• Sega has launched a new Sega Account service
• It’s free to sign up and offers exclusive in-game rewards
• This includes a bonus outfit for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Sega has just launched a brand new online account system, simply called ‘Sega Account’.

The official Sega Account website reveals that its “lets you maximize Sega’s online services” and that it “offers a ton of benefits.” Much like Sega’s email newsletter system, Sega Account is free to sign up for and seems like it’ll offer exclusive in-game rewards for those who do.

Google is announcing a variety of classroom and accessibility-focused ChromeOS features today, and one of the standouts is being able to control your computer with your head and facial expressions. The feature — aimed at those with motor impairments — was first announced in early December, but it’s now rolling out to more users with compatible Chromebooks (Google recommends 8GB of RAM or more).

This isn’t Google’s first foray into the face-as-a-cursor space. It previously made an open-source AI accessibility tool for Windows games called Project Gameface, which was also announced for Android. Here’s a sample video from Google of the tech in action, demoed by software engineer Amanda Lin Dietz who helped develop it.

Additionally, Google is also teasing a boatload of new Chromebooks for 2025, with over 20 new devices in its standard Chromebook and Chromebook Plus lines coming this year. That estimate may be a bit of a stretch, since Google seems to be counting the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus that launched back in October, but it does also count the just-announced 14-inch Lenovo Chromebook Plus 2-in-1 and more to come.

Along with laptops aimed at educators and students, Google’s got a new batch of classroom-focused ChromeOS features called Class Tools. These allow teachers to have real-time control of their students’ screens. Once a pairing code is shared, educators will be able to send students direct content on their Chromebook screens, flip on live captions or translations for them, remotely view their screens, and share a student’s work with the whole class.

In addition to these collaborative tools, Google Classroom is also getting an integration with Figma’s FigJam, allowing teachers to assign online whiteboards to students for brainstorming and group work. Maybe the combination of FigJam with the teacher’s ability to snoop on students’ screens will reveal who’s really doing all the work for the group.

A four-year-old London startup backed by Peter Thiel has raised a $55 million Series B round as it sets about “fixing the broken clinical trial industry.”

The announcement comes as artificial intelligence is shaping up to revolutionize drug discovery and development, in turn spurring demand for a streamlined clinical trial process to help get new medicines to market quicker.

Lindus Health has built a platform that covers the entire end-to-end process of running clinical trials, with automation playing a central role — as such, Lindus calls itself the “anti-CRO” (contract research organization). A CRO, for the uninitiated, is an external organization used by pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies for carrying out crucial clinical research, which enables those companies to focus more on their core drug development work.

The CRO market was pegged as a $82 billion market last year, and is predicted to grow to $130 billion by the end of the decade.

Trials and tribulations

While clinical trials vary in size and scope, they typically involve several stages from start to finish, which includes designing the trial as well as building a protocol and regulatory submission package. After that, they have to set up the technology to run the trails, recruit patients, and collect data. Altogether, this can take years, so when a potentially life-saving drug is on the cards, anything that can speed things is a good thing.

Lindus says it can streamline many parts of this process using machine learning, for instance to design the initial protocol (a detailed plan), which can be very labor-intensive. For this, Lindus has built a protocol generation tool trained on historical data that can create an initial draft.

While its software is a large part of Lindus’ offering, co-founder Meri Beckwith (pictured above right with co-founders Michael Young and Nik Haldimann) stresses that the company delivers everything that’s needed for running a full end-to-end clinical trial, including the staff necessary to conduct it.

“We’ve directly enrolled and provided treatment for more than 35,000 patients now. On staff, we have medics, doctors, technologists who are overseeing the trial data, clinical operations and regulatory folks,” Beckwith told TechCrunch in an interview last week.

Founded in 2021, Lindus Health has so far delivered clinical trials across Europe and the U.S., focusing on conditions such as asthma, acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, weight management and social anxiety. These trials are either for trialing drugs or testing new medical devices.

“What you might notice is in common with a lot of these, and what gets us excited, is that these are quite complex, prevalent conditions that a lot of people suffer from, and frankly, they have been neglected by the industry,” Beckwith said.

Drug discovery

While the rise of AI is leading to all manner of ethical and legal quandaries, one area that seems to be exciting many people is its potential applications in health care, particularly in drug discovery.

A slew of startups have raised truckloads of capital to apply AI to the drug discovery process, and the company at the heart of much of this is Google’s DeepMind. Back in October, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper scooped the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, a deep learning model capable of predicting the 3D structure of proteins — data that’s crucial for disease research and helping scientists uncover novel drug candidates.

Hassabis predicts that all human diseases could be cured within a decade thanks to these advances. While some of the early indications are positive, clinical trials will be pivotal to proving the technology’s true worth. As with the drug discovery industry, many startups have been raising venture capital to modernize the dusty old clinical trial industry.

This raises an important question: Is all the hullabaloo around AI drug discovery leading to a greater demand for clinical trial technology?

Beckwith, for his part, thinks there is a correlation.

“Frankly, all these AI drug discovery companies are not going to have the impact they deserve unless we fix this bottleneck in clinical trials,” he said. “The average AI drug discovery company spits out targets and hypotheses about this drug, or that patient population, but you still have to test them.”

For a pure software firm, the concept of rapidly testing, iterating and shipping code is fairly well ingrained in company culture. But in biotech, even where software is central to operations, it has been difficult to adopt such a “move fast and break things” mantra.

This is for good reason, of course, as there is a world of difference between building a fashion marketplace and developing life-saving pharmaceuticals. However, Beckwith says things can be greatly improved with more efficient clinical trial infrastructure.

“Our mission as a company is to help these biotech companies test and iterate more rapidly, and more safely with patients,” he said.

‘Scratching the surface’

Lindus Health had previously raised around $25 million in equity and grant funding, including an $18 million Series A round in 2023 from the likes of Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. With a fresh $55 million in the bank, the company is preparing to accelerate its expansion, which includes moving its global headquarters from the U.K. to the U.S. — a transition that’s currently underway.

Moreover, Lindus plans to invest more resources in its commercial go-to-market team, expand into “more complex” clinical trial types, and bolster its integrations with third-party tooling such as electronic medical records.

As with any company worth its salt in 2025, Lindus is also exploring more applications for AI across its business, including ways to analyze clinical trial data in real-time.

“We’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with AI,” Beckwith said.

Lindus Health’s Series B round was led by Balderton Capital, with support from Creandum, Firstminute, Seedcamp, and Visionaries.

In today’s increasingly connected world, the need for reliable, high-speed internet connectivity is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for both organizations and consumers alike. As more individuals and businesses continue to rely more heavily on digital platforms and technologies, the demand for seamless, secure and robust connectivity has never been so important. For many businesses, connectivity is not just about operational efficiency, it is at heart of business operations, innovation, and security in an age where even minor outages can cause significant disruptions.

This landscape highlights the important role vendors play in ensuring businesses have access to the necessary IT infrastructure and tools needed to succeed. Through focusing on inclusive policies, implementing advanced technologies, and offering tailored solutions, vendors can empower businesses to meet the challenges today’s digital world brings.

Bridging the digital divide for a more inclusive society

Hindustan Unilever has agreed to acquire beauty startup Minimalist for about $342 million, marking its latest push to expand in India’s fast-growing premium skincare market.

The consumer goods giant will initially acquire a 90.5% stake in the four-year-old direct-to-consumer brand through secondary buyouts and primary investment, with the remaining 9.5% to be purchased from founders in two years, according to a stock exchange filing.

The announcement confirms TechCrunch’s report from earlier this month.

The deal gives Unilever’s Indian unit a stronger foothold in the premium beauty segment, adding to its portfolio that includes brands like Dove, Pond’s and Lakmé. Minimalist, known for its actives-led skincare products, reported an annual revenue run rate of over 5 billion rupees and has been profitable since inception.

“This acquisition is another key step to grow our Beauty & Wellbeing portfolio in the high growth masstige beauty segment,” Rohit Jawa, CEO of Hindustan Unilever, said in the statement.

Founded in 2020 by Mohit Yadav and Rahul Yadav, Jaipur-based Minimalist sells a range of products from sunscreen to hair-repair serum. The startup had previously attracted investment from Unilever Ventures in its Series A round in 2021. Peak XV was its first institutional investor, leading the seed funding in the startup through its Surge platform in late 2019. Minimalist is one of the earliest Surge portfolio startups.

The acquisition follows Hindustan Unilever’s expansion into health and well-being through the purchases of Oziva and Wellbeing Nutrition last year. The latest transaction is expected to close in the June quarter, subject to regulatory approvals.

The founders will continue to run the business for two years after the deal closes. Minimalist has built a strong presence in e-commerce, which Hindustan Unilever plans to complement by expanding the brand’s offline distribution using its extensive retail network.

The deal values Minimalist higher than the roughly $300 million valuation it reportedly sought when attempting to raise venture capital in the second half of last year, according to previous media reports.

Indonesia’s antitrust agency KPPU fined Google 202.5 billion Rupiahs, equivalent to $12.6 million, on Wednesday for antitrust violation related to its payment system services for the Google Play Store.

The KPPU ordered the search giant to cease the mandatory use of Google Play Billing in the Google Play Store. It also asked Google to let all developers participate in the User Choice Billing (UCB) program and give them a minimum 5% service fee discount for a year after the decision is finalized, according to its statement.

The antitrust watchdog launched an investigation into Google in 2022 for its market dominance — in particular, the company required Indonesian app developers to use Google Play Billing (GPB). The agency found that the Google Pay Billing System had charged fees up to 30%, higher than other payment systems.

The Google Play Store handles payments between developers and users through the GPB System for in-app purchases. Google requires all purchases of digital products and services in the Google Play Store to go through the Google Play Billing system. At the same time, it prohibits other payment alternatives to Google Play Billing. The agency said that limiting the payment options led to fewer app users, reduced transactions and lower revenue.

The agency noted that the Google Play Store is the only app store pre-installed on all Android devices, with a market share over 50%. As for the search engine market, Google held a market share of 95.16% in the Indonesian search market, and other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex held the rest as of January 2024, according to Statista.

Google plans to appeal the ruling.

“We strongly disagree with the KPPU’s decision and will appeal. Our current practices foster a healthy, competitive Indonesian app ecosystem, offering a secure platform, global reach, and choice, including user choice billing — which enables alternatives to Google Play’s billing system,” a Google spokesperson, Danielle Cohen, said in an email statement.

“Beyond our platform, we actively support Indonesian developers through a comprehensive suite of initiatives, including Indie Games Accelerator, Play Academy, and Play x Unity, reflecting our deep investment in their success. We remain committed to complying with Indonesian law and will continue collaborating with the KPPU and stakeholders throughout the appeals process,” she added.

The tech industry has been closely watching a series of legal disputes involving Google being fined for breaching anti-competitive practices due to its misuse of dominant market power in various countries, including Indonesia, India, South Korea, France, the EU and the U.S. Japan’s antitrust regulator is likely to determine that Google has breached Japan’s antitrust laws and will order the tech behemoth to cease its monopolistic behaviors, according to Nikkei Asia.

• A new Xbox Wireless Controller has been official revealed
• The new Pulse Cipher colorway is a dazzling red
• It comes after the Ghost Cipher and Sky Cipher controllers

Microsoft has officially revealed its latest special edition Xbox Wireless Controller – the Pulse Cipher – which was only recently leaked by French outlet Dealabs.

An Xbox Wire post has all the details on this new gamepad, with keeps the general look of the Cipher line-up we’ve seen so far. A translucent frame, solid underside with textured grips and triggers that stand out brightly with an almost metallic sheen – it’s all there, just in a pretty dazzling red this time.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! 

This week, we’re looking at just how much fintech startups raised in 2024, a slew of fundraising deals, Plaid’s reported revenue growth last year, and more!

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here.

The big story

Global funding to fintech startups continues to decline. According to CB Insights’ State of Fintech 2024 Report, fintech startups globally raised a combined $33.7 billion in funding last year — down 20% from the year before. Deal volume also dropped — by 17% to 3,580. But there are at least a couple of bright spots: The annual decline in funding was fintech’s smallest in three years. Plus, funding rebounded to close the year strong, reaching $8.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 — up 11% compared to the 2024 third quarter. CB Insights also reported a 33% annual increase in median fintech deal size  — to $4 million.

Dollars and cents

LemFi, a London-based financial services platform designed for immigrants, raised $53 million in new funding, which it will use to fuel efforts to acquire more customers and further expand into more countries.

Recharge, a key European player in online prepaid payments, has secured a €45 million debt facility with ABN AMRO to look at rolling up the market with a round of M&A, as well as moving into fintech-style services.

French startup Hyperline wants to build the next-generation Chargebee. It raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling down on this investment as it is investing another $10 million in the startup.

Bench, the accounting startup that imploded over the holidays, filed for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7 revealing massive debts, documents seen by TechCrunch show. The filings — one for Bench and another for 10Sheet, Bench’s original name — show that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand by the end of its life but $65.4 million in liabilities. Charles Rollet does a deep dive here.

More fintech IPOs?! Trading platform eToro has reportedly filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO that could value the company at over $5 billion. Israel-based eToro, which competes with the likes of Robinhood, told TechCrunch it is “not commenting on IPO rumors.”

Amazon has agreed to acquire Indian buy now, pay later startup Axio, deepening its push into financial services in one of its fastest-growing markets.

Ex-SoftBank veteran Akshay Naheta’s Switzerland-based startup, Distributed Technologies Research (DTR), is attempting to bridge the gap between traditional banking and blockchain technology, joining an army of companies trying to modernize the global payments infrastructure.

Barclays’ Rise is shutting down in 2025.

People moves

Synctera has hired its first CFO, Matias Pino. 

Mark Fiorentino announced he’s left Index Ventures to join Bain Capital as “the newest partner charged with helping to guide the next generation of growth-stage AI-native, vertical SaaS and fintech startups.”

High-interest headlines

Last year was a good year for Plaid. Bloomberg reports that revenue at Plaid Inc., which provides infrastructure to connect fintechs and banks, spiked by over 25% last year.

Cryptocurrency-wallet provider Phantom Technologies raised $150 million in a funding round at a $3 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Paradigm co-led the round. 

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you again next week!

• Netflix now costs a bit more.
• The streaming service has announced price increases for all three of its plans.
• Its cheapest plan now starts at $7.99 a month and tops out at $24.99 in the US.

We must be experiencing deja vu as Netflix just raised its prices again, though it might just be that we recently streamed Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour documentary on the streaming service, too. As announced in Netflix’s latest letter to shareholders, price increases are coming for the streaming services’ three main plans.

The streaming service writes: “As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix.” It’s become a trend with Netflix, and other streaming services included, to raise prices, and the latest hikes aren’t shocking but can be substantial over time.

In the United States, the ‘standard plan with advertisements’ is up $1 from $6.99 to $7.99 a month, ‘standard without advertisements’ jumps to $17.99 from $15.49, and ‘premium’ is now $24.99 a month from $22.99. These price hikes go into effect immediately, with similar increases in Canada, Portugal, and Argentina as well.

Netflix writes that the price hikes are so that it can continue to invest further in programming and deliver more value for its subscribers. The latter is a number that continues to grow, with Netflix adding 18.9 million new subscribers in quarter four of 2024, for a total of 302 million paid subscribers globally.

Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the crowded world of expenditure management by focusing on applying AI to optimize an area where businesses are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars annually: software and cloud spend.

The London-based startup’s business has grown 13x in the three years since its inception (similar how fast software spend has increased), and it has now raised $50 million in new funding to expand its vision.

“[Vertice] is designed to standardize companies’ processes around how they buy anything, not just software and cloud,” its CEO and co-founder Roy Tuvey (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. “A lot of companies today have disparate solutions, different silos that they look at, and procurement teams are generally under a lot of pressure to deliver savings and efficiencies. They don’t have amazing technology today. So we’ve brought it all together in a unified and simplified platform.”

Lakestar, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series C round. Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity, as well as previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North (which co-led Vertice’s Series B almost exactly a year ago) are also participating. 

The startup has now raised around $100 million in total, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, Tuvey confirmed that this Series C was an up-round, valuing the company higher than the “several hundred millions” it was pegged at 12 months ago.

The size of Vertice’s customers has grown, too: Its clientele now number in the hundreds across Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific, including the likes of chip giant ASML, Euronext, Grant Thornton, and banking behemoth Santander.

For some more context, Vertice’s founders have a strong history of entrepreneurship: Roy and his brother Eldar previously founded two security startups, ScanSafe, which they sold to Cisco in 2009 for $200 million; and Wandera, which was acquired by Jamf for $400 million in 2021.

Gartner predicts that spending on data centers in 2025 (thanks to cloud and AI), software, related IT and communication services will increase by more than 9% to just under $5 trillion, so it isn’t surprising to see Vertice working in a crowded part of the enterprise market. 

Its competitors include a plethora of platforms that offer varying levels of services like product recommendations, pricing, side-by-side feature comparisons, and more. These include Spendbase, Spendesk, Gartner and G2. 

Vertice’s point of differentiation, Tuvey said, is how it integrates with a business’s data to better understand what to suggest. Tapping into the same approaches that a cybersecurity firm might use to better understand activity in a network, Tuvey said Vertice uses AI and other tools to build a picture of what a company does, how much it spends typically, and what it might need or want to buy next.

In effect, the startup has built, along the lines of a large language model, a “large software procurement model,” where the parameters are not facts and insights, but software usage. The company claims it has ingested data on some $3.4 billion worth of SaaS and cloud expenditure, as well as benchmarking data on more than 16,000 software vendors (none of these have any financial relationship with Vertice, Tuvey confirmed).

Customers essentially use Vertice to speed up the process of buying and also to save money. The startup says that purchasing cycles can typically be cut in half, yielding savings between 20% and 30%. 

“We ingest all the contract information through AI,” Tuvey said, adding that it uses the tech to build co-pilots to help with purchasing, automating work that finance teams might have to do manually before. “We surface benchmark pricing insights and analytics that they need at the point of purchase. AI is really interesting when it comes to procurement orchestration, because you can learn where the company has bottlenecks in their processes.” 

That, in turn, helps Vertice understand how the wider business is working, he added. 

“For example, if a company is always spending a long time with certain steps, for example to check pricing but also security compliance, we can see how to run them in parallel and save time,” he said. “And you can just imagine — the more and more apps you have, the AI can learn and make recommendations.”

It’s the Tuveys’ background, how they are applying it to procurement, and the resulting growth that has had investors knocking on the door, said Georgia Watson, the Lakestar partner leading this round. At the moment, expenditure is top of mind for companies looking to bring down operational costs — especially at startups given the constrictions they are facing around funding at the moment. 

“Some of our portfolio companies are using Vertice,” Watson said, citing the pressure to bring down software expenditure. “That’s been a conversation we’ve been having… and feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” she noted, adding that Lakestar had been trying to invest previously, and finally pulled it off this time around.