Topic: startup funding
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Reflection raises $2B to become America's open AI lab
Reflection secured a $2 billion investment, raising its valuation to $8 billion and positioning itself as a major open-source AI competitor to firms like OpenAI and Anthropic. Founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, the company has built a team of top AI experts and infrastructure to train...
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Naveen Rao's AI Startup Eyes $5B Valuation With a16z Backing
Unconventional, Inc., founded by former Databricks AI head Naveen Rao, is negotiating a $1 billion funding round that would value the company at $5 billion to develop a new type of AI computer system. Andreessen Horowitz is leading the investment with participation from Lightspeed, Lux Capital, a...
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How to End Things Gracefully
The author secured startup funding by demonstrating preparedness for failure, which built trust with investors through honesty and realism. When the startup failed, they returned leftover funds to investors and maintained relationships, leading to support for future ventures. The author reflects ...
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Paid AI raises $21M seed to bill clients only for results
Manny Medina's new startup Paid has raised $33.3 million in total funding, achieving a valuation over $100 million, with its seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Paid introduces a results-based billing platform for AI agents, allowing developers to charge clients based on the tangible v...
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Micro1 Raises $500M at $500M Valuation to Rival Scale AI
Micro1, an AI data services startup, raised $35 million in Series A funding at a $500 million valuation, led by O1 Advisors, amid growing demand for high-quality training data. The company is experiencing rapid growth, with annual recurring revenue increasing from $7 million to $50 million, and i...
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IQM Quantum Computers Expands Global Ambitions Beyond Europe
IQM Quantum Computers has reached unicorn status after raising $300 million in a Series B round led by Ten Eleven Ventures, fueling its global expansion and focus on the U.S. and Asia-Pacific markets. The funding will accelerate R&D in chip fabrication, software development, and error correction ...
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Nvidia, Google, Bill Gates Back $863M Fusion Energy Funding
Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $863 million from investors including Nvidia and Google, bringing its total funding to nearly $3 billion and highlighting growing confidence in commercial fusion energy. The company is building a prototype reactor, Sparc, aiming to achieve scientific breakeven b...
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Base Power Secures $1B to Expand Home Battery Deployment
Base Power secured a $1 billion Series C funding round, valuing the company at $3 billion, to accelerate its growth in the energy storage sector. The company leases home battery systems to Texas homeowners for a low upfront fee and a monthly service charge, bypassing high initial costs and offeri...
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Datacurve Secures $15M to Challenge ScaleAI
Datacurve raised $15 million in Series A funding to provide high-quality, specialized data for AI training, with backing from investors including professionals at DeepMind and OpenAI. The company uses a bounty system to engage software engineers in creating complex datasets, focusing on user expe...
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Replit's 9-Year Grind Pays Off: Can It Sustain Its Market?
Replit achieved a $3 billion valuation through long-term persistence, overcoming multiple business pivots, revenue plateaus, and a critical downsizing before experiencing breakthrough growth. The company's recent $250 million funding round and surge to over $150 million in annualized revenue foll...
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VCs Are Pouring Money Into AI Startups - Here's Why
Venture capital is increasingly flowing into AI, with projections showing it will account for over half of all VC funding by 2025, highlighting a major shift in investor focus away from other sectors. AI startups have received $192.7 billion in investments this year, making up a significant porti...
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UAE's YAL.ai Raises $12M for AI-Powered Scam-Free Communication
YAL.ai, a UAE-based startup, raised $12 million in Series A funding to advance its AI platform that ensures secure, scam-free digital communication globally through sophisticated telecom fraud protection. The platform uses self-learning, on-device AI to instantly adapt to new fraud tactics across...
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Superpanel Secures $5.3M to Automate Legal Intake with AI
Superpanel, an AI platform for legal intake, has secured $5.3 million in seed funding co-led by Outlander VC and Field Ventures to support its expansion and development. The platform was founded by Julien Emery and Dingyu Zhang to automate client communication and document handling, acting as a d...
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Koah Secures $5M to Integrate Ads into AI Applications
Monetizing AI applications is challenging, especially in global markets where subscription models are often impractical, leading Koah to introduce ads within AI-driven conversations as a scalable solution. Koah has secured $5 million in seed funding to embed contextual ads in niche and internatio...
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From YouTube to $12M: French VC Funds Y Combinator Startups
Gabriel Jarrosson's Lobster Capital exclusively invests in Y Combinator graduates, a focused strategy that has grown his assets to over $12 million and led to a second fund. This approach is based on Y Combinator's superior performance metrics, including a 4.5% unicorn rate and 45% Series A succe...
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Steph Curry's VC Invests in AI to Fix Food Supply Chains
The global food supply chain is inefficient, relying on outdated methods like emails and faxes for orders, which creates bottlenecks and hurts thin profit margins. Burnt, a startup, has secured $3.8 million in seed funding to use AI agents that automate back-office tasks, such as order entry, wit...
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Ex-Apple Star Aims to Build the Perfect GPU Software
Chris Lattner co-founded Modular in 2022 to create a universal software layer that enables AI applications to run efficiently across diverse processors without extensive rewrites. The company's strategy involves a unifying software stack and a new Python-based programming language to maximize har...
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This $30M Startup's Dog Crate-Sized Robot Factory Learns by Watching Humans
MicroFactory has developed a compact, tabletop manufacturing system with dual robotic arms that learn from human demonstrations for precision tasks like circuit board assembly. The startup, founded by Igor Kulakov and Viktor Petrenko, was inspired by their manufacturing challenges and uses a non-...
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Augment AI Logistics Startup Raises $85M Series A from Deliverr Founder
Harish Abbott, co-founder of Deliverr, has launched Augment, an AI-driven logistics company that recently secured $85 million in Series A funding to modernize freight operations. Augment's AI assistant, Augie, automates routine tasks like tracking shipments and invoicing, reducing manual work and...
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Nvidia's AI Startup Investments: Powering the Future
Nvidia is leveraging its dominant position in high-performance GPUs and financial power to strategically invest in and shape the AI ecosystem through extensive venture capital activities. The company has significantly increased its startup investments, participating in numerous large funding roun...
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VCs Ditch AI Hype, Back Real Innovation
Venture capital investment hit a ten-quarter high of €108.3 billion in Q1 2025, with over €44.6 billion driven by artificial intelligence. Investors are becoming more discerning, demanding tangible proof of functionality and market readiness rather than just AI-related buzzwords. Despite a 21% de...
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SpotitEarly Uses Dogs and AI to Detect Common Cancers
SpotitEarly is developing an at-home breath test for cancer detection that combines the scent-identifying abilities of trained dogs with AI validation for accuracy. In a clinical study, the dogs achieved a 94% accuracy rate in detecting early-stage cancers like breast, colorectal, prostate, and l...
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Ex-Battlefield Devs Raise €2M to Tackle Europe's New Accessibility Law
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is introducing new digital accessibility standards for businesses in Europe, with significant fines for non-compliance and a 2030 deadline for existing products. DevAlly, an Irish startup, uses AI and automation to help companies identify and fix accessibility...
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Wave Function Ventures Raises $15M for Deep Tech Fund
Wave Function Ventures raised $15.1 million for its inaugural deep tech fund, focusing on early-stage investments in sectors like nuclear energy, robotics, and aerospace. Founder Jamie Gull leverages his engineering background from SpaceX and Scaled Composites, along with angel investing experien...
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Perplexity Acquires AI Design Startup Visual Electric's Team
Perplexity has acquired the team from AI design startup Visual Electric to form a new Agent Experiences group, enhancing its AI capabilities and expanding product development. The acquisition, led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, will focus on creating innovative consumer product experiences for Perplexi...
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Ex-OpenAI, DeepMind Scientists Land $300M to Automate Science
Periodic Labs launched with $300 million in seed funding to pioneer automated scientific discovery using AI scientists that autonomously conduct experiments, backed by prominent tech investors. The startup, co-founded by former Google Brain and OpenAI executives, aims to develop advanced material...
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Telo Raises $20M for Compact Electric City Trucks
California startup Telo has secured $20 million in Series A funding to develop its compact MT1 electric pickup, targeting urban drivers with a smaller, more efficient vehicle. The MT1 is designed for city life with a footprint similar to a Mini Cooper but offers a five-foot bed and a claimed 350-...
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Rulebase: The AI Coworker for Fintech, Backed by Y Combinator
Rulebase is a fintech startup focusing on back-office automation, using AI to streamline compliance, dispute resolution, and quality assurance in financial institutions. Founded by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, the company secured $2.1 million in pre-seed funding and has achieved significant c...
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Nothing raises $200M for its first AI-native devices
Nothing has secured $200 million in funding, valuing the company at $1.3 billion, to develop AI-native devices with a new operating system aimed at breaking current standards. The company plans to launch an "AI OS" for a hyper-personalized experience across a range of hardware, from smartphones a...
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Ex-Google X Trio Raises $6M to Build Your AI Second Brain
TwinMind is an AI-powered app that captures ambient speech to build a personal knowledge base, operates entirely offline, and recently secured $5.7 million in seed funding. The app distinguishes itself by running unobtrusively in the background on mobile devices, offering real-time translation an...
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Waymo's NYC Expansion & Nvidia's Nuro Investment: TechCrunch Mobility
Autonomous vehicle advancements and significant investments are shaping the industry, with updates from companies like Waymo, Nuro, and emerging startups. Key developments include major acquisitions and funding rounds, such as Serve Robotics acquiring Vayu Robotics and Nuro securing $203 million ...
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Doji Secures $14M for AI-Powered Virtual Try-On Avatars
Doji, an AI-powered virtual try-on platform, raised $14 million in seed funding to enhance its avatar-based fashion app, offering personalized shopping experiences. The app creates photo-realistic custom avatars from user photos, suggests outfits based on preferences, and allows users to visualiz...
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EWOR's $68M Founder Fellowship Program Now Open
Europe’s startup ecosystem is witnessing a surge in programs supporting early-stage founders, with EWOR’s new €60 million fellowship emerging as one of the...
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Ex-Microsoft Execs Launch AI to Replace Excel in Finance
Despite significant investments in enterprise financial software, many finance departments still rely heavily on Excel for critical tasks like closing books and audits, prompting the launch of Maximor, an AI-powered platform by former Microsoft executives to automate manual processes. Maximor's A...
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19-Year-Old's AI Memory Startup Supermemory Wins Backing From Google Execs
Supermemory, founded by 19-year-old Dhravya Shah, is developing a sophisticated memory solution to enable AI applications to retain context across interactions, addressing the challenge of AI's lack of long-term memory. The platform functions as a universal memory API that processes multimodal da...
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Nuclearn Secures $10.5M to Bring AI to Nuclear Industry
The nuclear energy sector is adopting AI to enhance operational efficiency, particularly in optimizing administrative workflows and documentation, though it is not yet trusted to directly control reactors. Nuclearn, a startup, secured $10.5 million in Series A funding and deploys AI tools across ...
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Huxe: The Audio-Powered App for News and Research
Huxe is an audio-first app that delivers personalized news and research through dynamic briefings and AI-hosted simulated podcasts, designed for hands-free consumption. The startup, founded by former Google engineers, secured $4.6 million in funding and pivoted to focus on audio after observing u...
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Minute Media Acquires Indian AI Startup for Automated Sports Highlights
Minute Media, backed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, has acquired Indian AI startup VideoVerse to enhance automated sports highlights generation across its portfolio, including Sports Illustrated and The Players’ Tribune. VideoVerse, valued between $200–250 million, specializes in AI tools for sp...
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Deta Surf: The AI Browser Meets NotebookLM
Deta Surf is a hybrid AI browser that integrates web browsing with research and knowledge management tools, allowing users to create and edit topic-specific notebooks. The platform enables users to generate summaries from web content and use open tabs as context for AI-driven queries, while also ...
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Distributed Storage Startup Challenges Cloud Giants
The AI boom is driving demand for specialized computing providers, but most businesses still rely on major cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure for storage, which are not optimized for distributed AI workloads. Tigris Data is addressing this gap by building a decentralized ...
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ÄIO Makes Edible Fat From Sawdust and Farm Waste
ÄIO, an Estonian startup, produces edible fats from agricultural byproducts like sawdust and farm waste using a unique yeast strain that converts sugars into fats instead of carbon dioxide or alcohol. The resulting fats are versatile, resembling chicken fat in solid form or vegetable oils like ca...
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CommanderAI Aims to Be the Salesforce of Waste Management
CommanderAI is a specialized CRM and sales prospecting platform for the waste management industry, founded by David Berg in 2024 to modernize traditional pen-and-paper and door-to-door sales methods. The platform uses AI to identify and segment potential clients unique to waste management, such a...
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Fourth Power's Thermal Batteries Could Undercut Natural Gas Plants
Fourth Power is developing a thermal battery using superheated liquid tin and argon to store and release energy efficiently, aiming to make renewable energy more cost-effective than natural gas. The technology can supply power for about eight hours, twice the duration of most lithium-ion batterie...
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Offgrid Raises $15M to Pioneer Lithium-Free Battery Storage
Offgrid Energy Labs raised $15 million in Series A funding to develop its zinc-bromine battery technology, offering a cost-effective and safer alternative to lithium-ion systems. The company's ZincGel batteries provide 80–90% of lithium-ion efficiency with a longer lifespan, reduced fire risk, an...
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AI Startup Helps Rice Farmers Fight Climate Change
Mitti Labs uses AI and satellite technology to measure and reduce methane emissions from rice farming, a major source of this potent greenhouse gas. The company partners with organizations like The Nature Conservancy to promote sustainable farming practices in India, providing financial incentive...
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Okosix Debuts Biodegradable Plastic at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025
The healthcare industry produces massive plastic waste, with U.S. facilities discarding over 2,800 tons of single-use plastics daily, inspiring entrepreneur Eddie Yu to seek sustainable solutions. Okosix, Yu's startup, has developed a cost-effective, high-performing biodegradable polymer from bio...
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OpenAI's Latest Move: Betting Big on Personalized AI
OpenAI has acquired Roi, a personal finance AI app, and will discontinue its services on October 15, with only Roi's CEO joining OpenAI while the rest of the team does not. This acquisition highlights OpenAI's focus on personalization and life management, leveraging Roi's expertise to enhance its...
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Unlock Your Codebase with Macroscope: AI-Powered Bug Fixing
Macroscope is an AI-driven platform that automates codebase management, bug detection, and provides natural language insights for engineering teams and product leaders. Founded by former Twitter head of product Kayvon Beykpour, the tool integrates with GitHub and other systems to analyze code and...
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Yottar: Unlock Hidden Electrical Grid Capacity for Energy Users
Surging global electricity demand from AI, EVs, and digital infrastructure is straining aging grids, causing delays and hindering decarbonization efforts. Yottar addresses this by mapping available grid capacity, helping businesses identify optimal locations for energy-intensive projects like dat...
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Tesla Robotaxi Future & Redwood’s Next Move: TechCrunch Mobility
Tesla's limited robotaxi rollout in Austin sparked controversy over alleged traffic violations, prompting federal regulators to request details and highlighting the challenges of camera-based autonomous systems. The debate reflects Tesla's divisive reputation, with ...
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