (While Steinberger was hired by OpenAI, he still leads the independent open source OpenClaw project.)
O’Malley joined OpenClaw because she sees it working to “enable everyone to run AI in a safe way, that’s open,” she said.
But she got to thinking about what will happen when OpenClaw invades an enterprise and decided to build a tool for that eventuality. She began with an open source container tool called Podman, created by a colleague at Red Hat. Containers are a way to run apps separately from the underlying computer, with everything the app needs to run, bundled together. They can run a Linux app on a Windows or Mac machine, for instance.
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Podman is a particularly secure way to do this because it’s “rootless,” meaning it doesn’t give the containers any privileges from the underlying machine, Red Hat says.
Tank OS loads OpenClaw onto Red Hat’s Fedora Linux OS in a Podman container and makes that container a bootable image, meaning it will run and launch OpenClaw when you start the computer.
Her tool includes everything needed to make OpenClaw useful without human oversight, like state (the part that allows it to remember); the ability to store API keys (the credentials for accessing subscriptions and services); and other features.
Users can run multiple Tank OS instances on a machine to do different tasks, never sharing passwords or credentials between them, and no OpenClaw instance can gain access to anything else running on the computer.
While O’Malley knows that the OpenClaw project is working to make the agent safer, she says that “it’s an incredibly powerful application,” but can also be “dangerous” if not configured properly. “It’s not a tool that you can use easily unless you do have some sort of technical experience,” she said.
Stories abound, such as the Meta AI security researcher whose Claw started deleting all of her work email, or an agent that downloaded in plain text all of a user’s WhatsApp DMs. There’s also a growing crop of malware aimed at OpenClaw users.
To be sure, Tank OS isn’t really for techno novices either, she says. You have to be comfortable installing and maintaining software on your computer, she says. Tank OS is also not the only OpenClaw implementation working in containers. NanoClaw, for instance, is doing a similar thing with well-known container company Docker.
But Tank OS is intended to be especially useful for IT pros (aka, Red Hat’s main customers) who may one day manage fleets of OpenClaw agents on corporate computers. It allows them to update the agents the same way they already manage other containers.
“My role within OpenClaw is really my interest in it,” O’Malley said. “How it’s going to look scaled out when there are millions of these autonomous agents talking to one another.”
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