SoftBank is creating a robotics company that builds data centers — and already eyeing a $100B IPO | Tentagraph

Microsoft’s carbon removal plans aren’t dead after all

Microsoft is purchasing 650,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits from startup BioCirc, the company said today.

As carbon removal deals go, it’s not a big buy. But this one is notable because last month, two reports said the tech giant was pausing its carbon removal deals. BioCirc confirmed for TechCrunch that the purchase agreement was signed in May, weeks after Microsoft reportedly paused new deals.

For the carbon removal industry — and the startups that depend on it — there’s a big difference between a pause and a recalibration. Microsoft is reportedly responsible for more than 90% of the carbon removal credit market, meaning its purchasing decisions alone can determine whether young companies in the space survive.

Microsoft repeatedly denied that it had paused its carbon removal purchases. “Our carbon removal program has not ended,” Melanie Nakagawa, chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, told TechCrunch in a statement. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals.”

The new deal generates carbon removal credits from five BioCirc biogas projects. The biogas plants take biomass waste — frequently from agriculture — and use industrial bioreactors to turn it into methane and carbon dioxide. BioCirc captures the carbon dioxide and stores it in an underground reservoir offshore. The methane is then burned in a power plant.

Microsoft’s sustainability goals have been strained by the company’s push into AI. To power its data centers in Texas, Microsoft last month said it was working with Chevron and Engine No. 1 to build a natural gas power plant in the state that could eventually generate 5 gigawatts of electricity. Emissions from that project alone promise to dwarf the deal with BioCirc.

Truecaller gets into the eSIM business to diversify its revenue streams

Caller ID company Truecaller launched eSIM services for travellers. The launch comes as the company aims to bolster its balance sheet and diversify business amid dipping ad revenues.

The company said its plans will range from 1 GB over 7 days to 20 GB over 30 days. Initially, the launch will make the eSIM product available in 29 countries.

The list includes Italy, Sweden, Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Austria, Finland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Norway, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria.

Notably, the company’s biggest market, India, is missing from the list. This is likely due to the country’s strict telecom regulations. Previously, the country blocked AirAlo and Holafly over concerns around fraudulent use.

Truecaller said it is working with global cellular connectivity provider Telna and telecom software provider Telness Tech to operate the eSIM platform.

Where there are other eSIM providers like Airalo, Holafly, Roamless, and NordVPN’s Saily, Truecaller thinks that its existing userbase of over 500 million will prove beneficial for acquiring new users.

“The starting point is different from other players in the category. They have had to build their audiences from zero. We are offering travel eSIM inside our app that over 500 million people already use and trust every month,” Truecaller chief operating officer Fredrik Kjell told TechCrunch over email.

“These are established relationships, with a large number of people having used Truecaller for many years. That changes distribution and pricing,” said Kjell.

Kjell also said that this is a strategic move for Truecaller that makes the app more usable for users. This comes at a critical time for the company. Last week, the company slashed 70 jobs across many teams. Plus, it posted disappointing Q1 2026 numbers. Truecaller’s net sales dropped 27% to 362 million SEK ($39.34 million), and ad revenues declined by 44%.

The company is leaning into increasing subscription revenues with features like AI Assistant and Family Protection. During the time when ad revenues are shaky, additional services like eSIM could provide newer money-making avenues.

As TechCrunch reported last year, eSIM adoption is on the rise thanks to travel and device compatibility. Investors are also interested in putting money into eSIM startups. Within the last twelve months, startups like Airalo, Roamless, Kolet, eSIMo, and Truley raised millions of dollars.

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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.

You can contact or verify outreach from Ivan by emailing im@ivanmehta.com or via encrypted message at ivan.42 on Signal.

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Kin Health raises $9M to build an AI notetaker for patients

The market for AI notetaking devices has exploded in the U.S., with the category generating over $600 million in revenue last year, according to a Menlo Ventures report. And as startups like Heidi Health and Freed, have shown, there’s decent demand for this tech in healthcare, where doctors and clinics see the potential for an AI assistant that can help them keep track of patient conversations, surface health records, and lower their administrative burdens.

But those apps don’t do much for patients, which is why Kin Health is building a notetaker that can transcribe your visits to doctors, parse medical advice, and surface next steps when required. To that end, the startup has raised $9 million in a seed funding round led by Maveron.

The app is similar to a meeting notetaker: you can record doctor visits, and it will return an AI summary of the meeting, with the next steps, all of which you share with family and friends if you want to. It also lets you note down questions that you might want to ask during your next visit.

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Kin Health says it encrypts all patient data, and that summaries are kept private by default. The tool is not HIPAA-certified, as it is a patient-facing one, but it adheres to the same privacy standards, the company said.

The free app is built by physicians Arpan and Amit Parikh, along with Kyle Alwyn, who previously built online prescription service HeyDoctor and sold it to health platform GoodRx. Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, co-founders of GoodRx, are founding partners and executive chairmen at the company.

Co-Founders Arpan Parikh, Amit Parikh, and Kyle Alwyn Image Credits: Kin HealthImage Credits:Kin Health

“We have a lot of these storage cabinets where our health data can live, but we don’t have a way to convert that into a utility that we can use to drive our behavioral change. Our goal is to create this health graph where we can store your information from multiple different sources,” Alwyn told TechCrunch over a call.

Kin Health says that its summaries are provided after a few stages of processing. After transcribing the visit, an algorithm turns the transcription into a clinical narrative, which gets crunched into a user-facing summary with action items. The company says it is leaning on specialized medical models to power the transcription, and that it evaluates and observes outputs at different stages to ensure answers are accurate.

But AI in healthcare is being received with a measure of caution and apprehension. Privacy experts and researchers have raised concerns over data security, accuracy of AI, consent mechanisms, the quality of generated notes, and their effectiveness.

AI notetakers also often fail to recognize and struggle to transcribe regional accents. Kin Health says it is working to ensure its tool works with different accents, as well as when someone has a bad throat or is wearing a mask.

Dr. Rebecca Mishuris, chief health information officer and VP at Mass General Brigham, a healthcare organization in Boston, argues it is important for physicians to review any notes generated by AI.

“Generative AI will hallucinate; that is the nature of a technology built on patterns and prediction. That is why it is so important for clinicians to review the drafted notes before signing them. At the end of the day, the responsibility for the documentation falls to the clinician,” she told TechCrunch over email.

Kin Health currently only shows notes from conversations it records during consultations, but the company said it plans to bring in data from other health sources, including physicians’ own notes through electronic health record (EHR) systems, this year.

The company says it will keep the app free of cost forever, and monetize via referrals to services such as specialists and labs. The startup is taking a leaf from GoodRx’s playbook, which also keeps the core product free and earns commissions by referring other services.

Natalie Dillion, a partner at Mavero

Dessn raises $6M for its production focused design tool

New types of design tools, such as Perpexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Flora, and Krea, have risen in popularity in the last few years, thanks to AI. These tools bank on the promise that, with AI, a product team with designers can iterate through variations quickly.

A new design startup, Dessn, now backed by $6 million in funding, believes that design tools that don’t let you work directly on your codebase can limit you from being able to imagine new workflows and features.

That’s why Dessn developed technology that allows startups to run their codebases in the cloud without any setup cost. To do so, it abstracts away the dependencies that make it necessary for a codebase to run locally.

Because Dessn works in a production environment, it’s easier for designers to hand off their work to developers, the startup says.

Current customers include teams at health company Color, voice AI company Wispr, and fintech Mercury.

Founded by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, the company today announced its $6 million funding round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks and N49P.

“When we started the company two years ago, our whole thesis was [that] the code is going to get commoditized — and in a world where code is insanely cheap, you just get a lot more software, and then design becomes a way that’s a differentiator,” Cheema told TechCrunch over a call.

Image Credits: DessnImage Credits:Dessn

The design tool is not built for ground-up ideation, such as a Lovable or v0 by Vercel, where you can play around with new ideas. Instead, Dessn says it’s useful only for the teams that have an existing codebase and want to iterate on it.

Cheema noted that the tough part for Dessn was to build an infrastructure that is capable of running codebases with different backend architectures, without needing a developer to get started.

Because of the low setup cost, companies that adopt Dessn don’t have to move over from their design tool right away.

“The one thing that’s great about Dessn is that we don’t create switching costs. It’s not like you have to drop all of Figma now, and you have to come to Dessn for everything. You can come in and use it for one project and then another one. That’s kind of what we’re seeing happen. And it’s so easy to share a Dessn link, which isn’t possible with Cursor or Claude Code,” Hachem said.

Dessn, like other AI tools, lets you prompt your way into creating new designs. However, some designers might like old-school toolbars to move things around. But the startup doesn’t think that is necessary.

Hachem said that she and her co-founder are token maximalists — people who would spend more tokens to get to a result even if it costs more — and would rather spin up a toolbar for a particular context than keep a static one.

Image Credits: DessnImage Credits:Dessn

In the age of AI, tools are often trying to work with each other to move data from one place to another easily as part of task automation.

At the moment, Dessn doesn’t have any integrations. But it plans to integrate tools like Slack, where you can call up Dessn and ask the tool to create prototypes based on ongoing discussions. Another tool it thinks could be useful to integrate is a meeting notetaker like Granola, which can feed it discussions from a meeting to create designs. However, the company said that one integration it doesn’t want to do is Figma, because it thinks that would take teams away from production, and it goes against Dessn’s ethos.

Dessn lets you compile one repository for free and try out five prompts per week to let clients get a taste of the tools. It plans then start from $39 per user per month, which unlocks more prompt limits, and based on the tier, public links, and the ability to opt out of AI training.

Betaworks partner (and former TechCrunch editor) Jordan Crook said that Dessn would be a tool Figma built if the latter started today.

“Dessn is the only product that has perfect fidelit

Microsofts AI data center push is colliding with its clean power goals

Microsoft is weighing whether to delay or scale back one of its most ambitious clean energy goals as its rapid buildout of AI data centers puts pressure on its ability to meet those targets. Microsoft has yet to make any public announcements, but according to Bloomberg the company is having internal discussions over its hourly clean energy matching goal.

The tech company has said that by 2030 it intends to match 100% of its hourly energy use with clean power on the same grid. But Microsoft’s rush to build AI data centers has apparently sparked debate within the company about whether the pledge has become an impediment to its ambitions.

Microsoft declined to comment on the internal debate over the hourly matching goal. Instead, a spokesperson told TechCrunch the company continues “to look for opportunities to maintain our annual matching goal.”

Hourly targets like the kind Microsoft has set for itself are more rigorous than annual targets. Because the grid is a balanced system — the supply and demand of electrons needs to be matched on a near-instantaneous basis — hourly matching helps develop clean energy sources that more closely align with a company’s usage patterns.

Annual targets are more lenient. They are effectively accounting tricks that could, for example, let a company buy more solar power than it might use at midday. Other customers on the grid use that energy, but the company that paid for the solar panels gets to claim the renewable power they make. It’s a tidy arrangement that has sped the deployment of wind, solar, and batteries. But on its own, annual targets won’t eliminate fossil fuels entirely. Hourly targets help foster renewable development that more closely mimics how a true net-zero world would be powered.

Big tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Apple have generally led on emissions reductions, setting aggressive net-zero targets. Many have eliminated their carbon emissions on an annual basis. Microsoft, for instance, said it met that goal last year.

But as data centers grow in size and number, those same companies are turning to natural gas. Microsoft is included in that list; last month, the company said it was working with Chevron and Engine No. 1 to build a massive natural gas power plant in West Texas that could eventually generate up to 5 gigawatts.

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Despite the West Texas project, Microsoft is widely viewed as a leader among tech companies pursuing net zero emissions. By 2030, Microsoft intends to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than its operations produce.

Part of the company’s renewable push has been driven by an internal carbon tax. The Microsoft spokesperson did not reply to questions about the company’s carbon tax. If it remains in place, some of the internal debate surrounding hourly matching might revolve around a cost-benefit analysis of the shift.

If Microsoft were to abandon its hourly-matching target, the company would also lose some leverage in efforts to sell the public on its on its data centers.

As data centers have proliferated, the general public has begun to push back against them, citing concerns over pollution, power prices, and water use. When Microsoft brings its own clean power to a project, it can plausibly say it has addressed two of those concerns. Without it, new data centers might be harder to sell to the public. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.

De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new busine

PayPal says its becoming a technology company again. That means AI.

PayPal is looking towards the future, despite its falling stock and looming layoffs. In its first-quarter earnings call, CEO Enrique Lores told investors that PayPal needs to “recommit to the fundamentals,” which included “becoming a technology company again.”

There was no need to read between the lines — PayPal was pitching an AI-powered turnaround.

Lores explicitly said so, telling analysts on this week’s call that leading companies find ways to differentiate themselves by innovating, and that now is the time for PayPal to take action. This includes modernizing its tech platform, moving faster to become “cloud-native,” and “aggressively adopting AI in our development processes,” Lores said. The latter would increase developer productivity and shorten time to market, he added.

It’s a startling admission from PayPal that it has yet to fully embrace AI in-house, when AI-assisted coding is one of the breakout areas where the technology has truly excelled.

Other consumer tech companies have rapidly adopted AI in recent months to assist with coding, with Spotify even declaring in February that its top developers haven’t written a line of code since December. Meanwhile, top dev teams are trying to outcompete one another by tokenmaxxing — a proxy for understanding who at the company is experimenting with AI more often, based on the number of AI tokens they use.

PayPal is only now catching up, it seems.

Lores said the company has formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team to help with its enterprise AI agenda. Combined with the planned layoffs, which Lores characterized as PayPal removing layers from its organizational structure, the addition of AI-enabled processes is expected to bring the company at least $1.5 billion in cost savings over the next two to three years, he said.

The company announced last week it was reorganizing its business, which streamlines the operation into three segments: checkout solutions and PayPal, consumer financial services (and Venmo) as well as payment services and crypto. In addition, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that PayPal plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years as part of its cost-savings plan, equating to north of 4,500 jobs.

More cost savings will come from PayPal’s plans for AI adoption, company execs said on the call. That includes bringing AI into areas beyond coding, like customer service, support operations, and risk management, to name a few.

“I think the changes that AI will enable us to do are going to drive — are going to be very significant,” said Lores. “This is why we created a group last week, reporting to me, that is going to be in charge of driving — function by function, process by process — this AI transformation. And this is not about adopting AI as a technology, where we have done many pilots in the company, and we have seen what is possible. It’s really about understanding how can we redesign the key processes … this is what we have seen that really will drive significant savings.”

Announcing an AI-driven push to cut costs while eliminating thousands of jobs underscores a core criticism of the technology — it comes with a human cost

It’s worth noting that, in this case, PayPal was already in need of restructuring. The company may have beat on its first-quarter earnings with revenue of $8.4 billion, up 7% year-over-year, but it forecast weak guidance for the second quarter, sending the stock tumbling after earnings. That follows a long post-pandemic decline that has sent the stock down over 80% from its 2021 high and has stunted PayPal’s growth.

Asked if separating Venmo into its own business meant the company would be open to selling it, Lores said that, for now, this is what made the most sense in terms of the turnaround plan. Still, he signaled openness to future deals by saying “my number one priority is to maximize shareholder value,” in answer to an analyst’s question about a sale.

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SoftBank is creating a robotics company that builds data centers — and already eyeing a $100B IPO

Microsoft’s carbon removal plans aren’t dead after all

Microsoft’s carbon removal plans aren’t dead after all

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Truecaller gets into the eSIM business to diversify its revenue streams

Kin Health raises $9M to build an AI notetaker for patients

Dessn raises $6M for its production focused design tool

Microsofts AI data center push is colliding with its clean power goals

PayPal says its becoming a technology company again. That means AI.