TechCrunch Startup News
3,872 episodes — Page 12 of 78
Has GetReal cracked the code on AI deepfakes? $18M and an impressive client list says yes
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
OpenAI’s viral Studio Ghibli moment highlights AI copyright concerns
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
Outreach founder Manny Medina has a new startup that helps AI agents get paid
Medina's new startup, called Paid, helps agentic startups profitably charge for their bots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Plural’s platform allows enterprises to manage their Kubernetes clusters in one place
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 open sources its AI model optimization framework
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
AI creation platform Arcade expands from jewelry to home goods
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
Mortgage as an employee benefit? Kleiner Perkins leads $23.5M Series A for Multiply Mortgage
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 secures $6.5M for its SaaS tool focused on product lifecycle management
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
1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025
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 CEO shares his key ingredients for scaling autonomous driving tech
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
ClearGrid, armed with a fresh $10M, is developing AI to improve debt collection in MENA
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
Amid calls for sovereign EU tech stack, Evroc raises $55M to build a hyperscale cloud in Europe
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
Factorial snaps up $120M from General Catalyst to boost its HR sales and marketing
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 raises $12M from Perplexity co-founder’s new fund to make AI agents less awful
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
Rippling sues Deel, Deel denies ‘all legal wrongdoing’, and Slack is the main witness
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 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