Tech
Qualcomm backs SpotDraft to scale on-device contract AI with valuation doubling toward $400M
As demand grows for privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows.
The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year.
Across regulated sectors, enterprises have moved quickly to test generative AI, but privacy, security, and data governance concerns continue to slow adoption for sensitive workflows — especially in legal, where contracts can include privileged information, intellectual property, pricing, and deal terms. Industry research has consistently flagged data security and privacy as key barriers to wider GenAI deployment in professional services, pushing vendors like SpotDraft to pursue architectures that keep core contract intelligence on the user’s device rather than routing it through the cloud.
At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025, SpotDraft demonstrated its VerifAI workflow running end-to-end on Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, executing contract review and edits offline while keeping the document on the local machine. SpotDraft said internet connectivity is still required for login, licensing, and collaboration features, but contract review, risk scoring, and redlining can run fully offline without sending documents to the cloud.
SpotDraft sees legal as an early proving ground for on-device enterprise AI, arguing that sensitive contracts often cannot be routed through external cloud models due to privacy, security, and compliance constraints.
“The future of how enterprise AI is going to be — right now, there’s got to be AI that is close to the document, which is privacy critical, latency sensitive, [and] legally sensitive, and those are the things that will move on device,” said Shashank Bijapur (pictured above, left), co-founder and CEO of SpotDraft, in an interview.
SpotDraft says VerifAI’s on-device capability extends beyond simply generating summaries, with the tool designed to apply playbooks and recommendations directly inside Microsoft Word, the way legal teams already work. “VerifAI will compare a contract against your guidelines, your playbooks, your prior policies,” said Madhav Bhagat (pictured above, right), co-founder and CTO of SpotDraft.
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Bijapur told TechCrunch that the demand for on-device AI is emerging most clearly in tightly regulated sectors, including defense and pharma, where internal security reviews and data residency requirements can slow or block the use of cloud-based AI tools for sensitive documents.
On-device models have rapidly closed the gap with cloud-based systems, both in output quality and response times, Bhagat said. “Now we’ve come to a place where, in terms of eval, we are seeing as little as 5% difference between the frontier models, and some of these fine-tuned on device models,” he said, adding that speeds on newer chips are now “one-third of what we get in the cloud.”
Since its launch in 2017, SpotDraft said it has reached more than 700 customers, up from around 400 in February last year, and counts Apollo.io, Panasonic, Zeplin, and Whatfix among its users. The company said adoption is rising on its contract lifecycle management platform, with customers now processing over 1 million contracts annually, contract volumes growing 173% year-over-year, and nearly 50,000 monthly active users. It also expects 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, after growing 169% in 2024 and posting a similar growth rate in 2025, though it did not share specific revenue figures.
SpotDraft plans to use the new capital to deepen its product and AI capabilities and expand its enterprise presence across the Americas, the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and India, Bijapur said, adding that Qualcomm’s involvement extends beyond financing into joint development and go-to-market efforts for on-device deployments. The startup’s on-device workflow is currently available to a limited set of customers, and the founders expect it to expand more broadly as compatible AI PC hardware becomes more widely available.
“SpotDraft’s ability to deploy their proprietary models securely on-device using Snapdragon platforms represents a meaningful advancement for a privacy-critical industry,” said Quinn Li, senior vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, and global head of Qualcomm Ventures.
Bengaluru- and New York-based SpotDraft said it has a team of 300-plus employees, including 15–20 in the U.S., where COO Akshay Verma is based, and four to five in the UK, with the rest of the workforce in Bengaluru.
To date, the startup has raised $92 million, including the latest Qualcomm Ventures investment. Its earlier investors include Vertex Growth Singapore, Trident Growth Partners, Xeed VC, Arkam Ventures, and Prosus Ventures.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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