Many people who want to have children can’t, or shouldn’t, carry a pregnancy for a variety of reasons. Gestational surrogacy can be a great option for those individuals — if they can endure the lengthy wait times and afford to pay for the costly service. New York-based Nodal looks to make the process less expensive, more transparent, and faster.
Nodal is a marketplace for prospective parents to get matched with vetted surrogates. Nodal founder and CEO Dr. Brian Levine told TechCrunch that his company wants to fix the industry’s supply-and-demand problems.
Dr. Brian Levine is the founder and CEO of Nodal. Image Credits:Nodal
Nodal takes the same technology-driven approach as life insurance companies to vet potential surrogates, Levine said, which speeds up the process and allows for more surrogates to be available. The marketplace approach also provides transparency for parents to have more control over which surrogate they work with. Nodal also cuts out middleman costs and works with fertility benefit companies like Carrot, Maven, and Progyny to lower the costs for prospective parents.
Levine said Nodal is designed to help lower costs, even for people who are paying out of pocket. Users pay a $500 monthly fee until they find a match. Facilitating the match is $15,000, and those monthly payments chip away at that total. If users want Nodal to serve as a case manager, those services start at an additional $10,000. While still expensive, Levine said prior to launching Nodal, his patients were spending up to $180,000 for all of this.
“We have saved our intended parents over $5 million in fees,” Levine said. “We have saved them over a century of waiting time because we are running 45 days on average to match. The average in America is nine to 18 months. You can have a baby on the Nodal platform before you get off the waitlist at a Nodal competitor.”
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Levine knows the space well as a still-practicing physician with a speciality in obstetrics and gynecology. He got the idea for Nodal back in 2021 when New York became the 48th state to legalize gestational surrogacy; only Louisiana and Nebraska still don’t allow the practice. While Levine originally was excited that the ruling would open up opportunity for his patients in the state, that’s not exactly what happened.
“I was totally jazzed by this whole thing,” Levine said. “Very quickly I realized that it was truly a broken system. The cost had gone from $75,000 to $150,000 overnight. The reason it got so expensive is because supply and demand took hold. We are the largest fertility market in America; it literally drove up the price all over the country.”
The price increases weren’t benefiting the surrogates but rather padding the pockets of the matching agencies. Levine thought there must be a way to make this process better for both sides using technology, which led him to work on Nodal; it’s named after the protein that must be present in the uterus to be able to carry a baby.
The product officially launched in September 2022, is available in all 50 states, and has since matched 108 hopeful parents with a surrogate. The average clinic matches 25 a year, Levine said.
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Now the startup is announcing a $4 million seed extension round led by NFX that gives the company a $15 million post-money valuation. The round also included Amplo, Liquid 2, and Myelin VC, among others. The company has raised $8.7 million in total.
Levine said that Nodal wanted to hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue before it raised their Series A round. He added that they didn’t really need to raise this round but thought it made sense as a reproductive health company amid the uncertainty surrounding the results of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election.
“I didn’t know how this election was going to sway,” he said. “It would be myopic to not raise for women’s healthcare before the world potential changes into what could be a very challenging time for reproductive health.”
The company will invest the funds entirely into the technology, Levine said. Nodal wants to increase its partnerships with fertility clinics, too, so that more people can easily get referred to Nodal when they are looking to build a family.
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Despite demand, there seemingly aren’t any direct competitors for Nodal beyond traditional surrogacy agencies, which are still just scratching the surface. Levine estimated that the current system fulfills less than 10% of overall demand for surrogates, which means Nodal can grab substantial market share. But it has a long way to go.
“From a big picture perspective, what I hope people take away is this is a company that is completely focused on transparency, speed, and safety,” Levine said. “It’s unfortunate that the industry has gotten where it is today. It’s opaque, analog, and clunky. We recognize that we have the opportunity to really help people.”
Apple could finally add “charging time remaining” to the iPhone starting with the iOS 18.2 update. Hidden inside the incremental update are traces of code pointing to the new feature in addition to more Apple Intelligence features.
More Apple Intelligence features arriving with iOS 18.2
Apple started actively adding Apple Intelligence features to the iPhones starting with iOS 18. Eligible iOS smartphones received the first batch of Apple’s Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) features with iOS 18.1.
Apple has indicated that it will gradually roll out Apple Intelligence features and allow iPhone users to change default apps. Specifically speaking, the iOS 18.2 update, expected to arrive next month, should include Genmoji, Image Playgrounds, ChatGPT integration, and Visual Intelligence.
One such feature that Android smartphone users have long had, was the ability to see when their smartphones would be fully charged. In other words, newer versions of Android have allowed smartphone users to know the estimated time their devices would take to fully charge.
‘BatteryIntelligence’ framework in iOS 18.2 may show the charging time remaining
Hidden inside the OS 18.2 beta 2, which was released on Monday to developers, is a new framework called “BatteryIntelligence”. Although the feature appears in iOS 18.2, Apple has reportedly disabled the same, and it appears unfinished.
Apple currently offers a similar feature for MacBooks within the Battery menu. Hence, it is likely that the new framework inside iOS 18.2 may extend the feature to the iPhone.
Apple may allow iPhone users to see the charging time remaining from iOS 18.2. Since it’s Apple, the company may limit the feature to a notification. Apple may only alert users when their iPhones reach 80% charge. Needless to say, an estimation of the actual charging time remaining would be very handy primarily because there are several types of USB-C chargers, cables, and charging protocols.
The Internet Archive is continuing the recovery process after a series of that took down its servers in early October. On Monday, the nonprofit digital library on X that its ‘Save Page Now’ service has been restored to the Wayback Machine.
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The Wayback Machine resumed operation on October 14; now users can upload new web pages to record their information and access them later. As the X post notes, the Wayback Machine will begin collecting web pages that have been archived since October 9 when the entire site was taken down.
The October DDoS attacks coincided with the Internet Archive’s move to disclose a data breach that saw more than 31 million records taken. Security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the service for monitoring compromised accounts, that the two actions against the Internet Archive were “entirely coincidental” and likely taken by “multiple parties.”
For this week’s episode of Found we’re taking you backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Becca Szkutak had the chance to talk with Dan Lorenc, the CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, following their conversation onstage with prominent investors, The Chainsmokers.
The pair discuss how the EDM duo’s venture fund MANTIS went from being viewed skeptically by traditional VCs to becoming a highly sought-after investment partner in the B2B space, how Lorenc scaled the company in a difficult time for cybersecurity, and what value celebrity investors can add to a startup.
In this conversation they also discuss:
Navigating tricky market timing after the SolarWinds attack in 2021
How luck can play a major role when it comes to fundraising
Pitching the value of this product to CISOs and CFOs
The unique value that MANTIS adds to the company as they scale and work to stand out from other security tech companies
The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.
While Mozilla is best known for its Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Foundation — the parent of the Mozilla Corporation — describes itself as standing up “for the health of the internet.” With its advocacy and global programs divisions gone, its impact may be lessened going forward.
“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to TechCrunch.
This is Mozilla’s second round of layoffs this year. In February, the Mozilla Corporation laid off around 60 workers said it would be making a “strategic correction” that would involve involve cutting back its work on a Mastodon instance. Mozilla shut down its virtual 3D platform and refocused its efforts on Firefox and AI. The Mozilla Foundation had around 120 employees before this more recent round of layoffs, according to TechCrunch.
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In an email sent to all employees on October 30th, Nabhia Syed, the foundation’s executive director, said that the advocacy and global programs divisions “are no longer part of our structure.”
“Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak,” wrote Syed, who previously worked as the chief executive of The Markup, an investigative news site. “Lofty goals demand hard choices.”
The Mozilla Foundation did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Criminals are adding hundreds of malicious packages to npm
The packages try to fetch a stage-two payload to infect the machines
The crooks went to lengths to hide where they host the malware
Software developers, especially those working with cryptocurrencies, are once again facing a supply chain attack via open source code repositories.
Cybersecurity researchers from Phylum have warned a threat actor has uploaded hundreds of malicious packages to the open source package repository npm. The packages are typosquatted versions of Puppeteer and Bignum.js. Developers who are in need of these packages for their products, might end up downloading the wrong version by mistake, since they all come with similar names.
If used, the package will connect to a hidden server, fetch the malicious second-stage payload, and infect the developers’ computers. “The binary shipped to the machine is a packed Vercel package,” the researchers explained.
Hiding the IP address
Furthermore, the attackers wanted to execute something else during package installation, but since the file wasn’t included in the package, the researchers couldn’t analyze it. “An apparent oversight by the malicious package author,” they say.
What makes this campaign stand out from other similar typosquatting supply chain campaigns is the lengths the crooks went to hide the servers they controlled.
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“Out of necessity, malware authors have had to endeavor to find more novel ways to hide intent and to obfuscate remote servers under their control,” the researchers said. “This is, once again, a persistent reminder that supply chain attacks are alive and well.”
The IP cannot be seen in the first-stage code. Instead, the code will first access an Ethereum smart contract, where the IP is stored. This ended up being a double-edged sword, since the blockchain is permanent and immutable, and thus allowed the researchers to observe all of the IP addresses the crooks ever used.
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Since the targets are developers working with cryptocurrency, the goal was most likely to steal their seed phrases, and gain access to their wallets.
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Software developers, particularly those working in the Web3 space, are often targets of such attacks. Therefore, double-checking the names of all downloaded packages is a must.
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