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Airbnb Goes Global with "Pay Later"

Several tech companies announced significant developments this week, including the global launch of Airbnb's "Reserve Now, Pay Later" feature, the emergence of new AI-powered platforms, and partnerships aimed at advancing AI capabilities. These announcements highlight the ongoing evolution of technology across various sectors, from travel and finance to healthcare and enterprise solutions.

Airbnb announced on Tuesday the global expansion of its "Reserve Now, Pay Later" feature, which allows users to secure bookings without immediate payment. The feature, initially launched in the U.S. last year for domestic travel, enables users to cancel bookings without upfront financial loss. Properties with flexible or moderate cancellation policies are eligible, with charges occurring closer to the check-in date. According to Airbnb, the feature has seen 70% adoption for eligible bookings since its initial launch. This mirrors the "buy now, pay later" trend in e-commerce, making travel more accessible by spreading out costs.

In the healthcare sector, SpendRule, an AI-powered platform designed to help healthcare systems track spending, emerged from stealth. The company, founded by Chris Heckler and Joseph Akintolayo, launched last summer. Heckler, with his industry connections, and Akintolayo, with his AI and supply chain knowledge, collaborated to create the platform. "I wanted to get back into it," Heckler said, reflecting on his decision to re-enter the startup world after a non-compete period.

The Indian vibe-coding platform Emergent reported rapid growth, claiming an annual run-rate revenue of over $100 million just eight months after its launch. The company stated it had doubled its annual run-rate revenue in the past month and now has over 6 million users worldwide across 190 countries, with approximately 150,000 paying customers. Emergent's users have created over 7 million applications on its platform, with nearly 40% being small businesses and about 70% having no prior coding experience. The platform is primarily used to digitize operations previously managed through spreadsheets, email, or messaging apps, and to build custom software, according to co-founder and CEO Mukund Jha.

Infosys, an Indian IT giant, announced a partnership with Anthropic to develop enterprise-grade AI agents. The collaboration aims to integrate Anthropic's Claude models into Infosys' Topaz AI platform to build agentic systems capable of autonomously handling complex enterprise workflows across industries such as banking, telecoms, and manufacturing. The announcement was made at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. This partnership comes amid concerns about the potential disruption of AI tools on the IT services industry.

Also at the India AI Summit, enterprise AI company Cohere launched a new family of open multilingual models called Tiny Aya. These open-weight models support over 70 languages and can run on everyday devices without an internet connection. The models, launched by Cohere Labs, support South Asian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi. The base model contains 3.35 billion parameters. Cohere also launched TinyAya-Global, a version fine-tuned for broader language support.

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Synthesized from multiple sources. Reviewed for accuracy.

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