TechCrunch Startup News

Grammy Award-winning musician, composer, and producer Wyclef Jean says the music industry is broken, which is why he’s now involved with a startup, OpenWav, that’s looking to give the power back to the artists. Through the OpenWav app, launched over the summer, artists can drop new music and exclusives; connect directly with fans; sell merch; host concerts, pop-ups, and listening parties; and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anduril announced Tuesday that a fleet of its XL uncrewed undersea vehicle “Ghost Shark” will begin operations in Australian waters next year under a massive billion dollar contract. The five-year award structure is the defense-startup holy grail; it’s a program of record that essentially locks in recurring revenue by becoming a line item in the country’s defense budget. Also, Perplexity, the AI-powered search startup that competes with Google by providing conversational answers to user queries, has secured $200 million in new capital at a $20 billion valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Arc announced Wednesday it has signed a contract of that value with Curtin Maritime, a tug and barge operator. The new hybrid-electric tugs are expected to hit the waters around the Los Angeles port in 2027. Curtin has ordered eight tugs — at around $20 million apiece — and Arc will build them in conjunction with Snow & Co. shipyard. Also, it’s been a long road for the 20-year-old fintech Klarna to make it to an IPO. But on Wednesday, the company successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange, having raised $1.4 billion, largely for its existing investors, rather than itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fabian Kamberi, CEO and co-founder of the Berlin-based AI gaming startup Born, thinks the current AI companions on the market are designed to be exploitative and geared towards isolating users through one-to-one relationships with AI chatbots. Also, Clyx is a social platform that helps users find community events to join. Five years after its launch, the app today has 50,000 active users buying tickets for events, and more than 200,000 users browsing events. The company has now raised $14 million in a Series A round led by Blitzscaling Ventures, with participation from other investors, including Iqram Magdon-Ismail, the co-founder of Venmo, and F1-driver-turned-investor Nico Rosberg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SpaceX just fired off one of the biggest shots yet in the spectrum wars, agreeing to pay $17 billion to take over a massive chunk of wireless airwaves from EchoStar for Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell services. The deal is the most aggressive signal yet that SpaceX wants to rule the satellite-to-phone market. Also, Ramp answered any lingering questions as to why investors recently valued the expense management startup at $22.5 billion, just 45 days after a previous funding round valued it at $16 billion: The company says it has achieved $1 billion in annualized revenue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nuclearn got its start when the founders were working at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station just west of Phoenix. They had been experimenting with ways to streamline various repetitive tasks first from a data science perspective then with more advanced AI models. Also, ReOrbit, a Finnish startup focused on helping nations control their own sovereign satellites, has raised a record €45 million (about US $53 million) Series A round of funding for a European space tech company. The funding round signals that Europe’s new space market is heating up, fueled by a geopolitical environment in which countries increasingly worry about relying on foreign technology for critical infrastructure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Deep Fission is proposing to build small, cylindrical nuclear power plants and lower them into 30-inch diameter holes drilled one mile down into the Earth. By burying the reactors, the company hopes to solve several problems that plague current reactors, including concerns over meltdowns and potential terrorist attacks. Also, The corporate space world tired Bianca Cefalo to the point that she found it easier to literally start her own space company and launch objects into orbit. Bloomberg reported that Cognition AI, the startup behind AI coding agent Devin, has hit a $10.2 billion valuation after raising $400 million, marking a jump from the company’s $4 billion valuation earlier this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why is a startup that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI,” and that recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that was first released in 1942? Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts — Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you spend any time online, there’s a good chance you’ve seen plenty of ugly, AI-generated ads — but few to none when interacting with AI chatbots themselves. Koah co-founder and CEO Nic Baird argued that will inevitably change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending the company’s 12-year quest to commercialize its technology in the U.S. The company had $25 million worth of orders lined up for its Michigan factory, but it couldn’t deliver them until it had UL certification, according to Raleigh’s The News & Observer, which reported on the business’s closure because Natron had been planning to bring jobs to the state of North Carolina with its new factory. Also, Acqui-hires feel like they’re here to stay: The team behind Alex Codes, a popular tool that lets developers use AI models within Apple’s development suite Xcode, is joining OpenAI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Thursday, Augment announced that it raised an $85 million Series A led by Redpoint, with participation from 8VC, Autotech Ventures, and others. The massive round comes just five months after the startup launched out of stealth with a hefty $25 million seed round. Also, Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, has filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. Mark Zuckerberg the lawyer uses a commercial Facebook page to advertise his legal practice and communicate with potential clients. But his page has been disabled five times in the last eight years, since Meta’s moderation systems flag his account as falsely impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian’s CEO and co-founder, said, ‘today’s browsers weren’t built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era.’ Also, Francesco Cacciatore is a self-proclaimed skeptic. Yet after spending two decades in the European aerospace industry and hitting, as he put it, a “crisis,” he made an undeniably optimistic bet: he started a space company, saying ‘I wanted to try and build something myself.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Wednesday, Orchard Robotics announced that it raised a $22 million Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, and with participation from returning investors, including General Catalyst and Contrary. Although the idea of using computer vision for specialty crops isn’t new, Wu says that the largest farms in the U.S. still rely on manual sampling to make critical decisions about farm operations. Also, French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, reports Bloomberg, positioning the company as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups. The two-year-old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, develops open source language models and Le Chat, its AI chatbot built for European audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When congressional Republicans took a sledgehammer to the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, advanced geothermal startups were largely spared. Drilling for renewable energy appears to be one of the few things that engenders bipartisan support. Now, with the uncertainty settled, geothermal companies are announcing deals that promise to pave the way for broader deployment of their technology. Also, Fizz, the college social app, is expanding into grocery delivery thanks to a new partnership with Gopuff, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. The partnership will allow students to order anything from late-night snacks to weekly groceries directly within the Fizz app in as fast as 15 minutes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI firm Anthropic has raised a $13 billion Series F round that brings its post-money valuation up to $183 billion — funds the company says will be used to grow its enterprise adoption, deepen safety research, and support international expansion. Also, OpenAI announced in a blog post on Tuesday that it agreed to acquire the product testing startup Statsig, and bring on its founder and CEO, Vijaye Raji, as the company’s CTO of Applications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Swedish buy-now, pay-later startup Klarna and its shareholders are reviving its initial public offering, hoping to raise as much as $1.27 billion in a listing that would value the company at up to $14 billion. The company and some of its shareholders are together selling approximately 34.3 million shares between $35 and $37 each. That’s according to a company update earlier this week. Klarna would receive proceeds from about 5.6 million shares, while its shareholders are offloading nearly 29 million shares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reliance is launching a new subsidiary to drive India's AI ambitions, including a pending partnership with OpenAI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Khalid Ashmawy found it hard to send money home while studying in Europe. Now, he’s launched a startup to help other Egyptians with the same problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Maisa AI is built on the premise that enterprise automation requires accountable AI agents, not opaque black boxes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Framer, a no-code website builder that claims over half a million monthly active users,has reached a $2 billion valuation after raising a $100 million Series D funding round led by existing investors Meritech and Atomico. Companies cancelled $5 billion worth of clean tech manufacturing projects in the U.S. in Q2, mirroring a pullback in the broader manufacturing sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mitti Labs is working with The Nature Conservancy to expand the use of climate-friendly rice farming practices in India. The startup uses its AI to verify reductions in methane emissions. In other news, Assort Health now valued at $750 million, is one of three that recently raised funding to use AI agents for helping healthcare practices answer patient calls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Terraton sees promise in biochar, but the technology has struggled to scale. The startup thinks a franchise model could be what unlocks biochar's potential. Also, Uncaged Innovations is working with Hyundai to develop alternatives to leather with a fraction of the environmental impact. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robomart's RM5 autonomous delivery robot can carry up to 50 pounds and deliver multiple customer orders at once. Also, OpenAI has started hiring in India as it looks to expand its presence in the fast-growing South Asian tech market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eyebot secured $20M Series A for 90-second prescription kiosk. Also, Pintarnya raised $16.7M to power jobs and financial services in Indonesia. The Indonesian startup, now backed by $16.7M in Series A funding, helps workers find full-time and side gigs while offering financial solutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FieldAI builds foundational AI models that help all kinds of robots learn and adapt to new environments using physics. Also, Y Combinator is asking the court to deny Apple’s appeal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Several Indian startups, including Dream Sports, MPL, and Zupee, are shutting down their real-money games after parliament passed a bill banning such games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The thousands of trucks zipping along U.S. highways are often only about half full -- something Oway wants to change with its 'ride-share for freight' software. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Berlin-based non-profit search engine Ecosia has asked a U.S. judge to turn Chrome into a foundation it controls, funding billions in climate projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The battery materials startup raised significant Series D funding to expand its manufacturing capability. At the same time, it bought out partner SK's stake in a joint venture. The company helps automate complex enterprise workflows (like continuous integration and testing) — or, in other words, it makes DevOps capabilities more efficient as AI technology takes hold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prices for hacking tools that allow governments to break into mobile phones keep going up, thanks to efforts by tech firms shoring up their cybersecurity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

FieldAI builds foundational AI models that help all kinds of robots learn and adapt to new environments using physics. Also, YC backed Garage is a marketplace that sells specialized equipment commonly used in local governments and public safety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new gadget called Dex allows kids to take pictures of objects and the AI translates the word into different languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Firecrawl nabbed Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke as an investor from a gutsy email after they discovered he was using the product. Also, The round, which pushes Databricks' valuation to $100B, was co-led by Insight Partners and Thrive. CEO Ali Ghodsi says he's found an enormous untapped AI agent market to spend the funds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The sleep tech company raised from HSG, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Y Combinator and big F1 names like Charles Leclerc and Zak Brown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Petrou, founding member of Google Goggles and Google Glass, wants to enhance group chats with AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Les Amis is an app designed to make it easy for women to form friendships and attend local events. Also, why did Paradigm built a spreadsheet with an AI agent in every cell? The company raised a $5 million seed round and is releasing it's AI-powered spreadsheet to the general public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is the premise of Focus Friend, a productivity app created by Honey B Games and Hank Green, the longtime online creator/entrepreneur/educator/sock salesman. Though the app was soft launched last month, Focus Friend is only now gaining momentum on the App Store charts — likely because Green and his brother, author John Green, are posting about it more — reaching No. 4 among all free apps and No. 2 among productivity apps. Also, another crypto company is headed for the public markets. This time, it’s Gemini Space Station Inc., the New York-based crypto exchange and custodian bank founded by billionaire twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It humorously calls this family the Model Zoo because one is like the size of a fly's brain and the other the size of a chicken's. Also, Ultrahuman acquires viO HealthTech to launch enhanced cycle and ovulation tracking. Cycle and Ovulation Pro is available starting Friday as a premium PowerPlug in the Ultrahuman app for $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year for users in the U.S., U.K., EU, Australia, and Canada; and Loveable projects $1B in ARR within next 12 months. Loveable is a vibe coding startup growing phenomenally quickly, according to new sales projections from CEO Anton Osika. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed that the AI firm did not acquire Humanloop or its IP, that’s a moot point in an industry where IP lives in the brain. And what Humanloop’s team is bringing to Anthropic is experience developing the tools that help enterprises run safe, reliable AI at scale. Also, India’s Rapido begins testing food delivery to take on Swiggy, Zomato. Rapido's beta food delivery service has popped up in three key localities in Bengaluru before a broader rollout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cohere has hired Joelle Pineau, Meta's former VP of AI research who previously oversaw the tech giant's fundamental AI research (FAIR) lab. In her newly created Chief AI Officer role, Pineau will oversee AI strategy across Cohere's research, product and policy teams. Also, Monarch Tractors won’t be built by Foxconn after Ohio factory sale. The tractors were the only vehicles being built by Foxconn in Ohio after Lordstown Motors, Fisker Inc., and IndiEV went bankrupt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Self-driving truck maker Waabi has hired autonomous vehicle industry veteran and Uber Freight CEO, Lior Ron, to step in as chief operating officer, as the startup looks to scale its commercial operations ahead of its planned launch of driverless trucks on public highways later this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Neuralink has been making serious progress. Soon Sam Altman and OpenAI could be backing a challenger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As more solid rocket motor suppliers are coming online, a supply chain chokepoint looms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ultraviolette aims to expand its electric motorcycles to 40 European countries, as well as Latin America and Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chowdeck, a Lagos-based food delivery startup that has stayed profitable in a notoriously tough and low-margin market, has raised $9 million in Series A funding to launch a quick commerce strategy and expand into more cities in Nigeria and Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Truemeds has taken a different route from other Indian online pharmacies — and it has helped the startup double its revenue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"I think we're still kind of feeling out the space," CEO Brian Chesky told investors on the Q2 earnings call. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coding assistant startups are highly unprofitable, says a source familiar with Windsurf financials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-generated “brain rot” videos are popping up all over the internet and getting a lot of attention. Currently gaining traction among younger users, these clips feature wild characters, like a shark wearing sneakers and a ballerina with a cappuccino for a head. One startup driving this trend is OpenArt, founded by two former Google employees in 2022. It touts around 3 million monthly active users. In other news, OpenAI astounded the tech industry for the second time this week by launching its newest flagship model, GPT-5, just days after releasing two new freely available models under an open source license. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went so far as to call GPT-5 “the best model in the world.” That may be pride or hyperbole, as TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff reports that GPT-5 only slightly outperforms other leading AI models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI on some key benchmarks, and slightly lags on others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lava is a digital wallet that lets merchants use credits to facilitate transactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices