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Tag: General Catalyst

  • Bevel raises $10M Series A from General Catalyst for its AI health companion | TechCrunch

    Most people tracking their health today end up with scattered clues. Their smartwatch shows sleep duration. A fitness app logs steps. A nutrition app counts calories. Yet few tools help people understand how all of this fits together.

    Bevel, a New York–based startup, believes that’s the missing piece in the shift toward proactive health. The company has raised a $10 million Series A from General Catalyst to scale its AI health companion, which unifies data from wearables and daily habits across sleep, fitness, and nutrition into personalized insights.

    The investment follows a breakout year for the two-year-old health tech company.

    Bevel says it has grown more than eightfold within the past year and now reaches over 100,000 daily active users, making it one of the fastest-growing health apps in the U.S. The company also adds that the average user opens the app eight times per day, and retention remains above 80% at 90 days, rare numbers in a category where people often churn after reaching a short-term fitness goal.

    “We think of health as a continuous journey, not a phase,” said co-founder and CEO Grey Nguyen in an interview with TechCrunch. “Bevel meets you where you are, learns from your habits, and helps you make small changes that compound over time.”

    But with numerous health companion brands, from Whoop to Oura to Eight Sleep, why does the world need another one?

    According to co-founder and CTO Aditya Agarwal, many of these health apps rely on accompanying hardware devices that customers must buy and maintain. Because such devices can be pricey, there’s an opportunity to create a product that’s purely software-based, giving people the flexibility to use the wearables they already own.

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    “A $500 ring or band is out of reach for a lot of people,” said Agarwal. “We already generate so much valuable health data from our primary wearables and other everyday sources. We wanted to make something that was more accessible across a much larger set of people.” Bevel users pay $6 monthly or $50 annually.

    Unlike typical wellness apps that focus on a single area such as steps, sleep, or nutrition, Bevel combines them into one experience. It integrates with Apple Watch and other popular wearables through Apple Health and directly syncs with continuous glucose monitors like Dexcom and Libre. Garmin and additional integrations are in development, the company said.

    All this information feeds into Bevel Intelligence, the company’s core software, which helps analyze key information and adapt recommendations to each user, learning how their body responds to stress, movement, or nutrition.

    Image Credits:Bevel

    Bevel’s story started with pain — literally.

    Before starting the company in late 2023, Nguyen, who previously led products at Sam Altman–backed Campus, and co-founder/CTO Ben Yang, who worked on machine learning at Opendoor, were building stablecoin infrastructure for enterprises. The demanding nature of startup life meant Nguyen took little care of his health, developing chronic back pain that went undiagnosed for months despite using wearables and seeing doctors regularly.

    “Nothing pointed out what was actually causing my back pain, not even my doctors, which is crazy, right?” he said. “That’s when this idea came up. Everyone’s life is so nuanced. There are so many small things you do that stack on each other and, over time, create a chronic condition.”

    Nguyen says he began piecing together his health data, tracking sleep, nutrition, and steps, and realized that issues across these areas had compounded over time. Low mobility from sitting too long, sleep problems caused by his mattress setup, and sodium-heavy meals that increased inflammation all played a role.

    Similarly, Agarwal, formerly CTO at Dropbox and an early engineer at Facebook, had gone through his own health overhaul after years of intense work left him burned out. What helped was logging his data manually, through spreadsheets and connected trackers, to rebuild his energy.

    When he connected with Ben and Grey about what they were building with Bevel, he saw they had a similar vision and joined the team.

    “We shared the same North Star, which is helping people become more intelligent about their own health,” said Agarwal, who is also a partner at South Park Commons. The venture capital firm, alongside General Catalyst, invested $4 million into Bevel earlier this year.

    With fresh capital and no plans to venture into wearables, Bevel intends to grow its team and expand horizontally into more services and partnerships that make proactive health accessible.

    “Bevel’s mission to democratize health through intelligence and design deeply resonates with us,” said Neeraj Arora, managing director at General Catalyst. “The level of engagement they’re seeing from users is remarkable, and it’s become part of people’s daily lives — not just another app. We’re excited to support this team as they build the future of personal health.”

    Tage Kene-Okafor

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  • General Intuition lands $134M seed to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips | TechCrunch

    Medal, a platform for uploading and sharing video game clips, has spun out a new frontier AI research lab that’s using its trove of gaming videos to train and build foundation models and AI agents that can understand how objects and entities move through space and time – a concept known as spatial-temporal reasoning.

    Called General Intuition, the startup is betting that Medal’s dataset – which consists of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users across tens of thousands of games – surpasses alternatives like Twitch or YouTube for training agents. 

    “When you play video games, you essentially transfer your perception, usually through a first-person view of the camera, to different environments,” Pim de Witte, CEO of Medal and General Intuition, told TechCrunch.  He noted that gamers who upload clips tend to post very negative or positive examples, which serve as really useful edge cases for training. “You get this selection bias towards precisely the kind of data you actually want to use for training work.” 

    This data moat is what reportedly attracted the attention of OpenAI, which late last year attempted to acquire Medal for $500 million, per The Information. (Neither OpenAI nor General Intuition would comment on the report.) 

    It’s also what has led to General Intuition’s raising a whopping $133.7 million in seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst with participation from Raine. 

    General Intuition’s founding team.,Image Credits:General Intuition

    The startup intends to use the funds to grow its team of researchers and engineers focused on training a general agent that can interact with the world around it, aiming for initial applications in gaming, and search and rescue drones.  

    De Witte says the founding team has already made strides: General Intuition’s model can understand environments it wasn’t trained on and correctly predict actions within them. It’s able to do this purely through visual input; agents only see what a human player would see, and they move through space by following controller inputs. This approach, the company says, can transfer naturally to physical systems like robotic arms, drones, and autonomous vehicles, which are often manipulated by humans using video game controllers.  

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    General Intuition’s next milestone is two-fold: generating new simulated worlds for training other agents, and autonomously navigating entirely unfamiliar physical environments.  

    That technical approach is shaping how the company plans to commercialize its technology, and sets it apart from competitors building world models.  

    While General Intuition is also building world models on which to train its agents, such  models aren’t the product. Unlike other world model makers like DeepMind and World Labs, which are selling their world models Genie and Marble for training agents and content creation, General Intuition is focusing on other use cases to avoid copyright issues.  

    “Our goal is not to produce models that compete with game developers,” de Witte said.  

    Instead, the startup’s gaming applications center around creating bots and non-player characters that can surpass traditional “deterministic bots,” or preprogrammed characters that produce the same output every time. 

    “[The bots] can scale to any level of difficulty,” Moritz Baier-Lentz, a founding member of General Intuition and partner at Lightspeed Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It’s not compelling to create a god bot that beats everyone, but if you can scale gradually and fill in liquidity for any player situation so that their win rate is always around 50%, that will maximize their engagement and retention.” 

    De Witte also has a background in humanitarian work, which informs the startup’s focus on powering search and rescue drones, that sometimes have to navigate unfamiliar environments and extract information without GPS. 

    Ultimately, de Witte and Baier-Lentz see General Intuition’s core functionality – spatial-temporal reasoning — as a crucial piece in the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). While major AI labs focus on building ever more powerful large language models, General Intuition believes true AGI requires something LLMs fundamentally lack.  

    “As humans, we create text to describe what’s going on in our world, but in doing so, you lose a lot of information,” de Witte said. “You lose general intuition around spatial-temporal reasoning.”

    Rebecca Bellan

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  • General Catalyst merges with Venture Highway in India push | TechCrunch

    General Catalyst merges with Venture Highway in India push | TechCrunch

    General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital group, is expanding its presence in India by joining forces with local venture firm, Venture Highway, and earmarking $500 million to $1billion for investments in the country.

    Venture Highway’s investments include social commerce startup Meesho and B2B industrial marketplace Moglix. The two firms were said to be in talks for a deal since January.

    The deal will see the combined entity plot a multi-stage investment strategy for General Catalyst in India, spanning early- and growth-stage startups across industries, Venture Highway’s founder, Neeraj Arora, and its GP, Priya Mohan, told TechCrunch in an interview. 

    Venture Highway, which raised $78.6 million for its second fund in 2020, has traditionally focused on early-stage investments. As part of the General Catalyst team, it will expand its remit to incubating startups. “Our vision is to be part of building a number of companies that will not only go public but also be needle-moving for the economy,” said Mohan.

    General Catalyst plans to invest between $500 million to $1 billion in India over the next three years, said Arora, who previously served as chief business officer at WhatsApp and played an instrumental role in the instant messaging app’s sale to Meta.

    The deal positions General Catalyst as one of the largest venture capital firms in India, alongside the likes of Lightspeed, Accel, Elevation and Nexus, which have each raised between $500 million and $700 million for their recent funds. Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) leads the pack, with a $2 billion fund earmarked for investments in the country.

    General Catalyst isn’t acquiring Venture Highway’s portfolio, but will consider them “very much part of the GC portfolio going forward,” Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst’s CEO, told TechCrunch.

    “We want to support them the same way we support any of our companies in India or anywhere else in the world,” he said. 

    The two firms began exploring ways to collaborate several years ago, but, Arora said, the timing was right at the moment. “We could have gone out and raised more capital. That was one of the options on the table. But thinking from first principles, when we think about the opportunity that is in India today, and what our ambitions are, it made sense for us to join hands with General Catalyst,” he said. 

    India has become one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies over the past decade, with its GDP rate touching 8.2% in the latest financial year. Favourable policy changes have spurred growth across industries, attracting some of the world’s largest investors.

    SoftBank, Tiger Global, Peak XV, Lightspeed, Accel and others have deployed about $100 billion in Indian tech startups in the past five years alone, and are beginning to see some returns as many of those firms go public. But “returns on capital in India have sucked historically,” Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer said at a virtual gathering with Indian entrepreneurs last year.

    India is not new territory for General Catalyst, which has been investing in the country for over a decade. Its portfolio includes fintech unicorn CRED, used car marketplace Spinny, and healthtech startup Orange Health. The firm recently co-led a funding round with Indian conglomerate Tata that was raised by Alsym Energy, a company developing non-flammable rechargeable batteries.

    Taneja anticipates more partnerships with Indian conglomerates going forward. “I believe that many of the conglomerates in India are very entrepreneurial and will play a significant role in the growth opportunity of India,” he said. “Some of the opportunities we want to invest in or help build in India, it might make sense to radically collaborate with them.”

    “When you’re transforming industries, no matter where you are in the world, you have to team up with the industry leaders. We do that in healthcare here [in the U.S.] with a lot of healthcare systems; we are actively working with various governments when it comes to policy and issues and things like AI,” he added.

    Thursday’s announcement follows a similar move by General Catalyst in Europe last year, when the firm unveiled plans to merge with Berlin-based venture firm La Famiglia. Taneja declined to comment on whether his firm will seek to replicate the model in other markets.

    Manish Singh

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  • General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff | TechCrunch

    General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff | TechCrunch

    Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned. Engineering and product design were among the departments impacted by the cuts, according to posts on LinkedIn from impacted employees.

    TechCrunch was unable to independently verify the exact number of people who were cut, but an industry source who knew impacted people believes it was approximately half of Jasper Health’s small team. According to PitchBook data, Jasper Health had about 48 employees before the cuts.

    The company’s co-founder and CEO, Adam Pellegrini, didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. TechCrunch’s attempts to reach Jasper Health’s chief operating officer, chief growth officer, and head of marketing via email were unsuccessful, with messages bouncing back.

    A little over two years ago, in February 2022, Jasper Health raised a $25 million Series A led by General Catalyst, with participation from Human Capital, W Health Ventures, Redesign Health and 7wireVentures. At that time, the company said it raised a total of $31 million in venture capital.

    Most significantly, Jasper is a General Catalyst portfolio company. The VC firm is one of the most active healthcare investors. It is so serious about bringing new startup-led technology into the US healthcare system that earlier this year, the VC firm purchased an Ohio-based health system called Suma Health, an unprecedented move in venture capital. But clearly, that doesn’t mean that all GC-backed health tech startups will flourish up-and-to-the-right without setbacks.

    Jasper is also notable because it was conceived and launched in 2018 by Redesign Health, a venture firm and studio that creates new healthcare companies. Run by CEO Brett Shaheen (previously at Lone Pine Capital and Carlyle Group), Redesign says it’s built 50 healthcare startups that have collectively raised $1.3 billion. Redesign, which is itself backed by LPs like General Catalyst, CVS Health Ventures, and Samsung Next, also had its own layoffs earlier this year, Fierce Healthcare reported.

    Jasper’s digital but human-led platform offers care navigation, patient support and remote patient monitoring. The company also provides psychosocial care. It says that approximately 12% of its users are in remission from cancer.  

    Pelligrini, the company’s founder, started his career as a surgical specialist in the US Army. He also helped build the American Cancer Society’s website, which provides information to patients and caregivers about the disease. Before founding Jasper, he was the senior vice president of virtual care and consumer health innovation at CVS Health.

    Jasper Health’s competitors include Thyme Care and Reimagine Care.

    Marina Temkin

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  • General Catalyst leads $200M investment into Bilt Rewards, doubling its valuation to $3.1B | TechCrunch

    General Catalyst leads $200M investment into Bilt Rewards, doubling its valuation to $3.1B | TechCrunch

    Bilt Rewards, whose platform aims to allow consumers to earn rewards on rent and daily neighborhood spend, has raised $200 million at a $3.1 valuation, the company announced today.

    General Catalyst led the financing, which more than doubles the New York-based company’s valuation compared to its $150 million October 2022 raise. Eldridge and existing backers Left Lane Capital, Camber Creek and Prosus Ventures.

    Ken Chenault, chairman and managing director of General Catalyst, is joining Bilt’s board of directors as part of the new funding. Chenault is also former chairman and CEO of American Express. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is also joining the board as an independent director.

    The raise and valuation jump are impressive in an environment were mega-rounds (deals worth over $100 million) are few and far between. CB Insights’ State of Venture Report 2023 found that while mega-rounds “were a hallmark of 2021, with 350+ occurring each quarter…in Q4’23, that figure fell to just 78 — the lowest level since 2017.”

    With the new capital, Bilt has raised $413 million in total funding since the company launched in June 2021 out of Kairos, the startup studio led by Bilt founder and CEO Ankur Jain. It launched its rewards program in April of 2022.

    In a written statement, Bilt said its annualized member spend is “nearing $20 billion” and the company achieved EBITDA profitability in 2023. 

    At the time of its last raise, the company’s loyalty program and payment platform had been rolled out to more than 2.5 million apartment units. Today that number is up to nearly 4 million units.

    Users can earn points and improve their credit by simply paying rent each month. Bilt’s points can be used in a variety of loyalty programs, including major airlines, hotels, travel, fitness classes, Amazon.com purchases, credit toward rent or a future down payment.

    Bilt said it plans to use the new capital toward expanding its Rewards Alliance, which partners with multifamily, single-family, and student housing operators nationwide. It will also go towards bolstering its Neighborhood Rewards program, which aims to help local merchants “connect and build loyalty” with new and existing residents in their community. The company also plans to expand into mortgage payment rewards. 

    Bilt also offers a co-branded Mastercard, issued by Wells Fargo, that can be used to pay rent and earn Bilt Points with no transaction fees.

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    Mary Ann Azevedo

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