Sweden’s Lassie, the ‘prevention-first’ pet insurer, has raised $75m in Series C funding to support its mission to become a leader in Europe’s pet care and insurance market.

It is one of the largest insurtech funding rounds in Europe in recent years and includes participation from Balderton Capital, Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital and Stena Sessan.

The Lassie model works on the premise that insurance should be combined with proactive pet care to keep animals healthy and happy for longer. Its localised insurance products are delivered through a daily-use app that “educates, motivates and rewards pet parents for preventive care, using AI to remove friction from every part of the experience”.

“Pet parents don’t just want reimbursements – they want help keeping their pets healthy,” said Hedda Båverud Olsson, CEO and co-founder of Lassie, which currently operates in Sweden, Germany and France, insuring more than 250,000 pets.

“This round enables us to accelerate our growth and expand our prevention-first offering to even more pet parents. We’ve shown we can build outstanding insurance products and then scale them market by market. The key is deep localisation paired with a unique pricing model that combines real-time data with a preventive approach, and we’re excited to repeat this across more European markets.”

“Balderton are excited to invest again in Lassie as they create the leading pet care ecosystem across Europe,” said Rob Moffat, partner at Balderton.

“Lassie’s best-in-class user engagement enables them to expand from insurance into preventive care and, over time, all aspects of looking after your pet. Their world-leading use of AI automation has allowed them to scale successfully across Germany, Sweden and France with a very lean team.”

Powered by agentic AI, Lassie said its platform now processes 60pc of claims in Germany end to end in around six minutes. Customers simply upload a photo of their vet bill and receive near-instant payouts for straightforward treatments. Founders Olsson, Sophie Wilkinson and Johan Jönsson bring together a background in insurance and engineering-led automation. Now the start-up is planning to expand into other European countries.

The start-up is also focusing on building partnerships and already has collaborations with Lidl, offering pet insurance through its Lidl Plus rewards programme, and Tractive, enabling activity-based rewards and discounts through GPS pet tracking.

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With more and more sensors being crammed into the consumer devices that many of us wear every day, the question of where medical devices begin and end, and how they should be regulated become ever more pertinent. When a ‘watch’ no longer just shows the time, but can keep track of a dozen vital measurements, and the line between ‘earbud’ and ‘hearing aid’ is a rather fuzzy one, this necessitates that institutions like the US FDA update their medical device rules, as was done recently in its 2026 update.

This determines how exactly these devices are regulated, and in how far their data can be used for medical purposes. An important clarification made in the 2026 update is the distinction between ‘medical information’ and ‘signals/patterns’. Meaning that while a non-calibrated fitness tracker or smart watch does not provide medically valid information, it can be used to detect patterns and events that warrant a closer look, such as indications of arrhythmia or low blood oxygen saturation.

As detailed in the IEEE Spectrum article, these consumer devices are thus  ‘general wellness’ devices, and should be marketed as such, without embellished claims. Least of all should they be sold as devices that can provide medical information.

Another major aspect with these general wellness devices is what happens to the data that they generate. While not medical information, it does provide health information about a person that e.g. a marketing company would kill for to obtain. This privacy issue is unresolved in the US market, while other countries prescribe strict requirements about such data handling.

Effectively, this leaves the designers of wearables relatively free to do whatever they want, as long as they do not claim that the medical data being produced from any sensors is medical information. How this data is being handled is strictly regulated in most markets, except for the US, which is quite worrying and something you should definitely be aware of.

As for other medical device purposes like hearing aids, the earbuds capable of this fortunately do not generally collect information. They do need to have local regulatory approval to enable the feature, however, even if you can bypass any geofencing with some creative hacking.

Apple continues to double down on its Formula 1 programming, following up on the box office success of its blockbuster movie by adding a dedicated channel for the racing league to the Apple TV app. This section of the streaming service hints at some of what may be coming when the F1 season begins with the kickoff event in Australia next month. The F1 channel has placeholders for practices, qualifying and the grand prix as well as a weekend warm-up show.

Although it announced the five-year deal to host F1 broadcasts in the US back in October, we still haven’t heard many specifics on how Apple’s presentation of the race events will work. The channel has a section labeled “Event Schedule: Sky Sports,” which suggests that Apple will show the commentary from Sky rather than providing its own hosts; ESPN took that approach during its tenure with the F1 broadcast rights. In addition to the forward-looking streams, Apple TV also has some videos with highlights from the 2025 season and a recap of the rule changes for 2026.

If you’re looking to follow Formula 1 in the 2026 season, some races will be available to watch for free. However, a F1 TV Premium streaming package is now part of an Apple TV subscription, so that’s likely to be the preferred ticket for serious fans. F1TV grants access to all the zooming around you could want as well as to behind-the-scenes content like driver cams and live team radios.

‘ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is wilful, pervasive and totally unacceptable,’ Disney’s cease and desist letter read.

TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance has promised to “strengthen current safeguards” against intellectual property theft after Disney threatened legal action over videos generated by the company’s latest AI video generator Seedance 2.0.

In a cease and desist letter, Disney claimed that Seedance 2.0 has a “pirated library” of Disney assets from its biggest franchises. The company accused ByteDance of using its proprietary content assets as if they were in the public domain.

“ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is wilful, pervasive and totally unacceptable,” the letter read. “We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg – which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days.” The document was first seen and reported on by Axios.

Seedance 2.0 garnered immediate praise following its launch earlier this month. Swiss-based consultancy CTOL called it the “most advanced AI video generation model available”, placing it above OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3.1 in practical testing. The successful launched sparked growth in the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 Index.

Responding to Disney’s criticism, ByteDance told media publications that it “respects intellectual property rights”.

It added: “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users.” The company, however, did not specify details of the safeguards it plans to implement.

Others were quick to share their displeasure as well. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents major US studios including Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount, demanded that Seedance 2.0 “immediately cease its infringing activity”.

“By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law”, the MPA said in a strongly worded statement.

Meanwhile, US actors’ union SAG-AFTRA said that Seedance 2.0 has infringed on its members’ voices and likenesses. “Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent,” it added.

The Japanese government launched an investigation into ByteDance over the weekend over potential copyright law violations after users generated videos of the country’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi, and characters from popular anime and manga series ‘Detective Conan’ and ‘Ultraman’, without consent.

Disney is known to be protective of its intellectual property that spans many successful franchises created over decades. The company sent a similar cease and desist letter to Google last December, alleging that the tech giant infringed on its copyrights. The move prompted Google to restrict Gemini and AI image creator Nano Banana from generating Disney-copyrighted content.

Disney’s attempt to stop Google came around the time the company announced a licensing deal with OpenAI’s Sora and ChatGPT – after initially opting out from allowing the company to use its content.

The three-year licensing deal would see users gaining access to more than 200 copyrighted characters, plus  costumes, props, vehicles and environments, but no talent likenesses or voices.

Last June, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, accusing the AI company of being the “quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism”. The case is ongoing.

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As TechRadar’s resident 4K Blu-ray tester, I’ve seen a ton of excellent 4K discs and reviewed them as part of my Blu-ray Bounty feature.

I recently wrote about my favorite six 4K ‘classic movies’. These are the movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that benefitted hugely from the picture and audio restoration that 4K Blu-ray can provide.

• First PCIe 6.0 SSD reaches market availability for hyperscale AI environments
• Micron 9650 targets AI inference with up to 28GBps sequential reads
• Storage performance shifts toward accelerator-fed data pipelines in hyperscale data centers

Micron has declared its 9650 NVMe SSD has entered mass production, making it the first PCIe 6.0 SSD on the market, although the customer list is likely to be limited to hyperscalers and giant AI data center operators rather than everyday enterprise buyers.

The drive arrives as storage architecture adapts to support AI inference workloads that need faster and more predictable data access.