Monthly Archives: October 2022

Mother Honestly’s new offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiving spend

Being a working parent is challenging. Being a working mother, according to many studies, is extra challenging. Many mothers have had the unfortunate experience of having to choose between their careers and children as the balancing act of both can be overwhelming. Factor in aging parents and the number of women who are caregivers for…

Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression

Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with…

Swap Robotics is paving the way for electric solar vegetation cuts and sidewalk snow plowing

Swap Robotics, a company that manufactures electric grass-cutting and snow removal robots, presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how it’s making sustainable outdoor work equipment. For the next few years, 95% of the startup’s focus will be on facilitating robots that cut grass and vegetation on 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar farms. The company’s…

Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models

Cityblock Health is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that…

Staax thinks peer-to-peer payments can onboard a new generation of stock investors

For better or for worse, Robinhood helped inspire a new generation of investors to enter the stock market. Now that investing is cool again, upstarts like Staax, which pitched today at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, are finding new ways to cash in on its cachet, particularly among young people. Nikki Varanasi, Staax’s founder and CEO,…

Bird exits Germany, Sweden, Norway and “several dozen” US, EMEA markets

Shared micromobility company Bird is exiting several markets across the world as it struggles to build an economically viable business, according to a regulatory filing. Bird said it will “fully exit Germany, Sweden and Norway, as well as wind down operations in “several dozen additional, primarily small to mid-sized markets” across the U.S., Europe, the…