Tech
Dental practice software maker fixes bug that exposed patients’ medical records
Practice by Numbers, the developer of a patient management software used in thousands of dentist’s offices, has fixed a security flaw that exposed the private health records of patients on a portal that comes bundled with the software, TechCrunch has learned.
One patient, Joseph R. Cox, reported the bug to TechCrunch after he encountered the issue while looking at his own dental records on the portal, which was offered by his dentist’s office.
This patient portal is part of a dental office management software made by Practice by Numbers, which claims its products are used in over 5,000 dental practices across the United States.
Cox said the bug allowed any user of the portal, which houses patients’ medical documents and health records, to access documents belonging to other patients. He said he was able to access other patients’ documents from his account, including their personal information, medical histories, photo identification, and other files. The bug also meant that Cox’s records were just as exposed to other patients.
Cox said he attempted to alert the company about the issue via email, but did not hear back. He then notified TechCrunch as a last resort to ask the company to patch the bug.
The bug was remarkably easy to exploit by anyone with a login to the Practice by Numbers’ patient portal. Cox said changing the document number in the web address while loading one of his documents in the portal allowed users to access other patients’ files.
Worse, Cox said the document numbers in the web address appear to be sequentially incremental, so it could be possible to easily guess the document numbers of other people’s medical files.
Cox told TechCrunch that he faced difficulties in alerting Practice by Numbers to the issue, as the company offered no discernible avenue to report security problems. The company’s email address on its website was broken, with emails returned as undeliverable. Instead, Cox sent a message to one of the company’s founders on LinkedIn, but heard nothing back after sending a subsequent email.
The issue, now fixed, highlights a recent trend in which regular consumers are finding security flaws in companies’ products or websites, but have no clear way to report the issue to the developers.
Earlier in April, fashion retailer Express fixed a website bug that allowed anyone to access the order details and personal information of other customers, after a user identified the bug, but found no way to alert the company. A similar incident involved Home Depot in December: A security researcher tried to privately alert the company about a security lapse that was exposing access to its internal systems for almost a year, but their reports were ignored until TechCrunch contacted the company.
Given the security flaw was actively putting patients’ data at risk, TechCrunch alerted Practice by Numbers to the issue on April 13. The company took down its patient portal to fix the bug, and brought it back online on April 17.
Practice by Numbers’ co-founder and chief technology officer, Chris Lau, told TechCrunch that the company had fixed the vulnerability, and it was notifying fewer than 10 patients that their information was exposed due to the bug, citing its server logs.
The company said it was working with the affected dental practice to notify the affected patients. Lau said that the company had not identified evidence of previous activity related to the bug, suggesting Cox was likely the first to find it.
Cox confirmed that the bug appears to have been fixed.
When asked by TechCrunch, neither Lau nor Practice by Number’s co-founder and president, Rohit Garg, would say if the company’s patient portal had undergone a security audit before it was launched. Companies commonly undergo security audits to ensure their products meet cybersecurity standards, and are free from common security flaws before customers begin using them.
While no software is ever completely bug-free, companies that handle sensitive information, like healthcare data, typically seek third-party reviews of their code to weed out any major security flaws.
When asked if Practice by Numbers plans to update its website to allow security researchers to notify the company of security flaws, such as through a vulnerability disclosure program, Garg said the company plans to update its website to let people report security issues. The company did not offer a timeline.
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Tech
Anthropic, Gamma, and Clay talk AI at Disrupt 2026
An AI demo can look brilliant in five minutes. Then customers start using the product. They push it into workflows you didn’t anticipate. They expect it to work reliably. And they quickly find out whether it solves a big enough problem to become part of how they work — or becomes another AI experiment they tried and abandoned.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, leaders from Anthropic, Gamma, and Clay will come together on the AI Stage for “What Anthropic Sees When Enterprises Actually Deploy Claude.” The conversation will bring two sides of AI deployment: the patterns Anthropic sees across enterprise implementations and the firsthand experience of founders building AI products people actually use.

Secure your pass to Disrupt and save 50% on a second pass. Hear what AI leaders and founders are learning when their products meet real customers. Insightful sessions like this are meant to be experienced with a colleague, partner, or peer.
What happens after the AI launch?
Most conversations about enterprise AI focus on what companies could do with it. Anthropic Head of Applied AI Cat de Jong starts somewhere more interesting: what happens after deployment.
De Jong works directly with enterprises putting Claude into critical workflows. At Disrupt, she’ll explore where deployments succeed, where they stall, and what separates organizations extracting real value from those still running pilots 18 months later.
If you’re selling AI into the enterprise, those patterns matter. De Jong’s experience offers a firsthand look at what changes when AI moves from experimentation into critical workflows and why some organizations get to production while others don’t.
Want to know what separates AI pilots from deployments that make it into production? Register for Disrupt and get a second pass for 50% off.
How do you get people to use what you’ve built?
Anthropic can see patterns across enterprise deployments. Gamma Co-Founder and CEO Grant Lee brings another perspective to the conversation: what it looks like from inside a company building an AI product and getting people to actually use it.
Gamma has grown its AI-powered platform from an alternative to traditional presentation software into a broader visual communication tool. TechCrunch reported in March that the company was approaching 100 million users as it expanded its AI tools into marketing assets and other forms of visual content.
That kind of adoption gives Lee a useful vantage point on the questions at the center of this session: What makes an AI product useful enough for customers to keep coming back? What changes once people start using it in ways you didn’t anticipate? And how do you turn powerful AI capabilities into a product that solves a problem people actually have?
Building an AI product is one thing. Getting people to make it part of how they work is another. Secure your pass to Disrupt and hear what Gamma has learned along the way.
What happens when AI becomes part of the workflow?
Clay Co-Founder and CEO Kareem Amin brings the perspective of a founder building AI into the way companies find and reach customers. Clay provides infrastructure to pull in data, run agentic workflows, and launch GTM plays.
In January, TechCrunch reported that Clay was one of the launch apps integrated into Claude when Anthropic introduced interactive workplace tools inside the Claude interface, so his perspective is particularly relevant to the conversation.
That puts Amin close to the questions this session will explore: where AI is genuinely useful, how it fits into existing workflows, and what happens once customers start depending on it.
Together, de Jong, Lee, and Amin bring different views of that transition. Anthropic can identify patterns across enterprise deployments, while Gamma and Clay can pressure-test those patterns against what they’re seeing as customers put AI products to work.
Want to learn what AI adoption looks like from both sides? Explore your Disrupt ticket options and save 50% on a second pass of the same type to hear crucial AI perspectives from Anthropic, Gamma, and Clay on the AI Stage.
Hear what it takes for an AI product to go beyond the demo at Disrupt 2026
An impressive demo can show what AI makes possible. The harder test comes when customers start depending on it. At Disrupt, Anthropic brings a view across enterprise deployments, while Gamma and Clay bring the founder perspective on building AI products people actually use.
Join them at Disrupt, October 13–15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, where 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders gather for 200+ sessions across six industry stages, roundtables, and breakouts featuring 250+ speakers, plus 300+ exhibiting startups, matchmaking, and networking.
Register for your pass and get a second pass for 50% off. Hear what Anthropic, Gamma, and Clay are learning about turning AI capabilities into products people actually use.

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Tech
Mavi bets on the AI boom creating demand for a new kind of accountant
Molly Liu and Aman Puri are tackling the U.S. accounting shortage from another angle — a global one, that is. On Monday, they announced that their AI-powered talent marketplace Mavi, founded in 2023, has officially emerged from stealth. The service helps connect and onboard U.S. companies with top AI-proficient global financial and accounting talent within days.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Liu, the company’s co-CEO, pointed out the problems facing the U.S. accounting industry today — mainly that the profession is shrinking and even those left aren’t necessarily fluent in the AI skills needed to help their enterprises grow. At the same time, she said, many U.S. companies don’t like the idea of working with global talent, either because it’s complex to hire and manage them or because they simply don’t think the talent is good enough.
“There’s been a new wave of tremendous talent, a really high bar that is equal or even better than the U.S.,” she said of the global workforce. And that’s where Mavi comes in, which, Liu said, also helps companies handle the unglamorous work that comes with hiring global talent, like managing cross-border contracts, legal and compliance, and even payroll. She said the company focuses on quickly finding full-time, long-term placements that augment in-house finance teams, with a focus on mid-level and senior-level positions.
Liu has worked at Ramp, Lyft, and Dropbox. She said working at these companies made her realize that more automation tools can’t fix all the problems in accounting.
“AI will automate away many entry-level roles in finance and accounting, which will further exacerbate the talent shortage at the mid-level experience level, given there will be less entry-level talent growing into the mid-level over time,” Liu said.
So no matter how many AI tools are released to automate grunt work, companies still need experienced humans to make judgment calls on critical work. In fact, she said, she’s noticed that the more AI tools a company adopts, the more pressure that adds to those in senior roles.
“They are increasingly expected to add more of their reasoning skills,” she continued. “Finance teams are now being pushed to do more with less.”
But there’s another snag — the fact that what it means to be an accountant today is slowly shifting. An AI-proficient accountant, for example, is someone with strong finance and accounting fundamentals, she said, but who can also direct AI tools to do work, apply judgment to catch what AI gets wrong; someone who can integrate LLMs into finance and accounting workflows and is familiar with the latest AI-native ERPs and tools. “A traditional accountant has the accounting fundamentals but only has a basic understanding of how to incorporate AI into finance and workflows or how to review [and] manage AI tools within finance,” she continued.
Last year, the company raised a $4 million seed round led by Harlem Capital, which it had not announced until Monday. Liu says the company now has more than 3,000 accounting professionals on the platform and enterprise clients that include the personal care company Athena Club.
“We have a very strong point of view as to what the future of the finance team looks like,” she said. “The work for us is focusing on that high-skill talent and that new layer of judgment that is paramount to all finance teams and all business functions as a whole, to be able to operate at the next level and beyond.”
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Tech
6 Best AI Meeting Note Takers for 2026: Fathom, Otter, Fireflies and More
Compare six AI meeting note takers for 2026, including Fathom, Fireflies, Otter, Granola, Fellow, and Notta on pricing, free plans, and features.
The post 6 Best AI Meeting Note Takers for 2026: Fathom, Otter, Fireflies and More appeared first on TechRepublic.
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