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Investors back Skye’s AI home screen app for iPhone ahead of launch

Skye, an iPhone app still in private testing, wants to change how people interact with AI on their smartphones. And even before it’s launched, it’s already attracted interest online and from investors and “tens of thousands” of users, according to its creator — a sign that consumers might want a more AI-aware iPhone.

Instead of launching an app or speaking to an AI chatbot, the startup is working to design an “agentic homescreen” for the iPhone, using iOS widgets as its interface.

Through those widgets, Skye would bring a sort of ambient intelligence to your device, offering personalized insights about your local weather, your current context, your health, and more, according to a post from its creator, who goes by signüll on X. The app can also draft email replies, help you with your meeting prep, send reminders, and flag suspicious charges in your bank accounts. Its creator also claims it can provide location-specific recommendations and additional information about local businesses, neighborhoods, and attractions while you’re out and about.

Much of this data would be pulled in through authorized connections granted by the user.

The app, which is being built by a small team from the startup Signull Labs, has already attracted investor attention, despite not yet having a public product.

According to an SEC filing, the startup has raised north of $3.58 million in pre-seed funding, in a round that closed in September 2025. PitchBook also currently lists New York-based Signull Labs’ funding along with a post-money valuation of $19.5 million.

Since announcing the startup’s plans on X, signüll, whose name TechCrunch confirmed as Nirav Savjani according to the SEC filings and other documents, claims the app has added “tens of thousands” of users to the waitlist. This metric, if accurate, would suggest strong consumer interest in a more AI-aware iPhone. (And the possibility that a new type of AI device, like the rumored OpenAI smartphone, could have a chance.)

TechCrunch spoke to signüll, who shared more about the product and funding, under the condition of protecting his pseudonymity. TechCrunch declined, as signüll’s name is listed publicly in the SEC filings establishing Signull Labs. (TechCrunch said we would still be happy to publish an interview with him when he’s prepared to go on the record.)

Image Credits:Skye/Signull Labs

The founder noted he’s previously worked at Google and Meta, though he has no obvious LinkedIn presence. He also told TechCrunch that Skye’s early backers included a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), True Ventures, SV Angel, and other individuals. Offline Ventures also lists Signull Labs in its online portfolio, we found.

Since announcing Skye, Savjani has appeared on the TBPN podcast as his avatar and has been posting on X about his use of the app.

He told TechCrunch that the Skye app plans to launch to its waitlist of users soon, though he declined to give specifics.

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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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