Tech
SpendRule raises $2M, emerges from stealth to help hospitals track spending
Last year, Chris Heckler was coming to the end of a five-year non-compete after selling his last company, a health care startup. “I was sitting on the sidelines doing angel investing, and I realized I was too young to retire,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get back into it.”
At the same time, Joseph Akintolayo had just sold his fintech company. He, too, had a non-compete, but was noodling on ideas for a company. He knew Heckler, as Akintolayo had once served as an advisor on one of his projects.
In this downtime, however, they wanted to come together — Heckler, with his connections, and Akintolayo, with his knowledge of AI and supply chains — to try and build something new.
The result was SpendRule, launched last summer as an AI-powered platform that helps healthcare systems track their spending. The company emerged from stealth on Tuesday, with $2 million in funding in a round led by Abundant Venture Partners. Others in the round include MemorialCare Innovation Fund and Zeal Capital Partners.
Right now, if an item has a barcode, health systems use a three-way match, Akintolayo, the company’s CTO, said, which connects a purchase to an invoice. But a lot of the time, health systems have purchases and contracts (such as maintenance, janitorial, translation services, or laundry) that lack bar codes or easily identifiable purchase receipts.
Because these types of purchases can often be tricky and complex to manage, overspending is quite common. SpendRule is a technology that ensures hospitals pay only what was negotiated in their contracts. It is integrated with and operates on top of a hospital system’s current enterprise resource planning software, contract management software, and accounts payable workflows, pulling information from contracts, invoices, internal databases, and vendor data to validate invoices before payment is released.
It flags discrepancies and tells teams when to pay and when not to. Typically, hospitals hire an auditor every 2 years to perform this function or manually review each invoice. It was a tedious task bound to be automated in this current wave of AI. Already, big names like Kettering Health, MemorialCare, and MUSC Health are using the platform, Akintolayo said.
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Heckler and Akintolayo started the company only last summer but managed to close a round by Halloween, mainly due to Heckler’s industry connections. “We were able to painlessly close that initial round and use that to grow the team to support the customers,” he said. The new capital will be used to hire and continue developing the company’s AI infrastructure.
Heckler said SpendRule considers existing invoice auditors its competition, such as SpendMend and GHX. But Akintolayo said again, one main difference is SpendRule’s focus on purchase services, the type of items hospitals buy that do not have barcodes.
“Our goal is to build a more resilient hospital system,” Akintolayo said. “That’s our vision. To protect the bottom line of everyone by connecting their data and helping them make better decisions.”
Tech
Cohere launches a family of open multilingual models
Enterprise AI company Cohere launched a new family of multilingual models on the sidelines of the ongoing India AI Summit. The models, dubbed Tiny Aya, are open-weight — meaning their underlying code is publicly available for anyone to use and modify — support over 70 languages, and can run on everyday devices like laptops without requiring an internet connection.
The model, launched by the company’s research arm Cohere Labs, supports South Asian languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi.
The base model contains 3.35 billion parameters — a measure of its size and complexity. Cohere has also launched TinyAya-Global, a version fine-tuned to better follow user commands, for apps that require broad language support. Regional variants round out the family: TinyAya-Earth for African languages; TinyAya-Fire for South Asian languages; and TinyAya-Water for Asia Pacific, West Asia, and Europe.

“This approach allows each model to develop stronger linguistic grounding and cultural nuance, creating systems that feel more natural and reliable for the communities they are meant to serve. At the same time, all Tiny Aya models retain broad multilingual coverage, making them flexible starting points for further adaptation and research,” the company said in a statement.
Cohere noted that these models, which were trained on a single cluster of 64 H100 GPUs (a type of high-powered chip by Nvidia) using relatively modest computing sources, are ideal for researchers and developers building apps for audiences that speak native languages. The models are capable of running directly on devices, so developers can use them to power offline translation. The company noted that it built its underlying software to suit on-device usage, requiring less computing power than most comparable models.

In linguistically diverse countries like India, this kind of offline-friendly capability can open up a diverse set of applications and use cases without the need for constant internet access.
The models are available on HuggingFace, the popular platform for sharing and testing AI models, and the Cohere Platform. Developers can download them on HuggingFace, Kaggle, and Ollama for local deployment. The company is also releasing training and evaluation datasets on HuggingFace and plans to release a technical report detailing its training methodology.
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The startup’s CEO, Aidan Gomez, said last year that the company plans to go public “soon.” According to CNBC, the company ended 2025 on a high note, posting $240 million in annual recurring revenue, with 50% growth quarter-over-quarter throughout the year.
Tech
As AI jitters rattle IT stocks, Infosys partners with Anthropic to build ‘enterprise-grade’ AI agents
Indian IT giant Infosys said on Tuesday it has partnered with Anthropic to develop enterprise-grade AI agents, as automation driven by large language models reshapes the global IT services industry.
Under the partnership, Infosys plans to integrate Anthropic’s Claude models into its Topaz AI platform to build so-called “agentic” systems. The companies claim these agents will be able to autonomously handle complex enterprise workflows across industries such as banking, telecoms, and manufacturing. The tie-up was announced at India’s AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, which will see top executives from AI companies and Big Tech alike in attendance.
The deal comes amid fears that AI tools, especially those built by major AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, will disrupt India’s heavily-staffed, $280 billion IT services industry, raising questions about the future of labor-intensive outsourcing business models. Earlier this month, shares of Indian IT companies went into freefall after Anthropic launched a suite of enterprise AI tools that claimed to automate tasks across legal, sales, marketing and research roles.
The partnership would give Infosys, one of the world’s largest IT services businesses, access to Anthropic’s Claude models and developer tools for building AI agents tailored for large enterprises. Infosys said it would use Anthropic’s Claude Code to help write, test and debug code, and said it is already deploying the tool internally to build expertise that will be applied to client work.
Infosys also detailed how AI is contributing to its business: AI-related services generated revenue of ₹25 billion (around $275 million), or 5.5% of the company’s total revenue of ₹454.8 billion (about $5 billion) in the December quarter. Rival Tata Consultancy Services previously said its AI services generate about $1.8 billion annually, or around 6% of revenue.
For Anthropic, the partnership offers a route into heavily regulated enterprise sectors where deploying AI systems at scale requires industry expertise and governance capabilities.
“There’s a big gap between an AI model that works in a demo and one that works in a regulated industry,” said Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei. Infosys’ experience in sectors such as financial services, telecoms, and manufacturing helps bridge that gap, he said.
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Anthropic this week also opened its first India office in Bengaluru, as it seeks to expand further into the country, which has grown into the company’s second-largest market. Anthropic said India now accounts for about 6% of global Claude usage, second only to the U.S., and much of that activity is concentrated in programming.
Infosys did not disclose the timeline for deploying Claude-powered AI agents or the financial terms of the deal.
The partnership is similar to other moves by Indian IT services firms. HCLTech and OpenAI last year partnered up to help enterprises deploy AI tools at scale.
Tech
Airbnb expands its “Reserve Now, Pay Later” globally
Airbnb said on Tuesday that it is launching its “Reserve Now, Pay Later” feature — which lets users secure bookings without immediate payment — globally. This allows users to cancel their bookings if there is a change of plans without losing money upfront.
The company launched the feature in the U.S. last year for domestic travel. Airbnb said that properties with a “flexible” or “moderate” cancellation policy are eligible for the upfront reservation. With this option, users get charged closer to their check-in date rather than at the time of booking. The feature mirrors “buy now, pay later” payment plans that have become popular in e-commerce, making expensive travel more accessible by spreading out costs. The company noted that since the launch, the feature saw 70% adoption for eligible bookings.

During its earnings calls for Q4 2025, Airbnb said that the feature helped grow nights booked in the quarter.
“Reserve Now, Pay Later saw significant adoption among eligible guests in Q4. It’s also led to longer booking lead times and a mix shift towards larger entire homes, especially those with four or more bedrooms, contributing to the increase in average daily rate,” Ellie Mertz, CFO of Airbnb, said during the call.
Mertz noted that Airbnb’s overall cancellation rate jumped from 16% to 17% for the quarter, and it was higher among customers who use the upfront booking product. However, she said that this was “not hugely material relative to the broader cancellations on the platform.”
Last year, the company surveyed U.S. travelers along with Focaldata, a London-based market research and polling company. Of those surveyed, 60% of participants said that a flexible payment option is important while booking a holiday, and 55% said that would use a flexible payment option.
The company has been experimenting with pay-later products for years now. Back in 2018, Airbnb launched a product that allowed users to book a property by paying 20% or 50% of the total charges. upfront, with the rest due later. In 2023, the company partnered with fintech firm Klarna to let users pay for their stays in four installments over six weeks.
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