TechCrunch Startup News
3,807 episodes — Page 11 of 77
Flexport accuses former employees of stealing its source code to create a rival startup
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
Photo calorie app Cal AI, downloaded over a million times, was built by two teenagers
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
Tern AI’s low-cost GPS alternative actually works
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
Bria lands new funding for AI models trained on licensed data
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 invests in wedding marketplace Cheersy
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
Omni raises $69M to design tools that help companies better analyze their data
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
Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation
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
How La Fourche, an online organic supermarket, is thriving after q-commerce’s busted flush
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 raises $40M to help manufacturers access specialty chemicals
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
Startup studio Hexa acquires majority stake in Veevart, a vertical SaaS platform for museums
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
General Fusion fires up its newest steampunk fusion reactor
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
Radiology AI software provider Gleamer expands into MRI with two small acquisitions
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’s Ceramic.ai looks to help enterprises build AI models faster and more efficiently
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, a no-code 3D creation tool for filmmakers and game designers, raises $4M
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 raises $10M to grow its card collection marketplace
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
Alpine Eagle secures funding from European backers for counter-drone tech amid rising threats
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
Turing raises $111M at a $2.2B valuation
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
Ahead of a possible $4 billion IPO, CoreWeave’s founders already pocketed $488 million
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
From high school science project to $18.3M: AI-accelerated enzymes are coming for fast fashion’s plastic waste
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
Moonwatt secures $8.3M to dial up solar’s staying power with sodium-ion storage
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
Mach Industries, founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, lands US Army contract, builds weapons factory
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
Flora is building an AI-powered ‘infinite canvas’ for creative professionals
With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cloudsmith raises $23M to improve software supply chain security
The software supply chain is notoriously porous: a reported 81% of codebases contain high- or critical-risk open source vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability can have a far-reaching impact on the wider software supply chain, as evidenced by the likes of the Log4Shell exploit that saw millions of applications exposed to potential remote code execution hacks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Just Move In raises $8M Series A for its home setup service
Fintech has fragmented into increasingly specialized, cucumber-sliced micro-services, ranging from embedded buy-now-pay-later loans to specialized neo banks to yet more payment processing systems. What opportunities remain for innovators in such a fragmented landscape? One U.K. startup, Just Move In, zoomed out and realised that the home had been overlooked by everyone in the industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Workhelix taps years of research to help enterprises figure out where to apply AI
AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn’t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Inception emerges from stealth with a new type of AI model
Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Europe’s Relay pulls in $35M Series A after applying Asia’s model to delivery
Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce, effectively ‘Uberising’ how deliveries worked down to the last mile. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bridgetown Research raises $19M to speed up due diligence with AI
Birdgetown Research has raised $19 million in a round co-led by Accel and Lightspeed to deploy AI agents for business decisions and M&A deals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Anagram takes a gamified approach to employee cybersecurity training
Despite employers requiring their employees to complete yearly cybersecurity training courses, human-driven cybersecurity breaches still happen. The problem could even get substantially worse as generative AI increases the scale and personalization of social engineering campaigns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Redalpine, Founders Fund back Magdrive’s electric thruster business
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Perfect taps $23M to fix the flaws in recruitment with AI
“Agentic AI” is the concept of the moment. Developers big and small are rushing to build apps to leapfrog the heavy lifting needed to employ generative AI in specific contexts… and investors are rushing to fund the most interesting of these. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Patlytics raises $14M for its patent analytics platform
For decades, patents have been a bone of contention in the technology world, seen by some as a way to protect intellectual property, but by critics as a blunt weapon against innovation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
AI-coding startup Codeium in talks to raise at an almost $3B valuation, sources say
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Arize AI hopes it has first-mover advantage in AI observability
The AI observability platform has raised $70 million in Series C funding. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Solar crushed 2024, but emissions were up as industry used more natural gas
Solar and wind together now represent nearly a quarter of electricity demand and nearly 10% of all energy consumption in the U.S. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Spore.Bio raises $23M to apply machine learning to microbiology testing
Recalls in the food and beverage industry due to contamination incidents can have catastrophic effects. Not only do companies have to pay fines and damages, but the impacts on the brand’s reputation can be long-lasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
IVF insurance startup Future Family promises a baby or your money back
For decades, couples going through in vitro fertilization have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the procedures with no guarantee of success. It’s not only an emotionally draining process, but a financially exhausting one as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hyperlume wants to make chip-to-chip communication faster and more efficient
Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and are estimated to use up to 12% by 2028. The majority of the energy data centers suck up is used to help transfer data from chip to chip. A company called Hyperlume is looking to make that process more energy-efficient while also speeding it up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Augury raises $73M on a $1B+ valuation for AI to detect malfunctions in factory machines
As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank make industrial robotics into a key focus for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware that measures vibrations, sound, temperature and other factors to understand how machines are working Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Level Zero Health banks $6.9M to prove wearable medtech can take the strain out of hormone testing
Level Zero Health, a female-founded medical device startup that’s aiming to break new ground by developing a device for continuous hormone monitoring, has closed an oversubscribed $6.9 million pre-seed funding round despite being only a little over a year old. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Legal tech startup Luminance, backed by the late Mike Lynch, raises $75M
Generative AI is getting better at interpreting dense texts, and this progress has proven to be a boon for startups attacking one of the most complex sets of texts there is: the law. It makes sense then that we’ve been seeing a new burst of activity in the legal tech space Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Germany’s Helsing doubles down on drones for Ukraine, scales up manufacturing
Helsing, the German defense tech startup backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and others, is producing 6,000 HX-2 strike drones in addition to the 4,000 HF-1 strike drones financed by Germany that are currently being delivered to Ukraine. “We are scaling up production of HX-2 in response to additional orders from Ukraine.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mistral releases regional model focused on Arabic language and culture
The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical. On Monday, Paris-based AI startup Mistral — which is vying to rival the likes of U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI — is releasing a model that’s a bit different from its usual LLM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tofu is building an omni-channel marketing platform for enterprises
When EJ Cho started his first company in 2018, he was exposed to what it takes to market a product. He was surprised to find a market filled with different single-use tools. “It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Phase raises $13M to speed up the UX design process with its no-code platform
UX and UI designers work closely with engineers throughout product development to build and implement design concepts and wireframes for functional user interfaces. Regular communication, feedback and testing are required for the collaboration to work smoothly and deliver a user experience that aligns with the intended design goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Apptronik, which makes humanoid robots, raises $350M as category heats up
Apptronik, a University of Texas spin-out that was quietly building humanoid robots before it became quite so fashionable, on Thursday announced a $350 million Series A round of financing. B Capital and Capital Factory co-led the round, which also featured participation from Googl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Avride launches sidewalk delivery bots on Uber Eats in Jersey City
Uber Eats customers in Jersey City can now have their orders delivered by one of Avride’s autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. The launch, which kicked off this week in New Jersey, is Uber’s latest foray into autonomous vehicles and represents an expanding relationship with Avride. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
No-code app builder Softr expands beyond Airtable databases
If you’re working for a small company and want to build a client portal or an internal tool, it can be difficult to find the budget and resources to allocate a developer to that small project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
SpotDraft taps AI to help streamline contract management
More and more legal professionals are embracing AI, surveys show. Per a recent poll from legaltech company Clio, 79% of firms used some form of AI for casework last year, up from just 19% in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chestnut Carbon gets $160M to turn old farms into forests
The company buys marginal and degraded farmland, plants them with native trees, and harvests the resulting carbon credits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices