Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we learn that Anthropic is releasing a new Claude chatbot tier aimed at higher ed; we meet a bunch of neat startups in sectors ranging from sales tech to fintech; and we dive into the latest details on Rippling's spying accusation against rival Deel. Dig in!

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🎓 Claude university: Anthropic today announced Claude for Education, a tier of its AI chatbot that is designed for higher education. This version includes a few new features aimed at students and educators like "Learning Mode," which is where Claude asks questions back to users.

🤭 The drama! We've got more info on Rippling's lawsuit against rival Deel. According to an affidavit released today, Deel's CEO and CFO, father-son duo Alex Bouaziz and Philippe Bouaziz, respectively, did in fact ask one of their employees to spy on Rippling for them. And that's just the beginning.

⏰ Amazon wants TikTok: ByteDance needs to divest from TikTok's U.S. operations by Saturday. Amazon today announced a late bid for the social media service. Unlike some other bids in recent weeks, Amazon is bidding for the whole shebang. If you want to look back at the whole TikTok saga, we've got you covered.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch

☹️ More layoffs: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, and more, has laid off 16% of its staff, which looks to be about 270 people. The layoffs affect employees across 90 different countries and come after the company has had quite the tumultuous year.

🧱 All the GPUs: Parasail is a new startup taking a horizontal approach to AI hardware by delivering on-demand GPUs to its customers from a variety of sources. The company just launched its platform today and has raised $10 million in VC funding.

🧾 Sales AI: The market of AI-powered tools for sales representatives could be considered saturated. Actively AI thinks it is taking a slightly different approach by building a "reasoning" model that helps companies sift through their data to find higher-value prospects.

🎙️ Early detection: Today's episode of Equity features a conversation with Valentina Agudelo, the co-founder and CEO of Salva Health. Agudelo talked about why she built her early detection breast cancer screening device and the impact that tools like this can have on rural healthcare markets.

🏡 Room to Roam: Assumable mortgages can be transferred from seller to buyer to avoid the buyer having to take on a new mortgage, which could come with a higher interest rate. Roam is a startup that is making it easier for prospective homebuyers to find these opportunities.

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Around the web

🧑‍🍳 Recipe for disaster: Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield launched an app called Recipe Ninja, which uses AI to create recipes from a single prompt. While this sounds harmless in theory, of course many users have used it to create horrific recipes like cyanide ice cream. Oops!

👀 Zuck's meddling: Mark Zuckerberg does not want Meta to face its antitrust trial later this month. He has been meeting with White House officials in recent days to try to find a settlement that would prevent the company from going to court. Now, why would they be afraid to go on trial?