Connect with us

Published

on

Sword Health, a startup focused on helping people deal with pain through digital services, is expanding into mental health and has raised additional capital to fuel its growth.

The 10-year-old company is introducing Mind, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence, hardware and human mental health professionals to treat patients with mild depression and anxiety. Sword said Mind will help users access care whenever they need it, rather than during sporadic, hourlong appointments. 

“It’s really a breakthrough in terms of how we address mental health, and this is only possible because we have AI,” Sword CEO Virgílio Bento told CNBC in an interview.

Also on Tuesday, Sword announced a $40 million funding round, led by General Catalyst, in a deal that values the company at $4 billion. The fresh cash will support Sword’s efforts to grow through acquisitions, as well as its global expansion and AI model development, the company said. 

The round included participation from Khosla Ventures, Comcast Ventures and other firms. Sword had raised a total of more than $450 million as of September, according to PitchBook. 

The financing lands as the digital health market shows signs of recovery following a difficult post-Covid stretch, when rising inflation, higher interest rates and a return to in-person activities led to a dramatic retreat in the industry.

Earlier this month, Omada Health, which offers virtual care programs to supports patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, held its Nasdaq debut, though the stock is trading below its initial public offering price. Weeks before that, digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health hit the New York Stock Exchange. The shares are trading a few dollars above their offer price.

Sword, which was founded in Portugal and is now based in New York, offers tools for digital physical therapy, pelvic health and movement health to help patients manage pain from home and avoid other treatments such as opioids and surgery. Patients can sign up for Sword if it’s supported by their employer or their health plan.

Mind users will receive a wrist wearable called the “M-band” that can measure environmental and physiological signals such as heart rate, sleep and the lighting in a user’s environment. Mind also includes access to an AI Care agent and human mental health professionals, who can deliver services such as traditional talk therapy. 

Bento said a human is always involved with a patient’s care, and that AI is not making clinical decisions.

For example, if a patient has an anxiety attack, Sword’s AI will recognize that and could ask a clinician to approve some physical activity for later that day to help with recovery. The clinician would either approve the physical activity that the AI suggested, or override it and propose something else. 

“You have an anxiety issue today, and the way you’re going to manage is to talk about it one week from now? That just doesn’t work,” Bento said. “Mental health should be always on, where you have a problem now, and you can have immediate help in the moment.”

Bento said Sword has some clients that have been on a waiting list for Mind, and the startup has been testing the offering with some of its design partners. He said early users have approved of Mind’s personalized approach and convenience.

“We believe that it is really the future of how mental health is going to be delivered in the future, by us and by other companies,” Bento said. “AI plays a very important role, but the use of AI — and I think this is very important — needs to be used in a very smart way.”

Disclosure: Comcast, the parent of Comcast Ventures, is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC.

WATCH: Billionaire investor Vinod Khosla on Sword Health investment, opportunities in AI and AI competition

Continue Reading

Technology

AWS’ custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia’s AI dominance

Published

on

By

AWS' custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia's AI dominance

AWS announces new CPU chip: Here's what to know

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.

Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.

Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.

But the real battle is with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space.

At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.

AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.

Read more CNBC tech news

Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.

“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.

The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.

“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.

With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.

And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.

The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.

Continue Reading

Technology

JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

Published

on

By

JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, New York City, on April 23, 2024.

Mike Segar | Reuters

JPMorgan Chase is taking a step further into the cryptocurrency space with its own stablecoin-like token, called JPMD.

The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.

JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.

“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.

“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.

Deposit token vs. stablecoin

JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.

A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.

Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.

Read more CNBC tech news

JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.

JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.

Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.

The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.

Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.

Watch CNBC’s full interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

Continue Reading

Technology

Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

Published

on

By

Canva expands from design into analytics with acquisition of MagicBrief

From left, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, and George Howes, co-founder and CEO of MagicBrief, pose for a photo at the Cannes Lions festival in Cannes, France, in June 2025.

Canva

Canva has grown into a $32 billion startup through its popular design tools used for easily creating images, marketing material and presentations.

Now the company, with its 12th acquisition, is buying its way into the analytics market.

Canva said on Tuesday that it’s buying MagicBrief, whose technology is used for analyzing ad performance, for an undisclosed sum. With MagicBrief, companies can track spending and engagement on their ads and see what’s working well for competitors.

Around 240 million people use Canva’s products, which compete with offerings from Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The company has been deepening its capabilities in artificial intelligence, incorporating it into photo editing, coding and by incorporating chatbots.

“We feel like, especially with AI, we can really democratize marketing and allow marketers to do a lot more with less,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview.

Canva, which ranked fifth on CNBC’s latest Disruptor 50 list, has raised over $560 million, and was valued most recently at $32 billion, though that’s a step down from its peak of $40 billion in 2021, when private markets were at their frothiest. Obrecht said the company has $1 billion in the bank.

Canva plans to incorporate MagicBrief into a broader product that it will announce later this year, Obrecht said. In October, Adobe announced the availability of a tool for creating ads with AI and then tracking performance.

Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Reddit are all pushing generative AI systems to boost the reach of online ads. Some marketers have used Meta’s offerings to tweak the visual appearance of their ads with hopes of gaining traction with certain audiences, CNBC reported in December.

Founded in 2022, MagicBrief has 14 employees and is based in Canva’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, the company announced a $2 million funding round, with investments from Archangel and Blackbird, which was Canva’s first investor. The startup has tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue, Obrecht said.

Canva, which started up in 2013, has 5,500 employees, with over $3 billion in annualized revenue. It’s one of the companies that venture capitalists are most excited about as an IPO candidate, but Obrecht said there won’t be an offering this year.

The focus, he said, is winning “over the next 10 years,” and not just hitting quarterly numbers.

“We feel that’s very short-sighted, and public markets do gravitate you more to quarter-on-quarter performance,” he said.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

WATCH: The design space overall has a lot of room to run, says Bessemer Venture Partners’ Elliott Robinson

The design space overall has a lot of room to run, says Bessemer Venture Partners' Elliott Robinson

Continue Reading

Trending