TechCrunch Startup News

SleekFlow, a Singapore- and Hong Kong-headquartered social commerce platform that has built a conversational AI suite for customer engagement targeted to Asian markets, said Wednesday it had secured a further $7 million in funding. The money will be used to continue developing its AI, as well as penetrate deeper into Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simulating the real world is a tremendously complex problem if you want to do it at any useful level of fidelity. Traditional techniques are holding back design teams at vehicle and aerospace companies, but Beyond Math is putting AI on the task with a new way of simulating the world that could save them days. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. Department of Defense is a mammoth organization. It not only employs millions of service members and hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, but also has the world’s largest military budget that’s used to buy and maintain more equipment than can likely fit into a single paragraph. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Popular iPad design app Procreate is coming out against generative AI, and has vowed never to introduce generative AI features into its products. The company said on its website that although machine learning is a “compelling technology with a lot of merit,” the current path that generative AI is on is wrong for its platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brands can use Keychain to look up different products and see who actually manufactures them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brands can use Keychain to look up different products and see who actually manufactures them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An AI social media vetting startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and is launching a new platform designed to screen election personnel. Founded in 2019, Ferretly leverages AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that traditional background checks may overlook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stoke Space is nothing if not ambitious. The five-year-old launch startup has generated a lot of hype due to its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both the booster and second stage vertically returning to Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Code reviews — peer reviews of code that help devs improve code quality — are time-consuming. According to one source, 50% of companies spend two to five hours a week on them. Without enough people, code reviews can be overwhelming and take devs away from other important work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been top of mind for brands for more than a decade to ensure their websites and products capture as many eyeballs as possible by ranking high up on search results pages. But search is changing, and as consumers increasingly turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

EliseAI employs an army of chatbots to text with, email, and respond to calls from renters about things such as apartment tours, maintenance requests, lease renewals and delinquencies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ArborXR, a startup that helps companies remotely manage AR and VR devices, believed that enterprise customers would be the primary targets for AR and VR devices. Now, that bet is paying off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PayZen aims to make healthcare more affordable by enabling patients to pay their bills in interest and fee-free instalments over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ex-Clubhouse, Netflix employees raised $1.65M for an app that combines social media, networking, and dating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most startups are looking to solve a problem inside a business, but Bandana, a New York City-based startup has a different goal. It wants to help people at the lower end of the wage scale find better jobs with higher wages and good benefits, all while being closer to home to reduce commuting time Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Los Angeles is notorious for its back-to-back traffic. Three events that promise to bring in millions of spectators from around the world — the 2026 World Cup, the Super Bowl in 2027, and the 2028 Olympics — have LA officials searching for a range of new mobility solutions to address its congestion problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup's core technology is a proprietary material that absorbs moisture from the air, allowing air conditioning to cool buildings more efficiently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Slag is the molten runoff created while producing steel in a traditional blast furnace. The material has been prized as greener cement alternative for creating concrete, the Earth’s most abundant human-made material. The runoff is facing supply chain issues, however, as the steel industry looks to greener methods of production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Palmer Luckey-founded defense startup wants to become a serious rival to longstanding kingpins, and has been clocking some big wins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New York-based fintech Payoneer has acquired Skuad, a Singapore-based global HR and payroll startup, for $61 million in cash, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Payoneer said it could also pay up to another $10 million, contingent on if Skuad meets various performance goals within the first 18 months of the acquisition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a sign that big tech companies are ready and willing to shell out cash for database tech, Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, on Wednesday announced that Microsoft’s venture arm M12 led a $25 million strategic investment in its business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many industries that rely on legacy energy sources are aiming to electrify or at least streamline their operations, but for countless use cases the tech just isn’t there. H3X is changing the game with electric motors so compact and efficient that the aerospace and marine world — not to mention investors — are taking notice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A startup developing AI market research based on location data, and backed by a who's who, has quietly raised, TechCrunch has learned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

COVID-19 pushed people to take up outdoor activities. Now, startups are helping companies and consumers keep up with demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trade My Spin has pieced together a logistics network capable of offering same or next day delivery in most major cities in the continental U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation is looking to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races towards a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024. Aurora, which went public in 2021 through a special purpose acquisition merger, is pursuing a driver-as-a-service model, wherein carriers purchase trucks with the Aurora Driver tech on Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two large Indian startups, Ola Electric and FirstCry, are set to test investor appetite with their public listings this month, but both have had to price their shares below their previous valuations as they come to terms with new market realities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales reps, has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Date Like Goblins is geared toward the gaming community and allows users to connect through voice chat while playing video games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup has raised $21.5 million to build more of its machines and deploy them throughout the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shared micromobility giant Lime is piloting two new vehicles designed to appeal to women and older folks who might appreciate a lower step-through frame, smaller wheels and an upgrade from pedal-assist. Lime has experimented with several new form factors over the years, something it can do because it designs and engineers its vehicles in-house. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The California Department of Motor Vehicles this week granted Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery vehicle in four Bay Area cities, giving the AV startup a positive boost after facing some setbacks and financial struggles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skip exited stealth this week to announce a partnership with outdoor clothing specialist Arc’teryx. The deal is the first to bring Skip’s MO/GO technology to market: “powered pants” that utilize a soft exoskeleton technology, developed in-house at Alphabet’s X Labs moonshot factory. MO/GO, short for “mountain goat,” is a hybrid soft/rigid exoskeleton system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Payments giant Stripe has acquired a four-year-old competitor, Lemon Squeezy, the latter company announced Friday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a self-proclaimed “merchant of record,” Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country. It primarily serves SaaS and software businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint. But opportunities for acceleration are growing. Swedish startup Greenely* has just spotted one. It’s closing an €8 million Series A funding round to expand its energy management platform into neighbouring Nordic countries (so around $8.7M at current exchange rates). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Voice recognition is getting integrated in nearly all facets of modern living, but there remains a big gap: speakers of minority languages, and those with thick accents or speech disorders like stuttering are typically less able to use speech recognition tools that control applications, transcribe or automate tasks, among other functions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Don Burnette, CEO and co-founder of self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics, had an “a-ha” moment when the company started working with the U.S. Department of Defense. Kodiak’s mission has always been to pursue long-haul autonomous trucking, but two years ago, the startup won a $50 million contract from the DoD to help the Army automate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Farmers have got to do something about pests. But nobody really likes the idea of using more chemical pesticides. Thomas Laurent’s company, Micropep, thinks the answer might already be in the plants themselves. Micropep is exploring how naturally occurring compounds, known as micropeptides, might work as an entirely new class of pesticides. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quality assurance in the app development world is a necessary, but often resource-draining, undertaking. According to Statista, 23% of companies’ annual IT budgets are allocated to in-house or third-party contracted QA and testing. The stakes are high. In a survey by QA software-testing company QualiTest Group, 88% of app users said that they’d abandon apps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Identity management is one of the most common fulcrums around which security breaches have pivoted in the last several years. One of the main reasons it has become the gift that keeps on giving to malicious hackers is that it’s a nightmare for organizations to track. A security startup founded in Tel Aviv called Linx Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nathan Rosenberg, the founder of farm automation platform Farmblox, said if there is one thing to know about trying to sell technology to farmers, it’s that you can’t tell them what to do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marathon Fusion emerges from stealth with a plan to help fusion power plants extract tritium, a necessary fuel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. TechCrunch’s sources heard similar and added that deal discussions could last into next week. If this deal does end up getting done, it would be Alphabet’s largest acquisition yet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canadian private equity firm PartnerOne paid $28.2 million for HeadSpin, a mobile app testing startup whose founder has been sentenced for fraud earlier this year, according to documents viewed by TechCrunch. The fire sale was reported by TechCrunch last week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coast, a startup that describes itself as “a financial services platform for the future of transportation,” has raised $40 million in Series B funding — just four months after announcing a $25 million round, the startup has told TechCrunch exclusively. Back-to-back fundraises were common prior to and during the wild investment days of 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Strong magnets are essential for the type of fusion power being pursued by Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a number of other startups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Both of Hofy's co-founders, Sami Bouremoum and Michael Ginzo, along with the rest of the startup's leadership team and 120 employees, are joining Deel to build Deel IT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Echo Chunk, a company that is building Wordle-styled daily chess puzzle game Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed from a16z Speedrun (Andreessen Horowitz’s early stage games accelerator), founder of Zyanga Mark Pincus, South Park Commons (SPC), Opendoor founder and CEO Eric Wu and Stef Corazza, the Head of Generative AI at Roblox Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At a time when many startups have struggled to raise money and keep their heads above water, Kandji, an Apple device management platform, has been an exception. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices