Tech
Y Combinator grad and AI insurance brokerage Harper raises $47M
Dakotah Rice is stepping back into the founder’s seat. On Wednesday, he announced that his new company, the AI-native insurance brokerage Harper, has raised $46.8 million in a combined Series A and seed round.
Previously, he founded the investment company Poolit, which closed in 2023. He spoke openly to TechCrunch about the collapse of that company, saying he never figured out how to make it profitable.
“My ego made it hard to accept the failure,” he told TechCrunch. “In hindsight, I should have shut it down a year earlier.”
For his next company, he went back to his roots. His family owned an insurance brokerage, and he remembered all the hassles that came when founders like himself walked through the doors, trying to insure their businesses. “I hated insurance,” he continued, “swore I’d never end up in it.”
But then he had an idea. At first, he and Tushar Nair, a longtime friend and former CTO of Poolit, thought about building AI tools for existing brokerages. Then they decided to just use that technology to build an AI-native insurance brokerage and call it Harper, after Rice’s mother’s maiden name.
Launched in 2024, Harper is part of a trend YC recently wrote about (Harper took part in the YC W25 batch). The YC blog wrote that the future of agencies “will look more like software companies, with software margins.” That’s exactly what Harper is — an almost fully autonomous licensed commercial insurance agency. It matches small- to mid-sized businesses with more than 160 insurance carriers to assist with workers’ compensation, as well as general and professional liability.
“What often takes a traditional broker five to seven days, we can often do in one to two,” Rice, the company’s CEO, said. He said a typical sales team at a human-led brokerage handles 20 to 30 deals a month, but AI enables Harper to handle more than 1,000 customers a month. Harper has more than 5,000 customers to date, he continued.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 9, 2026
“AI handles the operational weight. Submission routing, underwriter follow-ups, document collection, pipeline management,” Rice continued.
Investors in the company include YC and Peak XV Partners, and its Series A round was led by Emergence Capital.
Rice thinks of nearly all brokerages as Harper’s competition. He said that work remains very fragmented, with big players and everyone else running on “email and spreadsheets.” There are, of course, other AI-native brokerages in this space, like Gyde, as well as companies that use AI tools, like FurtherAI or Vantel (both of which are also YC alums).
Rice said what makes Harper different is that it hopes to target middle America. “The real-world businesses,” he said, “like daycares, manufacturers, car dealerships, local bars and restaurants.”
The fresh funding will be used to build out Harper’s engineering team and help grow the brand. The second time in the game, he has big dreams for this company.
“We want to become the voice for entrepreneurs, starting with their insurance, but over time becoming a focal point for all types of things related to risk, compliance, and their entire back office,” he said. “We want to make it simple for them to do their core work, and we basically do everything else over time.”
This piece was updated to clarify the total funding amount.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
NASAs incredible new telescope will offer an atlas of the universe
400K MagSafe power banks recalled after fatal fire, the 10th power bank recall in a year
