Tech
Babbel co-founder Markus Witte will once again run the company, replacing CEO Arne Schepker
Arne Schepker, the CEO of the popular Berlin-based language learning platform Babbel, is stepping down, and the company’s co-founder and former CEO Markus Witte is stepping back in to lead the company “into a new phase while searching for Arne’s successor with patience,” the company said. This new phase, unsurprisingly, will involve AI.
Witte will not claim the CEO role for the time being, but instead will be executive chairman and managing director.
After almost exactly five years as the sole CEO — and a few months prior as co-CEO together with Witte, who had held the position in the preceding years — Schepker decided not to renew his contract, he told me. Witte will continue in his role as Executive Chairman and will now also take on the Managing Director position.
“I just couldn’t get to a strong enough ‘yes’ and as a CEO, I don’t feel you can do the job with just 100 percent commitment. It needs to be 180 percent, no matter what. And I couldn’t get there, and I didn’t feel that was enough and right and sufficient for the team, for the company, for our shareholders, so I decided not to extend my contract,” he said.
Schepker joined Babbel as its CMO in 2015. At this point, he said, he’s seeing repeating patterns. He couldn’t quite get excited about another round of creating an annual budget and setting OKRs for the team.
“That’s reason number one. Reason number two is that the timing actually is quite good, because we are, anyways, moving into a new phase as a company,” he said. In addition, he also wants to take more time to travel with his family for at least the next year. “Don’t expect anything on my LinkedIn feed until next winter.”
He also noted that he was happy to be able to do our interview together with Witte. “I think a founder who built the company, who built our first products, who built our culture, who built all the foundations that I was able to work off of, and someone who I deeply trust and have a strong alignment with is a fantastic transition,” he said.
During Schepker’s tenure, Babbel’s revenue grew 6x to around $300 million, with a team of almost 1,000 people.
“We’ve achieved what we wanted to achieve,” he said. But what he’s perhaps most proud of is that the company was able to help students during the pandemic and now Ukrainian refugees with their language learning needs for free.
“There’s no monetary value to that. I can’t even prove you an ROI on it. Still to the day, I cannot, but not a conversation goes by where that’s not brought up, whether that’s a press interview, a candidate interview, or just a dinner with friends.”
So what does the next phase of Babbel look like? Witte told me that he believes as technology is changing, AI can now play a more direct role in helping people learn a new language. Babbel already used machine learning under the hood, but it never billed itself as an “AI company.” Instead, it always put an emphasis on the teachers and experts it worked with to create its courses (in no small part to differentiate from competitors like Duolingo).
With the technology moving so quickly, though, Witte also acknowledged that it’s hard even to think about strategy beyond the next half year.
“We’re in a phase where even people building large language models don’t know what the next generation will be able to do,” he said. “And so I think even companies of our size, so not very early-stage startups, need to be more nimble than they ever have been.”
And at this stage, he believes, having a founder back at the helm of the company may actually be an advantage because it’s easier for him, as a founder (and one of the largest shareholders in the company), to make risky changes to the company’s strategy.
In Witte’s view, we’ve now reached a point where the combination of large language models, which tend to excel at language-related tasks, and Babbel’s deep expertise in language learning, will change how the company goes about teaching its customers. Before, the technology simply wasn’t there. “We have come to the point where what we said before is not true anymore,” he said.
Schepker also noted that at its core, Babbel’s mission and the problem it tries to solve is a human one.
“The problem to solve is still human language learning. You still want to speak to someone in another language. You want to have a conversation with a loved one, a family member, whatever it is,” he said. “There’s a real opportunity here for Babbel to use all the didactic knowledge that we have, to use all the data that we have, to use this new technology and put that together and create a real, personalized and powerful language learning journey that finally gets us to crack the problem for real. Because we’ve made language learning easier, but it’s still work.”
In addition to navigating the change brought upon by AI, Witte also noted that he wants to focus on creating more “moments of delight,” for the company’s employees and users. “These things that bring a smile to your face, on all the different levels, that’s what I’m driving towards,” he told me. “That’s kind of my mental model in the moment. I don’t think we have to excel in everything. I don’t think we have to polish everything, but I want these moments of delight on all dimensions, on all levels.”
Tech
Cursor makes its biggest India push yet ahead of SpaceX acquisition with localized pricing
Weeks before its expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet, launching its first country-specific subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to drive its next stage of growth.
On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a ₹649-a-month (about $7) subscription built specifically for India — and priced well below Cursor’s standard $20-a-month Pro subscription.
The move reflects India’s growing importance to Cursor’s business. The startup says India is already its third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its user base in the country more than tripling over the past year.
That scale, coupled with India’s deep pool of software engineering talent, made it the first market where Cursor chose to localize pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt that we had an opportunity there to right-size the commercial model and drive scale,” Green said. “The technical competency of the country and the engineering talent that already exists make it a very natural fit.”
India has emerged as one of the world’s largest software developer hubs. Earlier this year, GitHub said that the country has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the U.S., with more than two million joining in 2026 alone.
Cursor Start includes access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, alongside cloud agents, its iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. The startup said the plan is aimed at developers who need more AI-assisted coding capacity than the free tier offers without upgrading to its full Pro subscription.
The lower-priced plan is intended to broaden access rather than replace Cursor’s flagship offering, Green said. Unlike the $20-a-month Pro subscription, Start does not include access to frontier AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, or advanced features including Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK.
The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments through credit and debit cards as well as India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Green told TechCrunch that Cursor would use multiple checks to ensure the India-only subscription is available only to individual users in the country, including measures to deter people from accessing the plan through virtual private networks (VPNs).
Cursor is not alone in tailoring its pricing for India. OpenAI and Anthropic have also rolled out India-specific plans over the past year as global AI companies compete for users in one of the world’s fastest-growing AI markets.
While Cursor Start is initially limited to India, Green told TechCrunch that the startup could expand localized pricing to other markets if the model proves successful.
“We will continue to do everything we can to fuel the demand and serve those clients that are using us,” Green said. “Now, if this model proves that we could take it to other markets, perhaps we will. But I think it’d be crazy to say we would never do it elsewhere.”
OpenAI provides one precedent for this strategy, having launched its sub-$5 ChatGPT Go in India before expanding the lower-priced subscription to other markets.
In addition to the localized pricing strategy, Cursor is also expanding its presence in India through new hires. Green told TechCrunch that the startup recently hired its first salesperson in India and expects another leader to join in Delhi. The company is also building out its a government affairs office, alongside three technical customer support hires, as it expands its presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.
Cursor’s enterprise push is still in its early stages in India, Green said, where adoption has so far been driven largely by individual developers, startups, and universities. He said Cursor sees significant opportunities in sectors including banking and large enterprises as it expands its local sales efforts.
Green said, the India-specific pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader. He said the lower-priced plan is viable because it is built around Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party frontier models.
Cursor’s India expansion comes a little over a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI coding startup in a $60 billion all-stock deal, following SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3. However, SpaceX has been partnered with Cursor since April to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI.”
Green said Cursor will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes and that the company’s India expansion plans were already in motion before the deal. Once the acquisition closes, however, Green said SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.
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Tech
Lyft and Baidu enter London’s robotaxi battleground as testing begins
Chinese tech giant Baidu has started testing autonomous vehicles in London as part of its partnership with Lyft and Freenow, the German taxi and multi-mobility app that Lyft now owns. Baidu is the latest in a string of companies to test self-driving technology in the UK ahead of commercial robotaxi deployments.
The testing, which began Tuesday with human safety operators, comes nearly a year after the two companies struck a strategic partnership to deploy Baidu’s purpose-built Apollo Go RT6 robotaxi across key European markets through the Lyft platform. The vehicles will eventually be available through Freenow, which Lyft acquired in 2025 for about $197 million.
That deal gave Lyft a foothold in Europe’s ride-hailing market, where a handful of well-funded companies are now jockeying to be first to market with robotaxis.
London is particular is shaping up to be a key battleground in the region. In April, Waymo began testing its autonomous vehicles with human safety operators in the city. Uber and its self-driving tech partner, Wayve, also announced plans to launch a robotaxi service in London this year. That initial service — which customers can now sign up for on an interest list — will have human safety operators behind the wheel before fully driverless operations begin later.
Baidu and Freenow by Lyft (as the latter service is now called) said they expect to invite the public to hail their robotaxis in 2027. The companies, which didn’t provide a more detailed timeline, noted that the launch will depend on regulatory approval.
For now, dozens of test vehicles will operate within London’s borough of Brent. Lyft and Freenow said they continue discussions with safety and city officials, including Transport for London (TfL) and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV). The UK government is in the process of creating autonomous vehicle regulations and opened applications in May for companies interested in an AV pilot program that lets companies test self-driving vehicles under government oversight.
When the service does launch, Freenow by Lyft said it will operate a hybrid network — employing the same language rival Uber has used — meaning human drivers operating taxis and private-hire vehicles will work alongside the robotaxis.
“As a platform with deep roots in the taxi industry, our priority is ensuring that autonomous technology supports the professional drivers who keep London moving,” Thomas Zimmermann, CEO of Freenow by Lyft, said in a statement.
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Tech
Granola launches an Apple Watch app
AI note-taking app Granola is launching an app for the Apple Watch in hopes that its users will want to record meetings and take notes without using their smartphones.
Users can set the Granola app as one of the watch faces to start transcribing at any time. The app can also surface reminders about upcoming meetings, and works with the iOS app, which launched last year.
The company’s co-founder, Chris Pedregal, told TechCrunch that the Apple Watch app is meant to be a way to capture in-person meetings without having to take your phone out of your pocket — for example, if someone is having a walking one-on-one meeting.
When Granola tested its app with employees who had Apple Watches, a big chunk of their mobile usage switched from iOS to the Watch, the company said.
In the past year, companies have released auxiliary devices that can be used with smartphones to record and transcribe meetings. Granola said it considered it easier to develop an app for Apple Watches rather than integrate with another hardware product at this point. Dictation app Monlogue earlier this year also added support for meeting note-taking, for both online and offline modalities, along with Apple Watch support.
Granola became a unicorn earlier this year with a $125 million Series C round that was led by Index Ventures.
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