Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica in a bid to build out its own design research lab, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. Lica's co-founders will lead the effort. Lica started off as an app that could turn screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. Founded by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta in 2023, the company a year later raised $4 million from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. Over the past couple of years, it has focused on working with e-commerce sites to create marketing videos that adhere to brand guidelines. Kalyanaraman said Lica wanted to build AI models around communication methods, including video and design, and the founders were familiar with Gamma's CEO, Grant Lee, as both companies are backed by Accel and South Park Commons. Those conversations eventually led to the acquisition. 'We have a very similar North Star vision of wanting to make visual communication easy. We focused a lot on frontier research and making sure that became accessible to users. But that's just one part of the solution. Gamma had focused a lot on building distribution, taking the application to 100 million-plus users. Given how fast things are moving, we decided to join forces,' Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch....

Indian startups spent years getting consumers accustomed to having groceries and everyday goods delivered within minutes. Now Walmart-owned Flipkart is rapidly closing the gap with those quick-commerce pioneers, as global rival Amazon mounts its own push into instant delivery. Flipkart Minutes, which debuted in August 2024 as the e-commerce giant's foray into quick commerce, is now delivering 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, up from about 390,000 to 400,000 in November, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. That puts the two-year-old service close to Swiggy's Instamart, which is delivering about 1.4 million orders a day, according to a person familiar with its operations. The gap is notable as Flipkart is a relative latecomer to a market whose top ranks have been dominated by Instamart, Blinkit, and Zepto. Food-delivery giant Swiggy launched Instamart in 2020 and Zepto arrived the following year, both during the pandemic, while Blinkit traces its roots to online grocery platform Grofers, founded in 2013. The three have since established themselves as India's top quick-commerce players....

Now the solar roof is dead. Tesla has scrubbed public-facing mentions of the product from its website. TechCrunch has confirmed that the solar roof URL now redirects to its generic solar landing page on Tesla's website, and all of the support pages redirect, too. Electrek was first to report on the product's disappearance. But like other Tesla initiatives, the concept might have a life beyond the company. Two solar installers told TechCrunch their company was still offering the solar roof, though one said availability would depend on the timeline of the project. That suggests Tesla is working to offload existing inventory. Depending on how full that warehouse is, the solar roof might be available for some time. Tesla had lofty goals for the product, aiming for 1,000 installations per week, but after years of refinement and process improvement, the project got to somewhere between 20 and 40 per week as of 2022. Tesla's solar roof never had a bright future. From the start, it was positioned as a luxury product, and it only got more expensive over time. In its marketing materials, Tesla compared the solar roof with the cost of solar, plus roof replacement. That positioning made the product seem attractive, especially if you really didn't like the looks of regular solar panels. But even when you factored in replacement, the product could be eye-wateringly expensive. People reported receiving quotes of $200,000 to install one....

In a cheeky marketing campaign, Liquid Death teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to share a solution to mitigate the environmental impact of AI data centers, which require massive quantities of water to prevent servers from overheating. 'The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek,' Michael Obradovitch, vice president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, told TechCrunch. 'But in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.' These alternative water sources, when used in data centers, at least partially offset the demand for potable drinking water. One such alternative water source is recycled water, which is made by treating wastewater and sewage water so that they're safe to use again. Wastewater and sewage water contain many things, including ' you guessed it! ' human urine. 'You wouldn't just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that's what we advocate,' Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator in water for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told TechCrunch....