Tech
BCI startup Neurable looks to license its ‘mind-reading’ tech for consumer wearables
BCI (brain-computer interface) technology — in which neural signals are routed from a person’s head to a computer — was once the stuff of science fiction, but these days the technology represents a competitive corner of the tech industry. One of the companies racing to commercialize BCI is Neurable, which this week announced that it’s looking to license its “mind-reading” technology to consumer wearables.
Neurable specializes in “non-invasive” BCI, which distinguishes itself from firms like Neuralink — the Elon Musk-founded startup known for inserting computer chips directly into people’s skulls — in that its product doesn’t require users to undergo brain surgery to enjoy its benefits.
Neurable’s technology works through a combination of EEG sensors and signal processing that can scan a user’s brain activity, analyze it with AI, and provide information about a person’s cognitive performance.
In December, Neurable raised $35 million in a Series A, which it plans to use to scale the commercialization of its technology. This week, the company announced that, as part of its expansion effort, it is looking to license its technology to a variety of consumer-facing companies.
The idea is that mind-reading tech (which can provide detailed data about how a person’s brain works while they’re engaged in various activities) could be integrated into wearables across a number of industries — including health and athletic products, productivity tools, and gaming. “Through Neurable’s licensing platform, OEMs can directly integrate its AI-powered brain-sensing technology into existing hardware, such as headphones, hats, glasses, and headbands, while maintaining full control over product design, user experience, and distribution,” the company said in a press release on Tuesday.
Neurable has already fostered partnerships with a number of companies to test out its effectiveness. This includes HP Inc.’s HyperX, a gaming brand, with which it created a headset designed to help gamers “level up their game play by optimizing focus and performance.” It has also partnered with a company called iMotions, a software platform that specializes in human behavior research, to assist with the company’s research initiatives.
In an interview, Neurable’s CEO Ramses Alcaide declined to say what new partnerships the company has in the works, but said that the company was seeking to expand its purview across a host of domains.
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“In the past, we were very specific about our partnerships,” Alcaide said, noting that Neurable tended to home in on a particular company to prove that a unique commercial application was worthwhile. Now that they know expectations can be met on a number of fronts, the startup is focused on scaling itself, he said.
“What we’re doing now is we’re basically saying, like, ‘Hey, we’ve demonstrated that we’re getting great traction’,” Alcaide said. “Like, let’s make this as ubiquitous as heart rate sensors on your wrist, right?”
Despite the “non-invasive” label, brain data is arguably a little bit more intimate than the information culled from a heart rate sensor, so what kind of privacy protections does a company like Neurable provide?
Alcaide said that the company ensures that user data is “protected and anonymized.” The company’s privacy policy provides a variety of different guidelines for when and how a user’s data might be accessed and used. “We make sure we follow HIPAA standards, like we’ve gone above and beyond where a lot of startups would be at our stage to make sure that we protect the data, we encrypt it, and that we anonymize it,” Alcaide said.
Does Neurable leverage a user’s neural data to train its AI software? “We can with user consent, right?” said Alcaide. “But we do it in a very specific way.” That specific way involves asking the user whether their data can be used for the purposes of particular experiments, Alcaide said. “We are not collecting the data, just training on it willy-nilly,” he said. In other words, this kind of data usage is quite targeted.
Alcaide said that his industry is at an “inflection point” — one wherein there finally exists “a real business model in neuro-technology that is scalable.” What comes after that inflection point is the big question.
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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
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
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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