TechCrunch Startup News

Thirteen years ago, when Chris Farmer founded early-stage venture firm SignalFire with data analysis at the core of its investment strategy, many were skeptical about the approach — conventional wisdom dictated that nascent companies didn’t have enough data to make investment algorithms effective. “This was a very radical idea, and everyone thought I was crazy.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI just co-led a $43 million Series A into deepfake defense startup Adaptive Security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thatch, a startup that aims to transform the health insurance experience for employers and employees alike, has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Aetherflux, the space solar startup founded by billionaire co-founder of Robinhood Baiju Bhatt, has raised a $50 million in a Series A round as it works to launch its first low Earth orbit demonstration in 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cloud infrastructure is dominated by several large industry players: AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud. While to some it may look like AI is headed in a similar direction, the founders of Parasail think AI infrastructure will look very different — and are betting their company’s fate on it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rippling released the affidavit of the its employee who admitted he was spying for Deel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While working on their MBAs at Harvard Business School, Colombian immigrants Stephanie Murra and Lorenza Vélez noticed that most of the workers in the cafeteria were Hispanic. In conversations with them, a common theme kept coming up: how difficult it was for people who legally moved to the U.S. from Spanish-speaking countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skylight, a startup taking on TikTok with a more open alternative, is launching its mobile app to the public on Tuesday after just ten weeks of active development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI startup Runway on Monday released what it claims is one of the highest-fidelity AI-powered video generators yet. Called Gen-4, the model is rolling out to the company’s individual and enterprise customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite Google’s intentions for its default image viewing and editing app for Android, the Photos app has, over the years, become one of the most popular photo backup services around. In fact, it was one of the most attractive offerings for years until it stopped offering unlimited storage in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Charlie Javice, the founder of student loan application startup Frank that was purchased by JP Morgan for $175 million, was found guilty on Friday of defrauding the bank by greatly inflating the customer count. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HoneyBook, a startup last valued in late 2021 at $2.4 billion, told TechCrunch that it hit $140 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR). This makes HoneyBook one of the few startups with peak-VC-era valuations to report their financials after the market cooled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Twin came out of stealth in January 2024, AI agents were more of a theoretical concept than a reality. Today, the Paris-based is releasing an automation agent in partnership with Qonto, the fintech startup that offers business bank accounts to more than 500,000 customers across Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on these deepfakes is already costing companies millions of dollars — not to mention the implications these could have on national security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Medina's new startup, called Paid, helps agentic startups profitably charge for their bots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Sam Weaver was vice president of product management at Unqork, he realized that the company needed a better way to manage its sprawling network of Kubernetes clusters — which are groups of computing nodes. When Unqork couldn’t find anything off the shelf, it assembled a 15-person team to build a Kubernetes management product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pruna AI, a European startup that has been working on compression algorithms for AI models, is making its optimization framework open source on Thursday. Pruna AI has been creating a framework that applies several efficiency methods, such as caching, pruning, quantization and distillation, to a given AI model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Arcade, a generative AI marketplace for designing jewelry, is expanding its offerings to include home goods, starting with rugs. The company on Monday also introduced a new feature called “Match My Room,” which allows users to upload a photo of their room so that their design complements the existing colors and style Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since. With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply not that attainable for many people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Aletiq has raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the founding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Norwegian robotics startup 1X plans to start early tests of its humanoid robot, Neo Gamma, in “a few hundred to a few thousand” homes by the end of 2025, according to the company’s CEO, Bernt Børnich. “Neo Gamma is going into homes this year.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall sees promise in bringing his autonomous vehicle startup’s tech to market. That is, if Wayve sticks to its strategy of ensuring its automated driving software is cheap to run, hardware agnostic, and can be applied to advanced driver assistance systems, robotaxis, and even robotics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Debt collection in emerging markets often feels outdated, and can be costly — damaging borrower trust. As consumer lending surges and regulators push for fairer practices, legacy collection outfits are struggling to maintain pace. ClearGrid aims to help modernize debt collection — and recovery — with AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A Swedish startup aiming to build a hyperscale cloud company in Europe has raised €50.6 million ($55 million) in Series A funding. Evroc, as it’s called, says it’s laying the foundations for a “secure, sovereign and sustainable hyperscale cloud to reimagine the digital future of Europe.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While Rippling and Deel duke it out in the field and in the courtroom alleging illegal sales and marketing tactics, here’s another way to boost business growth: pick up a massive sum of cash to expand your operations in those areas. Factorial, the Barcelona-based “unicorn” startup that provides an all-in-one HR platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta exec Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures. Laude is the new fund launched in 2024 by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who also co-founded Databricks. This isn’t the only check Laude has cut. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s gloves off in one of the more tense rivalries in the world of startups. HR company Rippling Monday morning announced a lawsuit against Deel, another big player in the same space. The dramatic 50-page complaint alleges racketeering, misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and aiding & abetting breach of fiduciary duty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flexport accuses Freightmate of being the product of "theft, not ingenuity" in its lawsuit against the startup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in 8 months, it says. Founders Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack are just 18. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-powered image generators, which are at the center of a number of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, are frequently trained on massive amounts of data from public websites. Most of these companies argue that fair use doctrine shields their data scraping and training practices. But many copyright holders disagree. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kerry Washington is expanding her angel investment portfolio, serving as lead investor in the pre-seed round of the wedding marketplace Cheersy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don’t exist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

La Fourche is just seven years old but it has been quite a rollercoaster for the French startup. During this time, the online grocery retailer has gone through a global pandemic, followed by the rise of venture-backed quick-commerce startups that promised grocery deliveries in less than 15 minutes, followed by the implosion of that vertical. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Scimplify has raised $40 million in a new equity round backed by Accel to expand its presence in the U.S. and enter new markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hexa is trying something new. Instead of fostering startups from the ground up and incubating them for the first year or so, the Paris-based startup studio is acquiring a majority stake in Veevart, a vertical software-as-a-service company for museums that provides solutions for ticketing, fundraising, CRM and collection management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The reactor, called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), is General Fusion’s latest iteration in a string of devices that have tested various parts of its unique approach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Medical imaging is a broad term that encompasses several distinct technologies. After working on AI-powered tools to enhance X-rays and mammographies, French startup Gleamer now aims to tackle magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Instead of starting from scratch, Gleamer has acquired two startups that have already been working on AI-powered MRI analysis: Pixyl and Caerus Medica Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anna Patterson has had a storied career in Silicon Valley. She founded three startups, including search engine upstarts Xift and Cuil, as well as recall.archive.org, which became the Internet Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Intangible AI, now backed by $4 million in seed funding, offers an AI-powered creative tool that allows users to create 3D world concepts with text prompts to aid creative professionals across a variety of industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CollX, a company offering an online trading card marketplace, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Austin-based Brand Foundry Ventures and Philadelphia-based 114 Ventures, both of which were previous investors in the company. Other investors such as Next Coast Ventures, FJ Labs, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners also participated . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Ukraine has brought drones to the forefront of modern warfare, creating a surge in demand for counter-drone systems. However, legacy solutions to counter drones, such as ground-based defense systems and cyber warfare, often come with a hefty price tag. For German startup Alpine Eagle, these solutions fall short: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in that effort is announcing a significant round of funding. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CoreWeave’s initial S-1 document for its upcoming IPO is full of surprises. Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave runs an AI-specific cloud service from its network of 32 data centers that together have more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024, according to the company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy compared to burning fossil fuels, their power output isn’t always consistent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thorton said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices