Here is yet one more sign of the travel industry’s noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of $370 million. The KKR-led round catapults Lighthouse to a valuation of over $1 billion.
The funding will be used to continue building out more data sets, analytics tools and AI functionality, the company said. It may also be using this large capital injection for acquisitions to evolve its business: the company has made four acquisitions to date, and one from earlier this year — Stardekk — has built all-in-one hotel software for managing reservations and more.
The company is based out of London, and this is one of the biggest rounds for a startup based in the city, as well as one of the biggest rounds for the travel sector, for this year.
For those tracking how Europe’s startup ecosystem is performing at the moment, Lighthouse’s funding track record is instructive: the company raised $80 million in 2021, at a peak moment for fundraising.
This latest round is an affirmation from investors that it’s been doing the right things in the last several years.
In Europe, startups have been beaten by slower activity across a number of segments of tech, geopolitical turmoil and slow economic growth. Lighthouse has aimed its business at a global market (currently estimated to be worth some $15 trillion annually), and its focus on business intelligence and applying newer technology like AI to providing it, underscores how data-driven businesses continue to see opportunities.
The company’s core set of tools are not directly related to taking bookings or managing staff and accounts per se. Instead, its focus is on business intelligence, specifically analytics and insights. It says that it crunches 400 terabytes of travel and market data daily, and “leverages AI” to provide insights to customers, with products targeting large hotel chains, and others targeting smaller operations.
It says it has more than 70,000 hospitality providers using its tools, with some of the big names including Holiday Inn, Radisson and NH Hotel Group.
The round is a testament to the demand among hotels for better tooling to improve its pricing and overall offer to customers, at a time when we have more choice than ever before, and more ways of finding and booking hotels.
“We’re just getting started in making hospitality data and tools more powerful, accessible, and affordable,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lighthouse, in a statement. “I couldn’t be more energized by what we’re working towards.” We’re hopefully speaking with him later today to hear more.
The company’s previous round included Spectrum Equity, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, and Highgate Technology Ventures, and all of these investors are also participating in this latest Series C.
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The United States Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should divest its Chrome browser as part of a remedy to break up the company’s illegal monopoly in online search, according to a U.S District Court of the District of Columbia filing. Google would not be allowed to re-enter the search market for five years if the DOJ’s proposed remedy is approved.
Ultimately, it will be up to U.S. District of Columbia District Court Judge Amit Mehta to decide what Google’s final punishment will be, a decision that could fundamentally change one of the world’s largest businesses and alter the structure of the internet as we know it. That phase of the trial is expected to kick off sometime in 2025.
Judge Mehta ruled in August that Google was an illegal monopoly for abusing its power over the search business. The judge also took issue with Google’s control of various gateways to the internet, and the company’s payments to third parties in order to retain its status as a default search engine.
The Justice Department proposed other remedies to address the search giant’s monopoly, including that Google spin off its Android mobile operating system. Prosecutors also argued the company should be prohibited from entering into exclusionary third-party contracts with browser or phone companies, such as Google’s contract to be the default search engine on all Apple products.
The Wednesday filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering pushing Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the browser market in the U.S., according to web traffic service StatCounter.
Google did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
This story is developing…
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WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. That means there are tons of businesses sending messages to users — and some of these messages could be considered as spam. For customers, the only option was to either let them send messages and offers, or block the business account altogether. WhatsApp is finally changing that.
The company is now testing new ways for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kind of messages they would want to receive — or not receive. This involves buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for some specific categories of messages.
Meta said it will begin testing interactions globally. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested (or not interested) in receiving “offers and announcements”. They can also choose to stop receiving this type of message altogether. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they wish to receive offers from a brand during a festive season.
Businesses can send messages through WhatsApp’s API based on one of these four categories: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries).
While these categories exist in the backend, there was previously no way for customers to stop one type of message while continuing to receive others. For instance, you might want to receive purchase updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you weren’t interested in marketing messages, you didn’t have the option to provide that feedback manually.
In countries like India and Brazil, a phone number attached to WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. While on email, you get an option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, there weren’t such indicators on WhatsApp. This resulted in users being overwhelmed by spammy business messages.
The company has been considering introducing new controls for business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in India, Nikila Srinivasan, VP of product management for messaging monetization at Meta, hinted at this feature.
“One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses. Two, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition to that, we are starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity,” she said.
Srinivasan also mentioned that educating businesses and helping them understand how some of their campaigns are not meeting the platform or users’ standards will eventually reduce spam.
Earlier this year, the company started restricting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in a day without explicitly defining the limit.
For a long time, WhatsApp marketed itself as a place for people to have personal conversations. Over the last few years, the company has introduced features to build and join communities, to broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Both communities and broadcast channels have their own tabs in the app.
However, business communication still shows up in the main chat inbox, and there is no way to filter it. In its Q3 2024 quarterly call, the company indicated that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other apps revenue, which raked in $434 million in the quarter. The company will need to find a balance between making money and not alienating core WhatsApp users by bombarding them with business messages.
When we asked about this balance to Srinivasan along with possibility of creating a separate place for business messages, she pointed out that several of the newer WhatsApp features are optional and separate from the main inbox.
“The core of what you want to do with WhatsApp is to be in your inbox. When I think about whether we would create a separate experience for businesses, I really love the inspiration that we have for helping businesses. Whatever we are doing in terms of educating businesses and investing in user controls is because we want the standard of what actually belongs in your inbox to feel really high,” she said.
You can contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal: @ivan.42
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Cancer, one of the most life-threatening diseases, is projected to affect over 35 million people worldwide in 2050 — 77% more than the estimated 20 million cases in 2022, according to the World Health Organization. Cancer survivors globally reached 53.5 million, and the reoccurrence rate of the disease varies between 15 and 100%, depending on the cancer type and stage and each patient’s situation. Despite this, the world currently lacks effective solutions for diagnoses to help curb recurrence.
Enter OneCell Diagnostics, a genomics-based startup in precision oncology, that aims to help cancer survivors limit reoccurrence instances through its proprietary cell biopsy technology.
The startup, which has served nearly 10,000 patients in India and is looking to replicate its early Indian success in the U.S., has developed its in-house blood-based biopsy testing that helps detect cancer’s reoccurrence through circulating tumor cells. This is unlike the widely used cancer detection methods, including PET CT scan, MRI, and tissue-based diagnosis.
OneCell has secured an IP to capture and isolate the circulating tumor cell from a 10ml blood draw. A phlebotomist visits the patient’s home to collect the blood drawn in two tubes: one for detecting circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and the other for detecting circulating tumor cells. These tubes are then sent to a nearby OnCell lab, where the blood sample goes through an analysis using a combination of scientific ways and AI to predict reoccurrence, which it calls True-Single-Cell-Multi-omics. The startup combines the circulating tumor cell-DNA with its RNA and cell surface protein testing.
This helps provide better diagnosis, with at least 100 times more information than the current liquid biopsy testing, which largely revolves around cell-free DNA and ctDNA, said co-founder and CEO Mohan Uttarwar.
The startup has also developed an app called iCare, which works as a precision oncology console to help oncologists interpret test reports using AI and machine learning. “It’s the innovation at the intersection of very deep science, the cell science, and data science, and that is a perfect storm,” Uttarwar told TechCrunch.
While oncologists have the medical knowledge, they are not well-trained in precision oncology, he said. OneCell’s iCare offers a helping hand. “Our goal is that every oncologist in every hospital in every corner of the world should adapt precision oncology,” he asserted.
OneCell has developed a proprietary glass bead that uses antibodies and has an affinity toward cancer cells. This helps filter circulating tumor cells from the patient’s blood sample.
The startup provides its biopsy testing for pan-cancer analysis for all solid tumors, including breast, lung, and colon cancers. However, it deliberately avoids first-time cancer patients due to regulatory restrictions.
Companies in that domain are classified under FDA’s breakthrough category, which requires pre-market approvals. India doesn’t have any such restrictions. Nonetheless, since OneCell aims to launch in the U.S., it chose to target specifically the reoccurrence patient market.
“Science and technology are pretty powerful and do work, but the business side of us have decided not to enter that very high-risk area,” Uttarwar said.
The startup includes Guardant Health and Natera, as well as various Indian diagnostic companies, among its competitors. However, Uttarwar told TechCrunch the precision in diagnosis and affordability, which is one-fifth the price the competition charges, makes it stand apart.
Founded in 2021, OneCell operates under the B2B2C model, offering its biopsy testing to patients through oncologists and hospitals in India. It has an office in India’s western city of Mumbai and a lab in Pune, with a headcount of 120 people. It also has 24 employees in the U.S., including those in its R&D facility in Silicon Valley.
The startup plans to start its business in the U.S. after over 2.5 years of serving India by working with biotech and biopharma companies. It has developed the test called OncoIndx Ikon to detect and analyze CTCs, which will be available in the U.S. through its local biomarker partners.
The early launch in India, one of the significant cancer-affected countries, has helped OneCell gain enough data to bolster its analytics and AI system and bring some of the top Indian hospitals on board, including state-run institutes such as All India Institute Of Medical Sciences as well as private hospitals Apollo, Fortis, and Tata Memorial Hospital. It also has strategic academic partners, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, and University of Georgia.
OneCell has raised $16 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Celesta Capital. The round also saw participation from Tenacity Ventures, Cedars Sinai, Eragon, and Singularity Ventures. Additionally, it has added Nobel Laureate James Rothman to the board.
The fresh capital will help OneCell expand into the U.S. and scale its business in India, Uttarwar said.
The startup projects to reach over 1,000 oncologists and a million patients in the near term.
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Arzooo, an Indian startup founded by former Flipkart executives that sought to bring “best of e-commerce” to physical stores, has sold its assets in distressed sale to Moksha Group.
The deal follows Arzooo engaging with several startups, including Bengaluru-headquartered Udaan, for potential merger opportunities, according to people familiar with the matter.
Arzooo had raised approximately $90 million from investors including SBI Investment, Trifecta, Tony Xu, and Celesta Capital, and climbed to a peak valuation of $310 million.
The startup didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal.
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Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case.
Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so counsel for The Times and Daily News could perform searches for copyrighted content in its training data sets. (Virtual machines are software-based computers that exist within another computer’s operating system, often used for the purposes of testing, backing up data, and running apps.) In a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that they and experts have spent over 150 hours since November 1 searching OpenAI’s training data.
But on November 14, OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers’ search data stored on one of the virtual machines, according to the aforementioned letter, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late Wednesday.
OpenAI tried to recover the data — and was mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build [OpenAI’s] models,” per the letter.
“News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time,” counsel for The Times and Daily News wrote. “The news plaintiffs learned only yesterday that the recovered data is unusable and that an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work must be re-done, which is why this supplemental letter is being filed today.”
The plaintiffs’ counsel makes clear that they have no reason to believe the deletion was intentional. But they do say the incident underscores that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools.
We’ve reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this piece if we hear back.
In this case and others, OpenAI has maintained that training models using publicly available data — including articles from The Times and Daily News — is fair use. In other words, in creating models like GPT-4o, which “learn” from billions of examples of ebooks, essays, and more to generate human-sounding text, OpenAI believes that it isn’t required to license or otherwise pay for the examples — even if it makes money from those models.
That being said, OpenAI has inked licensing deals with a growing number of new publishers, including The Associated Press, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, Financial Times, People parent company Dotdash Meredith, and News Corp. OpenAI has declined to make the terms of these deals public, but one content partner, Dotdash, is reportedly being paid at least $16 million per year.
OpenAI has neither confirmed nor denied that it trained its models on any specific copyrighted works without permission.
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