Twilio's stock has fallen from 2021 of $400 a share to somewhere in the $60s today. It's no wonder activist investors are circling.

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Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by David Rogier, the founder and CEO of MasterClass, the streaming service where users can learn from experts on a variety of subjects from baking to basketball. Rogier talked about leaving his job in VC with […]

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Multi-platform messaging startup Beeper, founded by YC and Pebble alum Eric Migicovsky, delivered an iMessage experience for Android that doesn’t use any intermediaries and as-such, should be (always a big caveat here since we’re relying on the company’s word) private and secure. It has the potential to illuminate just how much lock-in value iMessage has […]

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Microsoft Bing is getting a new “Deep Search” feature powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4. The feature is designed to give users more relevant and comprehensive answers to complex search queries. Microsoft notes that Deep Search is not a replacement for Bing’s existing web search, and is instead an enhancement the allows for deeper exploration of the […]

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Vercel today announced two new features for developers that aim to help them ship higher-quality code at scale. The first is conformance, which runs static analysis checks over a company’s codebase to find issues. The second is ‘code owners,’ which makes it easier to figure out who is responsible for a given part of the […]

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ZestMoney, a buy now pay later startup whose ability to underwrite small ticket loans to first-time internet customers attracted many high-profile investors including Goldman Sachs, is shutting down following unsuccessful efforts to find a buyer. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup — which also identified PayU, Quona, Zip, Omidyar Network and Ribbit Capital among its backers — employed about […]

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Paris Heymann Contributor Share on X Paris Heymann is a partner at Index Ventures, where he invests primarily in B2B SaaS and data. More posts by this contributor Vertical AI: The next logical iteration of vertical SaaS Acquisition, retention, expansion: Why SaaS founders must understand GDR and NDR As part of the Metrics That Matter […]

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When TuSimple went public in 2021 it was flying high as the leading self-driving trucks developer in the United States. Now — after a string of internal controversies and the loss of a critical partnership with truck manufacturer Navistar — TuSimple is exiting the U.S. altogether. The publicly traded company said in a regulatory filing […]

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Technology alone isn’t a sustainable moat for AI products, especially with the barrier to entry only continuing to go down.

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We're seeing a lot of folks push their capital into just a few squares on the betting table. One way or another, the result is going to be notable.

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Visual Electric, a company backed by Sequoia Capital, has launched its generative AI-based image-generation tool aimed at designers. The company was founded in November 2022 by CEO Colin Dunn, a former executive at Universe, a mobile building site (Dunn also worked at Facebook and Dropbox); Chief Product Officer Adam Menges, a former Apple employee whose […]

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The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. A startup called Beeper, which had been working on a multi-platform messaging aggregator, is now launching a new app called Beeper Mini which will allow Android users to send and receive end-to-end encrypted iMessage chats for just $1.99 per month. Beeper Mini […]

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When Respell founder Matthew Rastovac was in high school, he did an internship where his job was to copy information from a government website into a spreadsheet. It was mind-numbing work, so being an enterprising young man, he wrote some code to automate the task. These days, his company helps non-technical employees take advantage of […]

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AllSpice shifted its strategy to bring enterprise engineers together to more easily collaborate on projects.

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Israeli startup Mine made a name for itself a few years ago with a tool designed for consumers to quickly run an audit of their data privacy situation. One scan of your inbox using AI and specifically natural language processing, and Mine can triangulate which companies have access to your personal data, and then let […]

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