Latest AI News
Why Did Stripe Spend $8 Billion to Capture AI Spending?
“Would you keep production traffic on a gateway owned by the company that also settles your revenue?”
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Your Next Laptop Will Be Costlier, Thanks to AI Data Centres
Memory shortages are driving up prices for everything, from consumer electronics to NVIDIA AI servers, while squeezing PCs and smartphones.
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SpaceX Announces Starbase Louisiana Launch Site
The site is expected to support frequent Starship launches and expand SpaceX’s launch operations beyond Texas.
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Runable hits $21M to bet AI agents can go from building businesses to growing them
As artificial intelligence makes it easier than ever to build websites and apps, Indian startupRunableis betting the next opportunity lies in what comes after: finding customers and helping businesses grow. The startup has raised $21 million to expand in that direction. The Series A was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with existing investors Together Fund and Array VC also participating. The all-equity, primary funding valued Runable at $65 million after investment, co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar (pictured above, right) said in an exclusive interview. Founded in 2025, Runable is targeting small businesses in an increasingly crowded market that includes AI giants such asAnthropicandOpenAIand coding platforms includingCursor,Lovable, andReplit. But the Bengaluru-based startup with its 15-person team is looking beyond software creation, with an AI agent designed to find customers, run ad campaigns, create presentations, and promote businesses across search, social media, and AI chatbots. “In the end, a business doesn’t requireCodexorClaude Codeor anything. They require real outcomes,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “If I am paying an agency $10,000 to run my Google Ads, can someone come in and do it for me for a lower price? That’s where Runable comes in.” Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda (pictured above, left) founded Runable initially as an AI infrastructure startup, building browser technology to scrape data at scale. However, the duo noticed users increasingly asked its browser-based agent to create things like slide decks and websites. That led the startup to eventually pivot toward a general-purpose AI agent. The shift helped Runable go from zero to a $2 million annualized revenue run rate within three weeks of launching payments in March, Kumar stated. Today, Runable’s agent allows users to build websites, apps, presentations, and other content by using natural language prompts, while handling some of the underlying infrastructure, including deployment and analytics. The startup is now extending the agent into what it calls the “grow” side of the business, where it aims to run ad campaigns, manage social media, handle SEO, and optimize a business’s presence in AI chatbot results, among other tasks. Kumar told TechCrunch that the aim is to ultimately help small business owners ask Runable to get a certain number of customers rather than separately setting up a website, analytics tools, advertising accounts, and marketing campaigns. Currently, Runable has about 1.7 million registered users, Kumar said, with the U.S., UK, and Japan among its largest markets. The platform also has users in Brazil, though the startup is increasingly focusing on the first three and expects Japan to emerge alongside the U.S. as one of its top markets as soon as next month. Kumar declined to disclose Runable’s current revenue or number of paying customers. He said, nonetheless, that its users consumed more than 1 trillion tokens over the last 90 days, with about 60% to 70% of that usage coming from paying customers. That usage comes at a cost, as Kumar acknowledged that Runable currently has negative gross margins. This is partly because the startup subsidizes AI usage for its customers. The startup, Kumar said, is working with a mix of models, including developing its own, and expects falling inference costs to help improve its economics over time. “We are seeing this path where you can provide the same quality of inference at almost 10x less cost,” Kumar told TechCrunch. Runable’s bigger challenge may be standing out as all top AI model companies it relies on are increasingly building agents of their own. Kumar, however, argued that Runable’s advantage is handling the work required to produce an outcome for a small business — including infrastructure, analytics, and distribution — without requiring users to stitch together multiple services. In a brief test of Runable, TechCrunch asked the agent to build and deploy a website for a fictional coffee subscription business, set up analytics, and then attract its first 100 visitors with an advertising budget of $25. Runable built the site and prepared an ad campaign, but stopped short of running it, saying an advertising account first needed to be connected. We ran a similar test on Cursor and encountered some of the same limitations. Cursor prepared an ad campaign but required access to a Meta Ads account and payment method, as well as a third-party service to permanently deploy the website. Runable handled more of the website infrastructure within its platform, but still required an external ad account before it could spend the advertising budget. Asked about the limitation, Runable said its ability to run ads without customers connecting their own advertising accounts is currently available for ads on ChatGPT. The startup said it has partnerships that enable such ads but declined to identify the partners, describing those relationships as a “soft wedge.” Kumar mentioned that Runable is not trying to beat coding agents at their own game. For developers working with local files or primarily writing code, he said tools including OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code can be a better fit. Runable is, however, targeting nontechnical small business owners who may not want to configure the tools and services required to turn an AI-generated product into a functioning business. General-purpose agents such as Manus and Genspark are seen as Runable’s closest competitors, Kumar said, as they target similar users and markets. Nevertheless, Runable aims to differentiate itself by helping businesses find customers using AI rather than focusing on building with AI alone.
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Hearing tech startup Legato emerges from stealth with $12M and a peek at its AI hearing glasses
Hearing loss affects anestimated 50 million adultsin the United States, but onlyaround 20%of those with diagnosed hearing loss seek treatment.Legato, a new hearing tech company, aims to close that gap. The startup is emerging from stealth on Wednesday with $12 million in funding and a first look at its AI hearing glasses, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The glasses, called Legato Frames, integrate the company’s patented hearing-assistance technology into the arms of eyewear frames. Legato Frames are expected to launch later this fall. Legato was founded by Mehul Trivedi and Steve Romine, who bring extensive experience in wearables and hearing care from Bose, where Trivedi led the creation of Bose Frames and Romine ran the hearing aids division. Trivedi left Bose to work at EssilorLuxottica, where he led smart eyewear efforts and worked on the Meta Ray-Bans, while Romine went on to serve as COO of hearing care company Audicus. After spending years at larger companies, Trivedi took some time off to explore the intersection of hearing technology and smart eyewear. During that time, Trivedi came across technology he believed could bring the two together, so he contacted Romine and the pair founded Legato in late 2024. “Our goal is to make hearing as ubiquitous as vision,” Trivedi said in an interview with TechCrunch. “It’s kind of a no-brainer that you go to an eye exam, you get your glasses, you wear your glasses, and you’re happy, and you do that for the rest of your life — and the idea of it being blurry again where you would just stop wearing them is not a consideration. I think that’s what we want to do with hearing: just make it something that people address and almost forget about.” Legato is targeting people with mild to moderate hearing loss, which represents the largest segment of the hearing-loss population, the startup says. The company started with the goal of making hearing care more accessible by addressing the cost, comfort, and stigma associated with traditional hearing aids. Legato set out to make the glasses as small and lightweight as possible, and developed a proprietary acoustic system, signal-processing stack, and mechanical architecture to achieve it. Traditional hearing aids often use directional microphones to focus on sounds coming from a particular direction, which works well in quiet settings but can be difficult in noisy environments, such as restaurants. Legato takes a different approach by using an AI-powered system to differentiate between background noise and voices, amplifying only the voices. The goal is to make conversations clearer without creating the cognitively draining listening experience that can come with some traditional hearing aids. “We wanted to deliver an experience that was unique,” Trivedi said. “So a form factor that’s really discreet and looks normal. They’re meant to feel and look like regular glasses. And so, we want it to be a product that’s effortless, easy to use, with kind of no controls that you need to fiddle with, works everywhere, works throughout your day, doesn’t need a ton of configuration, and just delivers you better hearing.” While the frames have an open-ear design, sound isn’t broadcast to people around you. They feature a dual-speaker system that directs sound toward the wearer while canceling sound that escapes, reducing sound by 99% just a few inches away from the ear. The company’s funding, which is from Neotribe Ventures, Listen, and Village Global, has largely gone toward product development, along with marketing efforts. “We have an opportunity to address a population with this product and build something that delivers without all the compromises of traditional hearing aids,” Trivedi said. “Hearing, at first glance, it’s not so much just like ‘I want to hear the TV better.’ It’s really about connection. When you hear better, you connect to the world. It reduces dementia risk and depression risk,” he continued. “There’s impactful hearing health factors associated with better hearing. We’ve got a product that lives on people for 16 hours that is trusted to help them with their hearing and their vision, and we’d love to continue helping them in every way we can.” When the frames launch later this year, Legato says they’ll be available through select eye-care providers nationwide and will “cost a fraction” of traditional hearing aids and may be eligible for vision insurance when purchased through an eye-care clinic.
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Bengaluru-Based AI Startup Ringg AI Secures $10 Mn in Series A Extension Led by Peak XV
The Bengaluru-based startup plans to use the funds to expand its AI agents and enterprise operations across India and international markets.
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Gujarat Police Seeks AI System to Connect 80,000 CCTV Cameras
Participants will test their systems on about 50 cameras, tracking a designated vehicle and generating real-time alerts, movement histories, and GIS visualisation.
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India’s Next Global Legal Services Opportunity is Hiding in Its Data
The country has already demonstrated that it can become a global centre for technology, finance and business-process services. Legal Tech outsourcing could be the next frontier.
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Why Did Stripe Spend $8 Billion to Capture AI Spending?
“Would you keep production traffic on a gateway owned by the company that also settles your revenue?”
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DN Solutions Opens First India Plant With ₹600 Crore Investment, Targets Physical AI Manufacturing
The Korean machine tool maker said that it has deployed its full Phase 1 investment in Bengaluru and plans to expand local manufacturing, supplier development and engineering talent.
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AIM Person of the Year: Sharad Sanghi for Scaling Neysa to Build India’s AI Future
After building Netmagic into one of India’s pioneering digital infrastructure companies, he is starting again—this time betting billions on the infrastructure that could power India’s AI future.
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AM Intelligence Orders 9,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs for Hyderabad AI Factory
The Hyderabad AI factory is the first tranche of AMI’s planned 1 GW of Compute-as-a-Service capacity across India, the US, Finland and Malaysia.
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