Tech
The offline desk gadget that actually got me to sit up straight
Working from home has its own perils. Pets can be demanding, your back aches from hours at a desk, or you simply forget to move. There are a few apps that nudge you to move around or indicate that you’re not sitting in an ideal position, but they’re easy to dismiss.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade at a home desk, iterating on the setup as I go — gaming chair, lumbar support, the works. None of it guarantees good posture.
Then I came across Isa, a desk device from German startup Deep Care that takes a different approach entirely. It tracks posture, hydration, light, sound, and movement. And it does all of it without a camera or an internet connection, which, in an era of always-on surveillance, is a meaningful differentiator.
Here’s how it works and what’s inside. Isa has a 5.5-inch IPS HD screen and looks like a table clock. It is powered by USB-C; the company supplies a power unit with it, but you can use any of your existing chargers too, as it has a power consumption rating of roughly 2.45W.
The key sensor for the device is the Time-of-Flight (ToF) 3D depth sensor on the front — the same technology used in facial recognition and some smartphone cameras — that tracks posture and movement. It also enables beta features, such as counting the number of times you’ve had water or other liquids. The company said that the sensor works in the range of 0.15 meters to 1.8 meters. That means if the device is sitting on your desk, it can measure your movement, even when you stand up and move about. It also packs several other sensors: a ToF 1D sensor, a gyroscope, a barometer, a light sensor, a sound level sensor, a CO₂/VoC sensor, and a temperature and humidity sensor.
Getting started is straightforward — the device asks for a few details about you and your work routine. I found it strange that there was no option to set the device to India time (or any other Asian time zone). The company said Isa currently supports only EU and US time zones. Fair enough for now — but broader time zone support, or even a simple world clock, feels like a basic expectation for a desk device.
On the screen, Isa displays your posture with a squircle (a rounded square) ring that fills or empties based on how well you’re sitting, while a water-tank-style widget tracks your drinking. If you are not sitting in the correct posture, the indicator will turn yellow. The Apple Watch-style ring is a surprisingly effective nudge — when I see yellow or red, I straighten up almost instinctively.
The device vibrates to alert you if you’ve been slouching for too long, and I’m okay with that kind of mild shaming. That alert also indicates if you are leaning far too forward or back and helps you correct your stance.
A similar widget tracks movement, and if you have been stationary for a while, Isa suggests you get up, with on-device guided exercises to follow. When you return to your desk after a break, the movement tracker resets.
Deep Care chose not to include a cameras, which helps with privacy, but it comes with trade-offs.
If a bottle or some other object sits between you and the sensor, it may read that as a person and log you as stationary. Pets or housemates passing by can trigger the sensor, too. Isa usually figures out that you’ve stepped away and goes to a digital clock display, but I would have liked a manual button to tell it I’m not at the desk so it stops tracking.
Because of the sensor-only approach, the device occasionally told me I’d been stationary for too long when I’d been sitting for under half an hour. These are minor inconveniences. On balance, the device made me check my posture more often than I used to, and the exercise suggestions are truly useful.
To process all these features, the device uses a quad-core 2 GHz processor. The device can connect to Wi-Fi for software updates, but you can turn it off at any time.
Deep Care was founded by three former Bosch employees and initially sold Isa directly to businesses. It recently expanded to consumers — a shift that signals confidence in the retail market for workplace wellness hardware, and a test of whether a subscription model layered onto premium hardware can find a mainstream audience.
Isa is priced at €299 ($354) with two subscription tiers. The core plan (€4.99 per month) gives you access to posture tracking, healthy sitting habit tracking, drinking habit detection, and its exercise library. The Pro plan(€7.99 per month) lets you track light, noise, and CO2 levels for a healthy working environment.
The company plans to use Isa’s sensor suite to venture into mental health-related tracking. It claims that by using signals like posture, head movement, and chest movement, the device can measure breathing patterns. Plus, paired with environmental data like noise, light levels, and CO2 level, the company wants to introduce a stress-related score.
Even if you skip the mental health features, Isa is a solid device for anyone serious about posture and movement. It isn’t cheap, and the subscription adds to the long-term cost. But if you or someone you know works from home and has been meaning to do something about their desk habits, it’s one of the more thoughtful options out there.
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Tech
Indian Uber rival Rapido raises $240M at $3B valuation
Indian ride-hailing company Rapido said on Friday it had raised $240 million in fresh funding at a $3 billion valuation to compete better in the country’s growing but challenging mobility market.
Led by Prosus, the equity round saw participation from existing investors, including WestBridge Capital and Accel. The round was part of a larger $730 million primary and secondary financing. Rapido was previously valued at $2.3 billion during a secondary transaction last year.
Rapido said the fresh capital would be used to increase its footprint in high-growth markets, strengthen its driver network, and invest in technology and platform efficiency.
“We are going deeper into markets where demand exists, but supply remains fragmented,” Rapido co-founder Aravind Sanka said in a statement. “We will sharpen our focus on strengthening supply, building technologies, and expanding our multimodal footprint, with far greater speed and intent.”
The funding round underlines continuing investor interest in India’s mobility sector despite persistent concerns about pricing pressures, regulation, and profitability.
Founded in 2015, Rapido operates in more than 400 cities and has spurred its growth by enabling ride-hailing for lower-cost and more flexible modes of transport such as motorbikes and auto-rickshaws in India’s congested, price-sensitive cities. The Bengaluru-based startup has been expanding to smaller towns, too.
The funding comes in the wake of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s visit to India, where the ride-hailing giant this week unveiled plans to expand its engineering and infrastructure operations via two new technology campuses and a local data center partnership. Uber earlier this year infused $330 million into its India subsidiary as it sought to strengthen its presence amid growing competition from local rivals like Ola, Rapido, and Namma Yatri.
Khosrowshahi said last year that Rapido had overtaken Ola as Uber’s biggest competitor in the country.
India is currently one of the world’s most challenging ride-hailing markets because of intense price competition, supply issues, high driver incentive costs, and evolving local regulations. Nevertheless, Rapido has rapidly expanded its market share, even entering the food delivery business through its subsidiary Ownly last year.
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Tech
Osaurus brings both local and cloud AI models to your Mac
As AI models increasingly become commoditized, startups are racing to build the software layer that sits on top of them. One interesting entrant into this space is Osaurus, an open source, Apple-only LLM server that lets users move between different local AI models, either locally or in the cloud, while keeping their files and tools all on their own hardware.
Osaurus evolved out of the idea for a desktop AI companion, Dinoki, which Osaurus co-founder Terence Pae described as a sort of “AI-powered Clippy.” Dinoki’s customers had asked him why they should buy the app if they still had to pay for tokens — the usage units AI companies charge for processing prompts and generating responses.
That got Pae thinking more deeply about running AI locally.
“That’s how Osaurus started,” Pae, previously a software engineer at Tesla and Netflix, told TechCrunch over a call. The idea, he explained, was to try to run an AI assistant locally. “You can do pretty much everything on your Mac locally, like browsing your files, accessing your browser, accessing your system configurations. I figured this would be a great way to position Osaurus as a personal AI for individuals.”
Pae began building the tool in public as an open source project, adding features and fixing bugs along the way.
Today, Osaurus can flexibly connect with locally hosted AI models or cloud providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Users can freely choose which AI models they’re using and keep other aspects of the AI experience on their own hardware, like the models’ own memory, or their files and tools.
Given that different AI models have different strengths, the advantage of this system is that users can switch to the AI model that best fits their needs.
Such a structure makes Osaurus what’s called a “harness” — a control layer that connects different AI models, tools, and workflows through a single interface, similar to tools like OpenClaw or Hermes. However, the difference is that such tools are often aimed at developers who know their way around a terminal. And sometimes, like in the case of OpenClaw, they may pose security issues and holes to worry about.
Osaurus, meanwhile, presents an easy-to-use interface that consumers can use and addresses security concerns by running things in a hardware-isolated, virtual sandbox. This limits the AI to a certain scope, keeping your computer and data safe.
Of course, the practice of running AI models on your machine is still in its early days, given that it’s heavily resource-intensive and hardware-dependent. To run local models, your system will need at least 64GB of RAM. For running larger models, like DeepSeek v4, Pae recommends systems with about 128GB of RAM.
But Pae believes local AI’s needs will come down in time.
“I can see the potential of it, because the intelligence per wattage — which is like the metric for local AI — has been going up significantly. It’s on its own curve of innovation. Last year, local AI could barely finish sentences, but today it can actually run tools, write code, access your browser, and order stuff from Amazon … It’s just getting better and better,” he said.
Osaurus today can run MiniMax M2.5, Gemma 4, Qwen3.6, GPT-OSS, Llama, DeepSeek V4, and other models. It also supports Apple’s on-device foundation models, Liquid AI’s LFM family of on-device models, and in the cloud, it can connect to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI/Grok, Venice AI, OpenRouter, Ollama, and LM Studio.
As a full MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, you can give any MCP-compatible client access to your tools as well. Plus, it ships with over 20 native plug-ins for Mail, Calendar, Vision, macOS Use, XLSX, PPTX, Browser, Music, Git, Filesystem, Search, Fetch, and more.
More recently, Osaurus was updated to include voice capabilities as well.
Since the project went live nearly a year ago, it has been downloaded north of 112,000 times, according to its website. The app competes with other tools that let you run models locally, like Ollama, Msty, LM Studio, and others, but offers a differentiated feature set and presents itself as a more user-friendly option for non-developers, too.
Currently, Osaurus’ founders (who include co-founder Sam Yoo) are participating in the New York-based startup accelerator Alliance. They’re also thinking about next steps, which could see Osaurus being offered to businesses, like those in the legal space or in healthcare, where running local LLMs could address privacy concerns.
As the power of local AI models grows, the team believes it could lower the demand for AI data centers.
“We’re seeing this explosive growth in the AI space where [cloud AI providers] have to scale up using data centers and infrastructure, but we feel like people haven’t really seen the value of the local AI yet,” Pae said. “Instead of relying on the cloud, they can actually deploy a Mac Studio on-prem, and it should use substantially less power. You still have the capabilities of the cloud, but you will not be dependent on a data center to be able to run that AI,” he added.
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Tech
Meridian Ventures launched a $35M fund with a focus on MBA-deferred founders
Meridian Ventures was born out of a shared experience: deferred MBAs. Now, founders Devon Gethers and Karlton Haney have raised a $35 million fund to back pre-seed and seed-stage companies started by people like them.
Gethers, 29, told TechCrunch the idea for a firm arose after he met Haney in Harvard’s MBA deferred admission program in 2020.
Gethers grew up in poverty in Washington State, studied behavioral science and finance at the University of Utah, then moved into private equity before launching a company of his own (which he later exited). Haney, meanwhile, grew up on a farm in Arkansas, raising chickens, birds, and “anything that flew,” Gethers said about his business partner.
Haney, 28, went on to study industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas and worked as an investor at the family office, the Stephens Group. The two came together in 2023 with the idea of launching a firm that backed people with MBAs, with a tilt toward those who had deferred.
“Our thesis is going against a bit of the grain, the rhetoric you hear in Silicon Valley that MBAs don’t make good founders,” Gethers said, referring to the belief that an MBA prepares students for corporate culture, not the flexible, free-wheeling world of Silicon Valley.
To prove their thesis, Gethers and Haney went out and cold-called prospective limited partners and knocked on doors until they raised $2.5 million as a proof-of-concept fund to back 45 companies.
The two headed off to Harvard Business School in summer 2023 and about a year into it, decided to try and raise their first institutional fund. The funding environment was tough, but the pair ended up raising an oversubscribed $35 million fund from LPs, including publicly traded banks, family offices, and Fortune 500 executives, Gethers said. They graduated from Harvard Business School in 2025.
This new fund will back founders building enterprise technology in the United States. Meridian is agnostic, Gethers said, noting that the firm has already invested in companies in fintech, logistics, healthcare, and of course, AI. The average check size will be $500,000 for pre-seed and $750,000 for seed, and the capital hopes to be deployed over the next three years.
“We saw an expanding gap between ambitious founders building frontier technologies and the capital required to help carry those ambitions forward,” Gethers said. “With this $35 million fund, our goal is to seal that gap.”
This piece was updated to clarify that the firm also backs those who have not deferred.
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