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It seems theres fresh blood pumping back into the IPO market. After a blowout initial public offering from Figma last week, investors might have another chance to get their heart rates up again soon. Heartflow, a California-based medtech company that utilizes AI with imaging and diagnostics software to help evaluate cardiac and coronary diseases, is looking to list shares on the Nasdaq. In paperwork filed on Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Heartflow said it plans to offer 12.5 million shares, priced between $15 and $17. That could potentially raise more than $208 million. According to Reuters, Heartflow’s target valuation could be as high as $1.3 billion. The company plans to trade under the ticker HTFL. Personalized 3D-models of people’s hearts Heartflow uses AI and other technology to scan patients for coronary and cardiac problems, creating three-dimensional models of patients’ hearts. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the software the green light in 2022, and its now being used in some markets to diagnose patients. Additionally, the company got a leg up last year when the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded Medicare coverage to include platforms that use imaging results to look for signs of coronary disease, and the American Medical Association (AMA) issued a new Category I CPT code for those platforms. That gives doctors and clinics the go-ahead to start using the technology on a broader scale starting next year. According to the companys SEC filing, Heartflow says that as of the end of March 2025, its been used to assess more than 400,000 patients. Revenues are growing but profits are elusive Heartflow generated $125.8 million in 2024, a 44% increase over the $87.2 million it made the year before, the company says. Revenue likewise grew 39% for the first quarter of 2025 to $37.2 million. However, the company saw a net loss of $96.4 million in 2024, wider than its net loss of $95.7 million in 2023. It warns in the filing that it expects to incur “substantial losses in the foreseeable future [and] may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability.” Bain Capital, Panorama Point Partners, and Capricorn Investment Group are among Heartflow’s backers, according to Crunchbase. Bain led its most recent fundraising round, a Series F round in 2023, which raised $215 million. This is not the first time that Heartflow has attempted to go public. The company had planned to merge with a special purpose acquisition company during the SPAC frenzy of the early pandemic years, but it halted the plan in 2022, citing “unfavorable market conditions,” as Fierce Biotech reported. Heartflows IPO comes on the heels of another growing medtech companys public debut. Carlsmed, which specializes in AI-driven spine surgery technology, recently went public as well, with shares trading on July 23. Since then, the stock is down around 4.5%. Heartflow has not said when it plans to list its stock. Fast Company reached out for more details on the timeline and will update this post if we hear back.
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E-Commerce
Taiwanese authorities have detained three people for allegedly stealing technology trade secrets from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest chip foundry, Taiwanese prosecutors said on Tuesday. The three were detained late last month after TSMC reported that an internal investigation had shown that former and current employees had illegally obtained information from the company, the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office said in a statement. The prosecutor’s office said another two people had been released on bail, and one more had been released. The three who have been detained – two current staff and one former employee – are suspected of violating Taiwan’s national security law, it added. It did not disclose their identities apart from saying that the former staffer was surnamed Chen. Earlier on Tuesday, TSMC said it had launched legal proceedings and taken disciplinary action against employees involved in potential trade secret leaks after detecting unauthorised activities during routine monitoring. It said its “comprehensive and robust monitoring mechanisms” enabled early identification of the issue, leading to internal investigations and measures against the personnel involved. TSMC said the legal case, which is now under judicial review, prevented it from providing further details. Nikkei Asia earlier reported that the breach involved several former employees suspected of attempting to obtain critical proprietary information on TSMC’s 2-nanometer chip technology. There were no immediate details on the suspected motives or whether any information had been passed on, and investigations are ongoing to determine the scope of the leak and whether any others were involved, the Nikkei report said. Taiwanese media outlet United Daily News said prosecutors and investigators had also searched the offices of Tokyo Electron, without citing where they had obtained the information. Tokyo Electron and the prosecutors’ office declined to comment. TSMC’s 2-nanometer chip technology is the most advanced technology in the semiconductor industry in terms of both density and energy efficiency, according to the company’s website. The contract manufacturer, which counts AI industry darling Nvidia, iPhone maker Apple, and Qualcomm among its customers, highlighted its zero-tolerance policy for trade secret violations, and said it would pursue offenders to the full extent of the law. Bipasha Dey and Wen-Yee Lee, Reuters
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E-Commerce
When the web was established several decades ago, it was built on a number of principles. Among them was a key, overarching standard dubbed netiquette: Do unto others as youd want done unto you. Its a principle that lived on through other companies, including Google, whose motto for a period was Dont be evil. The fundamental idea was simple: Act ethically and morally. If someone asked you to stop doing something, you stoppedor at least considered it. But Cloudflare, an IT company that protects millions of websites from hostile internet attacks, has published an eye-opening exposé suggesting that one of the leading AI tools today isnt following that principle. Cloudflare claims Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine, is overriding website requests not to crawl their content by spoofing its identity to hide that the requests are coming from an AI company. Cloudflare launched its investigation after receiving complaints from customers that Perplexity was ignoring directives in robots.txt files, which are used by websites to signal whether they want their content indexed by search engines or AI crawlers. Perplexitys alleged behavior highlights what happens when the web shifts from being rooted in voluntary agreements to a more hard-nosed business environment, where commercial goals overrule moral considerations. The code of honor around crawling and robots.txt files is a charming remnant from when the web was collaborative and based on community standards, says Eerke Boiten, a cybersecurity researcher at De Montfort University in the U.K. Cloudflares position as a market leader in web protection means that, for now at least, its still possible to preserve some remnants of that morality, Boiten says. Boiten believes the sense of ethical cooperation online is fading fast, noting that many large AI companies show little regard for where or how they obtain their training data, often operating in murky ethical territory. While he sees OpenAI as generally respectful of the established norms, hes far less optimistic about others. Perplexity trying to scrape their way around any defenses feels like it will be the norm rather than the exception, he says. Perplexitys alleged conduct stands out as particularly bold, especially given that the company is already facing a lawsuit over unauthorized content scraping. Dow Jones Companythe parent of the Wall Street Journal and New York Postfiled a lawsuit in October 2024, alleging that Perplexity copies on a massive scale their content. (The case is ongoing.) The BBC also sent a letter in June to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, threatening legal action for scraping its content without permission unless the company stops and either compensates for the data already accessed or deletes it entirely. Perplexity told the Financial Times that the BBCs case was manipulative and opportunistic and reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law. Perplexity did not respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment on this story. But Boiten, for his part, anticipates an escalating arms race between those trying to protect online content from AI-driven web scraping and the companies attempting to do just that to improve their models. Cloudflare applying machine learning to spot Perplexity’s patterns, and acknowledging that publication of all this likely means Perplexity will come up with new decoys, he says. Cornell Law professor James Grimmelmann says the legal limits of scraping content without permissionor bypassing robots.txt filesremain unclear, but Cloudflares findings could expose Perplexity to more lawsuits. There is a loose judicial consensus that it is okay to scrape sites when their robots.txt files allow it, says Grimmelmann, but Perplexity seems determined to fuck around and find out whether the reverse is true.
Category:
E-Commerce
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