AI NewsSkyroot CEO Wants to Launch Multiple Rockets Per Day From New Facility
4:58 PM IST · March 11, 2026
Pawan Kumar Chandana said Skyroot’s Vikram-1 launch vehicle uses 95% indigenous components and is still en route for launch in the first half of 2026.
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Amazon Ring, facing a surge in customer-support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing startupVapito handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform. That deployment helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of around $500 million after investment, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ring turned to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year, when it was weighing whether to expand call-center capacity, rely more heavily on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents that could respond more naturally to customers, Vapi Chief Executive Jordan Dearsley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes Ring chose Vapi because if offered Ring engineers granular control over how the AI agents behaved in live customer interactions. Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, said Ring’s customer satisfaction scores improved after deploying Vapi’s platform and that the company’s teams were able to tune the AI agent experience without depending on engineering. “A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them,” he said. Founded by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta (pictured above, right), Vapi grew out of an AI therapist Dearsley built in 2023 for conversations during his daily walks. The pair, who had gone through Y Combinator with productivity startup Superpowered, found that while few people wanted the therapy product itself, startups were increasingly interested in the low-latency voice infrastructure underneath it. Thisled them to pivotto Vapi and launch the platform publicly in 2024. Vapi provides tools for companies to build, deploy, and manage voice agents across customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales. The startup says it has now handled more than 1 billion calls through its platform, with usage accelerating as enterprises move more customer interactions onto AI systems. Vapi, Dearsley said, currently processes between 1 million and 5 million calls a day, with enterprise customers accounting for the bulk of that volume. In addition to Amazon Ring, Vapi's enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. The startup also operates a self-serve developer platform that has been used by more than 1 million developers. "Because we started from self-serve and had such a wide developer footprint, we were already battle-tested at significant scale before we signed our first major enterprise customer," Dearsley said. Other investors participating in the Series B round included Microsoft's M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi's total funding to $72 million. The startup is currently at an annual recurring revenue run rate in the "healthy" eight figures, an investor source told TechCrunch. Vapi is part of a growing wave of AI voice startups that includes Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies race to build systems capable of handling customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Dearsley said Vapi differentiates itself by focusing less on pre-packaged applications and more on the infrastructure and orchestration layer behind voice agents, particularly for enterprises that want greater control over reliability, compliance, and model behavior. The startup currently has around 100 employees and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams. "The golden problem is taking this indeterminate beast that is a model and taming it," Dearsley said. "If you can do that, then you can provide value to the world."
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New types of design tools, such asPerpexity-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. 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. 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 fidelity within the code base/production, rather than trying to design and turn it into code, or prompt via design system. Plus, Dessn is built to be a truly delightful and almost emotional experience for users, rather than just a utility,” Crook told TechCrunch over email. The company has four people currently, and while it intends to stay small, it plans to add a few more people to the team.
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The funding round, led by Ideaspring Capital, also saw participation from Singularity AMC, Avatar Growth Capital and existing investor Persistent Systems.
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The chipmaker ramps up spending on advanced capacity amid rising AI demand and fresh speculation about Tesla’s future chip plans.
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