Daily Crunch: AI-powered fintech Candidly raises $20.5 million in Series B to help consumers ‘crush debt’

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Hellooooo, Crunchers! We’re back for another round of tech news from your favorite news site. It’s been a busy news day, and Haje is on deadline to try and complete this week’s pitch deck teardown, so let’s not hesitate and get right to it! — Christine and Shark

TechCrunch Top 3

• Like a student loan Superman: Sincere, a company that helps financial institutions and employers build student debt and savings optimization products into employee benefits, is injecting $20.5 million in new funding to pick up student debt relief where new U.S. guidelines leave off. Christine have more.
• Draw to your heart’s content: Devin powers up reMarkable’s e-paper tablet and researched every inch to bring you a product review worthy of getting rid of paper for good.
• Then I saw your game and now I’m a believer: Believer received $55 million in new funding from big names in venture capital, such as Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz, to focus on a new approach to multiplayer games that Ingrid writes will start with “original IP and stories ‘where player choice matters’.”

Startups and VCs

The economy is a little better – in a way, maybe, sort of? Although things seem to be moving in the right direction, it’s going to be a long road. Also, if you can’t find work, positive macroeconomic trends are cold comfort. One of the nice things Brian like having a platform like TechCrunch is the opportunity to help people in that difficult position – so here is a list of robot companies that are hiring.

The company is about to get hit by the generative AI hype train, as Salesforce prepares to invest in startups developing what it calls “responsible generative AI.” Paul write.

Here’s another fist:

Gatik’s Gautam Narang on the importance of knowing your customer

Image credit: Bryce Durbin

As the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, illustrates, our brittle, legacy supply chains are long overdue for an overhaul.

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik operates about 40 driverless heavy-duty semi-trailer trucks on routes up to 300 miles long, connecting distribution centers with smaller hubs.

Rebecca Bellan interviewed Gatik’s CEO and co-founder Gautam Narang to learn more about the company’s operations and investor expectations, and how a lack of human drivers is impacting growth.

“We’ve never done any free delivery,” he says. “So we’ve been doing commercial deliveries since 2019, which means every trip we’ve done, we’ve been paid for.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps entrepreneurs and start-up teams get ahead of the pack. You can register here. Use the code “DC” for 15% off an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Sonos is getting ready to launch two new speakers, so Brian got the scoop from company CEO Patrick Spence on right-to-repair, surround sound and the never-ending lawsuits.

Speaking of Sonos, Brian also wrote about the company replacing its One with a spatial sound speaker called the Era 100. Sonos is also adding support for spatial sound on Apple Music, Aisha reports.

Thanks for reading, and have a Sonos day!

It’s a busy day, so how about six more: