Avendus, top India venture advisor, seeks $300 million for new PE fund

Avendus, India’s leading investment bank for venture deals, is looking to raise about $300 million for its private equity unit, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The Mumbai-based firm, backed by U.S. private equity giant KKR, has established itself as the top financial advisor in India, working with popular growth-stage startups including Zepto, […]

Spotify launches personalized AI playlists that you can build using prompts

Spotify already found success with its popular AI DJ feature, and now the streaming music service is bringing AI to playlist creation. The company on Monday introduced AI playlists into beta, a new option that allows users to generate a playlist based on written prompts. The feature will initially become available to users on Android […]

Magnets are switching up the keyboard game

The next big thing in mechanical keyboards is magnetic switches. Mechanical keyboards quickly went from a niche product to mainstream during the pandemic, as everybody was looking to upgrade their home offices — and maybe for a new hobby, too. Brands like Akko, Drop, Ducky, Epomaker and Keychron became household names and today’s enthusiasts can […]

Working from home isn’t going away, even if some CEOs wish it would

When I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier. Even contractors mostly went into the office in those days. Over time, though, that slowly changed, and the pandemic — along with generationally shifting views on work-life balance — accelerated worker sentiment away from going […]

Fintech representation in YC’s Demo Days is definitely shrinking

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at just how many fintech companies made it into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort, how much funding slid in the first quarter, and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:00 a.m. PT, subscribe […]

Mahbod Moghadam, who rose to fame as the co-founder of Genius, has died

Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial, never-boring co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, as well as an angel investor, passed away last month at age 41 owing to “complications from a recurring brain tumor,” according to a post attributed to his family and published on Genius. The startup world appears to have caught wind of his passing just […]

When it comes to building startups in Boston, success begets success

When Hubspot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah conceived of their inbound marketing startup in 2004, they were still graduate students at MIT, and inbound marketing was not well understood. They were able to develop that idea into a successful company and eventually went public in 2014. Today, the Boston-based company has a market cap […]

EarliTec Diagnostics raises $21.5M to help diagnose autism earlier

One in 36 children in the U.S. has autism, according to the CDC. Research shows that the earlier a child gets diagnosed, the better their developmental outcome will be. EarliTec Diagnostics just raised fresh capital to expand its system that helps clinicians diagnose children as young as 16 months old. The Atlanta-based startup’s FDA-authorized approach […]