Lachy Groom, one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched solo investors, decided to back Indian startup Pronto just 20 minutes into his first meeting with its 24-year-old founder.

The meeting, which took place in February through a mutual connection, led to Groom investing $20 million in Pronto as an extension of its Series B round, valuing the startup at $200 million after the investment — double its valuation just over two months earlier, as TechCrunch had previously reported. The deal came together within weeks, bringing the solo investor on board as the Bengaluru-based startup expands to meet growing demand for on-demand home services in India.

Groom said he was drawn to Pronto’s ambition to build what he called the world’s largest platform for organizing domestic labor, starting with India’s vast and largely unstructured workforce. “The work underneath that is genuinely hard, and most attempts in adjacent categories have struggled with the operational discipline,” he said, adding that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana (pictured above) and her team were operating “at a level I haven’t seen elsewhere in this space.”

Before founding Pronto in 2025, Sardana worked at Bain Capital and venture firm 8VC, where she gained early exposure to investing and high-growth startups. The startup connects households with workers for everyday tasks such as cleaning and basic home services.

The introduction was arranged through Paul Hudson, founder of Glade Brook Capital, who connected Groom and Sardana during her trip to San Francisco earlier this year. Glade Brook has backed startups founded by both: Pronto, which Sardana leads, and Physical Intelligence, where Groom is a co-founder. Hudson and Groom have also backed Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto.

Sardana said Groom’s investment approach is heavily founder-driven. “He indexes two things. One is the founder, and that’s 95% of it. If he loves the founder, then he will invest,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the rest comes down to the scale and potential of the business.

Groom’s bet comes as a clutch of startups in India race to build instant home services platforms, a category that is seeing rapid adoption among urban households as more consumers turn to on-demand help for everyday tasks.

The opportunity is significant. A recent Bank of America note, reviewed by TechCrunch, estimates the instant home services market in India could grow into a $15 billion to $18 billion industry by the end of the decade, as companies including Pronto, Snabbit, and Urban Company’s InstaHelp compete for share in the fast-growing category.

Competition is intensifying, with heavy capital inflows and aggressive pricing, particularly to attract first-time users. Bank of America estimates that Snabbit and Urban Company’s InstaHelp each account for about 40% of the market, while Pronto has around a 20% share, even as it scales rapidly. The category is expected to remain “burn-heavy” over the next two to three years.

Despite trailing larger rivals, Pronto has been scaling rapidly, growing from around 18,000 bookings a day to 26,000 in just over a month. The startup is focused on driving repeat usage, betting that turning occasional demand into frequent, habit-driven usage will be key to winning the category, with its top 10% of users accounting for about 40% of bookings.

This growth has also brought challenges, particularly in building out supply. Pronto has expanded its network of service workers to 6,500, up from 1,440 in January. But Sardana said demand continues to outpace supply, making forecasting and capacity management key challenges as the startup grows.

Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller doesn’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is untrustworthy, despite recent reporting to the contrary. On stage at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI exec, who has been accused by some former colleagues and board members of being manipulative and deceptive at times.

Diller, who is friendly with Altman, was responding to a question about whether or not people should put their faith in Altman to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity.

In particular, he was asked about the theoretical form of AI known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which could one day outperform humans on any task.

The media exec, a co-founder of Fox Broadcasting and chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, said that while he believes Altman is sincere in his pursuits, that’s not really the area of concern people should be focused on. Rather, it’s the unknown consequences that will result from AI.

“One of the big issues with AI is it goes way beyond trust,” Diller said. “It may be that trust is irrelevant because the things that are happening are a surprise to the people who are making those things happen. And I’ve spent a lot of time with various people who’ve been in the creation mode of AI, and they have a sense of wonder themselves. So…it’s the great unknown. We don’t know. They don’t know,” he explained.

“We have embarked on something that is going to change almost everything. It is not under-reported. Now, whether these huge investments are going to come through — I couldn’t care less. I’m not invested in it, but progress is going to be made,” Diller added.

Still, the media mogul said he believes that most of the people leading the charge are good stewards, saying he believes that Altman is sincere and “a decent person with good values.” (Diller wouldn’t say which of the AI leaders he thinks is insincere, we should note.)

“But the issue is not their stewardship. The issue is … it’s dealing truly with the unknown. They don’t know what can happen once you get AGI, and we’re close to it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer and closer, quicker and quicker. And we must think about guardrails,” Diller noted.

Plus, he warned, if humans don’t think about guardrails, then the alternative is that “another force, an AGI force, will do it themselves. And once that happens, once you unleash that, there’s no going back,” Diller said.

On Wednesday, xAI and Anthropic announced a surprise partnership that has the Claude-maker buying out “all of the compute capacity at [xAI’s] Colossus 1 data center,” roughly 300MW that allowed Anthropic to immediately raise its usage limits. It’s a huge deal for xAI, likely worth billions of dollars. More importantly, it immediately monetized one of the company’s most impressive accomplishments, turning xAI from a consumer to a provider of compute. 

It’s tempting to see the arrangement as a shot at OpenAI amid the ongoing lawsuit. But Musk’s explanation on X was that xAI had already moved training to a newer data center, Colossus 2, and xAI simply didn’t need the both. 

In the short term, there’s an obvious logic at work. xAI’s existing products are mostly focused on Grok, which has seen plummeting usage since the image generation debacles earlier this year. If xAI’s data center buildout is that much more than what Grok needs to operate, partnering with Anthropic adds a lot of green to the balance sheet. This is especially useful as the company, now combined with SpaceX, speeds towards an IPO. More broadly, having Anthropic lined up as a customer makes it easier to believe that SpaceX’s orbital data center play might actually work. 

But beyond the short-term benefit, the Anthropic partnership sends an unusual message about where Elon Musk’s priorities really lie. It suggests the company’s real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models. 

It’s rare to see a major tech company treat compute resources this way when companies like Google, Meta who are also training models, are building more data centers. It’s an easy point to miss, because so many of these companies are working as enterprise AI vendors, online services and cloud providers all at once. But when forced to make a choice between selling more available compute to customers and preserving some to build their own tools, they reliably choose door #2. 

Just last month, Sundar Pichai admitted on a call that Google Cloud revenue was lower than it could have been because the company was “capacity constrained” — and when given the choice of renting out their GPUs or using them to develop AI products, Google chose the AI products. 

Facebook has faced a more extreme version of the same constraint, spinning up an entirely new cloud apparatus just to ensure they would have enough GPU power to chase Zuckerberg’s AI ambition. As he put it when announcing Meta Compute in January, “How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.” 

The key word there is “strategic.” Both Zuckerberg and Pichai are looking towards a future where AI is powering the most popular and lucrative systems in the world. Computing power isn’t just a way to satisfy today’s inference demand, but to build tomorrow’s products — and running short on compute means missing out on that chance.  

By focusing on data centers (earthbound and otherwise), xAI is positioning itself more like a neocloud business: buying GPUs from Nvidia and renting them out to model developers like Anthropic. It’s a far more difficult business, squeezed by both chip suppliers and the shifting cycles of demand. The valuations for most active neoclouds reflect that reality: xAI was valued at $230 billion in its January funding round; Coreweave, which oversees a comparable quantity of computing power, is worth less than a third of that. 

Musk’s version of a neocloud is more ambitious, as you might expect. Some of the data centers might be in space — at least by 2035, if things go according to plan. xAI will be making its own chips at the Terafab, which will take away some but not all of Nvidia’s pricing power. But none of it changes the basic economics of the neocloud business. 

As recently as the February all-hands, xAI had real ambitions in software. That was the presentation that unveiled the orbital data center project, but it also teased significant ambitions in coding (since bolstered by the Cursor partnership) and interesting ideas like leveraging computer use into full-scale digital twins (in the unfortunately named Macrohard project). These are the kind of long-horizon projects that need committed computing resources to succeed. As long as xAI is selling large quantities of compute to its competitors, it’s hard to think such new ambitions have much of a future.