TechCrunch Startup News

MoEngage already has customers across 75 countries, with North America being its biggest business driver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the last year, certain AI markets appear to be nearly sewn up by startup market leaders. Plus, Locket's social app is using iOS Live Activities to reach Gen Alpha via the iPhone Lock Screen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to multiple sources. Several people who spoke to TechCrunch pointed out that its hiatus comes as top names in tech eliminate, cut, reframe, or completely walk back on prior public commitments related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Trump administration has threatened legal and political ramifications for businesses supporting anything that could be seen as DEI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pine Labs aims to take Indian fintech global even as it cuts valuation for IPO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments. Also, Bluesky is looking to a new signal — "dislikes" — to personalize users' feeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After generating over 10 million social media impressions with the launch of its text-to-3D model app, Adam has raised a $4.1 million seed round to power its next steps. Plus, Cluely's Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: you should be thinking harder about how to go viral. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most people tracking their health today end up with scattered clues. Their smartwatch shows sleep duration. A fitness app logs steps. A nutrition app counts calories. Yet few tools help people understand how all of this fits together. Bevel, a New York–based startup, believes that’s the missing piece in the shift toward proactive health. Also, IntrCity SmartBus, a tech-enabled intercity bus platform in India, has raised $30 million in funding to expand its network across smaller cities and towns in the South Asian nation. The all-equity Series D round, led by A91 Partners, values the Noida-based startup at $140 million post-money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People are increasingly asking AI, not Google, to help them discover products. A recent shopping report says Americans, this holiday season, will likely turn to large language models this season to find gifts, deals, and sales instead of traditional search. Also, Snabbit has raised its third funding round in nine months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Phia founders, Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, are building an AI assistant that aims to help you shop, and save. Also, Grammarly is renaming itself as Superhuman, after acquiring Superhuman email client in July Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Access Grid builds APIs that companies can use to manage digital key fobs directly within Apple and Google's wallet platforms. Plus, Taranjeet Singh has launched six companies, with some failing and others seeing varying degrees of success. His seventh, Mem0, could be his defining one. The startup starts with the premise that large language models can’t remember past interactions the way humans do Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“What we really do is we took the most constrained, complex, and costly medical imaging solution in radiology, and we supplanted it with what is the most accessible, simple and affordable, which is CT,” Sean Walsh, RADiCAIT’s CEO told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Onfire, a vertical AI platform for IT revenue teams, is coming out of stealth with $20 million in funding, including a $14 million Series A co-led by Grove Ventures and TLV Partners. Also, Mercor, which connects AI labs with domain experts for training their foundational AI models, is close to raising $350 million at a $10 billion valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BlaBlaCar is seeing rapid growth in India, with 20 million passengers expected this year — up 50% from last year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tensormesh uses an expanded form of KV Caching to make inference loads as much as ten times more efficient. Plus, Palantir said on Thursday it had struck a partnership with Lumen Technologies that will see the telecommunications company using the data management company's AI software to build capabilities to support enterprise AI services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The round was led by Eclipse and saw participation from Nvidia's venture capital arm, NVentures. Also, Wonder will use the fresh funds to double its engineering team and accelerate its push into IP ownership and original content production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cohere's former VP of AI research, Sara Hooker, is launching a new startup to build AI models that can adapt to their environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After endless Silicon Valley takes on how generative AI would radically change scientific discovery, the founders decided that the pieces were finally in place to make this a reality. Or at least to found a startup that attempted it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Codi was founded in 2018, in a pre-pandemic world, with a mission to help companies find flexible office spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Abu-Ghazaleh said his two-month-old company promises to cut inefficiencies in high-stakes sectors like aviation, logistics, and oil and gas through an AI-native operating system for decision-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The redesigned Oura app introduces more personalization with three main tabs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"The platforms that won were the ones that kept people scrolling the longest, not the ones that made them feel the most connected,” Zehra Naqvi told TechCrunch. “Now there is an abundance of content but a scarcity of joy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Product designer Laurent Del Rey, who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launched a side project called Endless Summer, a photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos starring you in locations around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Late last year, OpenAI reportedly tried to buy Medal and its vast trove of video game data for $500M. Today, the company spun out a frontier research lab that's using that data to build AI agents that understand how they move through space and time, a concept called spatial-temporal reasoning. Also, electric aviation startup Beta Technologies has priced shares for its initial public offering between $27 and $33, in hopes of raising as much as $825 million, according to a regulatory document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If the company attracts investors at the top of that range it will debut with a valuation of about $7.2 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Liberate’s AI agents automate tasks for P&C insurers, working across sales, service, and claims. Viven's seed funding was led by Khosla Ventures and Foundation Capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sonic Fire Tech has developed a device that can extinguish flames using acoustic energy below the range of human hearing. The startup is building a demo capable of protecting a home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Co-founded by a former Uber Freight product manager, and backed by Uber's lead seed investor, FleetWorks is quickly scooping up customers in the trucking world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Flint raised a $5 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from Sheryl Sandberg’s fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, and prior investor Neo. Also, Coco Robotics is working toward automating its fleet of delivery robots using its millions of miles of collected data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An Indian drone startup called Airbound raised nearly $9 million in seed funding as it begins a drone-delivery pilot with a private hospital and works toward one-cent delivery using its ultra-light, blended-wing-body aircraft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, announced that it raised over three hundred million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation. The company’s value has increased two and a half times since its last fundraise just three months ago, when it was valued at two billion dollars. Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has lost one of its co-founders to Meta. The Wall Street Journal reports that AI researcher Andrew Tulloch announced his departure to employees in a message on Friday. A Thinking Machine Labs spokesperson confirmed Tulloch’s departure to the WSJ, saying he “has decided to pursue a different path for personal reasons.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reflection, once focused on autonomous coding agents, has raised $2B at an $8B valuation to expand into both an opensource alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Novoloop has signed a deal with a contract manufacturer to produce its Lifecycled TPU material. Also, Knapsack creates a unified workspace that integrates design and coding tools to ensure design and engineering teams are on the same page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Base Power's Series C will help the company expand beyond Texas, its beachhead market, and build batteries in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trump's Department of Energy wants to cancel billions more in awards that were granted by the Biden administration, and startups are in the crosshairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By coating regular rebar with a thin layer of stainless steel, Allium Engineering could reduce the amount of concrete needed to build a bridge while also prolonging its life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The third-party app store known as AltStore, one of the first companies to offer an alternative app marketplace in the European Union, is preparing to connect its platform with the open social web known as the fediverse. Also, ÄIO has developed a process to turn agricultural waste like sawdust into fats for the food and cosmetic industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

19-year-old Dhravya Shah, who is originally from Mumbai, has built a memory layer for AI applications with Google's AI chief's backing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Heidi Health raised a $65 million Series B led by Steven Cohen’s Point72. Also, Sugar Free Capital raises $32M inaugural fund to invest in MIT early-staged founders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social event planning app Partiful, which calls itself “Facebook events for hot people,” has firmly replaced Facebook as the go-to platform for sending party invitations. But what Partiful also has in common with Facebook is that it’s collecting a tsunami of user data, and Partiful could have done better at keeping that data secure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zehra Naqvi grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s and recently started Lore, a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions. The company has already raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. It is set to emerge from stealth on October 6th. Also, when Jamie Gull graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with a master’s degree in aeronautics, there was one place he wanted to go next: the desert. The Mojave desert, to be specific. A company called Scaled Composites had spent years developing experimental aircraft out on that arid land, and Gull wanted in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. government shutdown could stifle deal flow, freeze visa processing for workers, and cause other problems for startups and the broader tech sector, especially if it lasts longer than a week, according to experts who spoke to TechCrunch. Also, Bryan Onel’s father was a locksmith. As for Onel, he described himself as the digital equivalent. Ethical hacking was Onel’s hobby growing up. He studied AI at university and then turned that hacking hobby into a profession. Onel told TechCrunch, “I spent a decade performing penetration tests for over 150 companies across all sectors.” He added that he kept easily breaking into companies that had passed their security checks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simple is an AI-powered health coaching app that helps people lose weight. Electroflow drew inspiration from batteries themselves to develop a new way of producing LFP material for EVs. The process could undercut today's lowest price sources in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup was started earlier this year by Yang Fan Yun and Charlie Deane. Yun is a former product manager at Uber, while Deane founded a company selling server proxies. When he was at Uber, he realized that a lot of people around him were doing grunt work in their browsers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Periodic Labs was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMind, where one of his projects was, for instance, an AI tool called GNoME. Researchers say that tool discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023, materials that could one day be used to power new generations of technology. Whoop Advanced Labs offers health-screening blood tests from Quest Diagnostics that cover a variety of markers, from calcium to white blood cells. The platform integrates those results with the band’s continuous monitoring of activity, sleep, respiratory rate, and blood pressure to offer more personalized wellness advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CommanderAI launched in early 2024 as a customer relationship manager and sales prospecting platform built for waste management — and other industrial services like dumpster rentals and industrial recyclers – to fill that gap. Also, Silicon Valley-based Cerebras announced it raised a $1.1 billion Series G round on Tuesday that valued the AI hardware company at $8.1 billion. The round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital, among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s no secret that vibe coding — using AI-powered coding tools to build apps and websites via natural language prompts — is exploding in popularity. In July, Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch, plans to close the year at $250 million ARR and thinks it will hit $1 billion ARR within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Replit said earlier this month that its ARR soared from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year. Also, job seekers in all fields can expect to soon be doing a lot more initial screening interviews. While that may sound like positive news, it doesn’t mean that there will suddenly be more open positions. Instead, recruiters, often bogged down with determining which applicants are qualified for the next round, will outsource the routine screening tasks — like checking backgrounds, salary needs, and availability — to (you guessed it) AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised about $21 million in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and angel investors. But while raising this kind of money is the dream of many developers, its creator Ritchie Vink didn’t set out to do so. Also, making democracy work isn’t easy, as recent events have made clear. Some critics would argue that technology is making it worse. But one startup is hoping that AI could help bridge some differences instead of widen them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paid just closed an oversubscribed $21.6 million seed round led by Lightspeed. With the €10 million pre-seed round it raised in March, London-based Paid has already raised $33.3 million and hasn’t even hit its Series A yet. A source familiar with the deal says the startup’s valuation is over $100 million. Also, despite millions spent on financial software, many finance teams still rely on Excel to close their books and reconcile numbers while preparing them for audit. Two former Microsoft executives view it as a problem — and they have started Maximor to replace spreadsheets with AI agents for the grunt work finance teams perform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A Y Combinator startup called Burnt thinks AI agents — software that can automatically handle tasks typically done by humans — can succeed where traditional enterprise software hasn’t in the trillion-dollar U.S. food market. Doorstep integrates into existing delivery apps and then, using phone sensors, tracks when a driver has entered a building, gone up an elevator, and made it to the desired doorstep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Starpath’s new space-rated solar panel business kicked off sales in the U.S. on Thursday with an eyebrow-raising pitch. The company says its solar panels, called “Starlight,” are priced around 10 times cheaper than typical industry pricing of $72.50 per watt, roughly a 90% cost reduction versus the status quo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hardware startup Nothing said Thursday that it plans to make its affordable device brand, CMF, into an independent subsidiary with India serving as its headquarters for manufacturing and R&D. The company first launched CMF in 2023 with a pair of earbuds and a smartwatch. Since then, it has introduced smartphones under the brand as well. Also, the accelerator has introduced a new application track called Early Decision, designed for students who want to start companies but don’t want to drop out. The program allows them to apply while still in school, get accepted and funded immediately, and defer their participation in YC until after they graduate. For example, a student applying in fall 2025 could graduate next spring, then participate in YC’s Summer 2026 batch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices