TechCrunch Startup News

Thea Energy says that its planar-coil fusion power plant could be cheaper and easier to build thanks to AI-powered control software.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The biotech startup is betting that owners of abandoned oil wells will use the tech to squeeze energy out of their wells.

Also, Spinny is set to be valued at about $1.8 billion post-money in its latest funding round.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Goldman Sachs has led Harness's Series E round, with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures. The new valuation is a 49% jump from its $3.7 billion valuation in a $230 million round in April 2022. With this funding, the startup has raised $570 million of equity to date.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spoor's computer vision software can help wind farms, and other industries, track bird populations and migration patterns.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Me raises $6 million for its digital gift card platform that lets users purchase cards categorized by interests rather than being restricted to specific retailers.

Also, Port offers a proprietary alternative to Spotify's popular devtool catalog Backstage, but with a valuable addition: it can be used to manage AI agents, too.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tavus has launched a new experience where you can chat with an AI Santa that asks personal questions and remembers your interests.

Oboe has raised $16 million in funding for its learning app. The company now lets users generate unlimited courses for free.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Crusoe will pay Boom $1.25 billion for more than a gigawatt of generating capacity with deliveries of the turbines starting in 2027.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Empromptu claims all a user has to do is tell the platform's AI chatbot what they want — like a new HTML or JavaScript app — and the AI will go ahead and build it.

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky is expanding his company's device lineup with a new smart wearable: an AI-powered smart ring known as Index 01.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tiger's last fund did well with investments in OpenAI, Waymo and Databricks. But it warns investors that AI valuations are already 'elevated.'

Skild AI is developing a hardware-agnostic foundation model for robots that can be customized for various uses.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quilt has sold nearly 1,000 units in the U.S. and Canada, and the new funding should help expand sales operations to more states and provinces.

Also, while OpenAI continues to insist that there are currently no ads — or tests for advertising — live in ChatGPT, the company’s chief research officer also acknowledged that the company “fell short” with recent promotional messages.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Limitless said it shares Meta's vision of bringing personal superintelligence to everyone.

Also, sometimes, founding a startup just once isn’t enough.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hamlet TV is a way to help keep citizens informed of what's happening inside local governments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nexus Venture Partners manages $3.2 billion in capital across its funds and has invested in more than 130 companies over the years.

Also, can Kiro win the hearts of startup founders above the many AI coding tools they already have? Amazon hopes a free year will tempt them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While VCs have long used big investments to spur category winners, they are taking this strategy to new extremes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Antares is designing and building small modular reactors that it plans to deploy for commercial, space, and defense applications.

The latest funding comes less than two months after Kalshi announced that it raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Titan OS aims to expand its independent TV operating system in Europe and Latin America.

Gradium, a startup spawned out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), and saw participation from a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures.

Also, analysts will be watching to see if Thrive-owned firms actually succeed in building long-term profitable businesses using OpenAI’s tech, or if the result is really just pumped up valuations based on speculative market potential.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Adam Joseph was shocked when Mark Cuban replied to his email with an inquisition full of questions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

MyHair AI examines photos of the scalp to help diagnose hair loss and suggest scientifically validated clinics and treatments.

The startup uses AI to help immigrants understand the system, connect with lawyers and reduce associated costs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An investor explains the "buy, fix, and hold" model employed by Bending Spoons and similar companies that buy distressed startups.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google and Accel will jointly invest up to $2 million in each startup through their new partnership.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Career exploration platform Find Your Grind raises $5 million to help more students discover alternative professions.

Also, the discovery of a massive lithium deposit suggests that a region in Quebec might hold even more lithium than originally suspected.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The small modular reactor startup is capitalizing on surging interest from tech companies and data center developers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Startups are still racing to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant on land, but Maritime Fusion thinks the path will be easier out at sea.

Also, AI testing startup Momentic has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Standard Capital, with participation from Dropbox Ventures. Existing investors at Y Combinator, FCVC, Transpose Platform and Karman Ventures also participated.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sierra’s rapid growth suggests that enerprises are embracing AI agents.

Also, Phictly helps fans find niche clubs for their favorite books, shows, and movies, offering intimate, spoiler-safe communities with flexible pacing and tracker tools.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The region's startup market is hungry for its first trillion-dollar startup, and in many ways has set itself up to reach that goal.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The quickly growing prediction betting market raised fresh capital from Sequoia and CapitalG, according to someone familiar with the deal.

Also, Point One Navigation, now valued at $230 million, is building out well beyond automotive.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Curastory’s founder and CEO, Tiffany Kelly, has resigned from the role and replaced herself with Dave Dickman, former CEO of the influencer marketing platform Tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Anthony Sardain began developing Cavela in 2023, an AI startup that helps brands automate supplier sourcing, he did not foresee that new tariffs would drive customers to become increasingly wary of manufacturing products in China.

Function Health, which offers a regular lab testing service to help people track their health, wants to change that by consolidating health data and making it usable for its customers by connecting that data to an AI model. To further that effort, the company recently raised $298 million in a Series B round led by Redpoint Ventures at a valuation of $2.5 billion.<...

“The best ideas in drug discovery were often blocked not by biology, but by synthesis,” Boiko told TechCrunch. Synthesis is the creation of new molecules by using chemical reactions. It’s like a recipe or Lego pieces, where small pieces, ingredients, molecules, come together to form a wider puzzle picture, a food dish, a larger molecule.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instead of getting an AI-generated travel plan, Boop aims to give users access to itineraries from real people who went on real trips.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With consumers increasingly asking questions to ChatGPT, not Google, product discovery is changing — and the promise to give brands visibility and control over this fast-growing search channel has made Peec AI one of Europe's hottest startups.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Monday, Luminal announced $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by Felicis Ventures with angel investment from Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch, and Ben Porterfield. 

Also, as U.S. giants like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic race to develop the large language models that underpin their AI products, startups such as Sakana AI, Mistral AI, DeepSeek, and AI 21 Labs are carving out their own niche with specialized models designed for specific regions, industries, or unique features.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos seems to be getting his hands dirty once again: the billionaire is partly backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus that has raised $6.2 billion in funding, and will take on duties as co-chief executive.

Plus, Bone AI, a South Korean startup, is combining AI and manufacturing to build next-gen defense robotics and challenge the region’s industry giants.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Israeli startup Milestone raised a $10 million seed funding round to correlate AI tool usage with engineering metrics, including code quality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The solar-thermal startup wants to deliver electricity for as little as one cent per kWh. But first it has to scale production to 1 million units per year.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The goalposts are moving for AI startups when it comes to growth, product features and just about everything else.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WisdomAI is offering AI-driven data analytics that can answer business questions from structured, unstructured, and even “dirty” data, meaning data not cleaned of typos or errors.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Teradar's sensor uses the terahertz part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and combines the best traits of radar and lidar sensors without some of the drawbacks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two experienced investors share their tips for founders and operators hoping to nail product-market fit at their AI startups.

Also, Uare.ai, formerly Eternos, raised $10.3 million in seed funding led by Mayfield and Boldstart Ventures.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Startups should start forging connections with late-stage investors while they are still at the early stages.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amanda Kahlow has been quietly been back in sales and marketing tech for about a year with agentic startup 1Mind.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mmotion is a new friendship app that combines elements of location sharing with social discovery features to find nearby users with shared interests.

Also, Scribe Optimize is the startup's next major offering to help organizations identify where AI will be most useful.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Three industry insiders walk through how startups can set up an employee equity strategy that remains fair as a company grows.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instead of building seawalls or dikes, Terranova has developed a new way to raise cities to protect them from sea-level rise.

In addition, Chris Sacca’s venture firm Lowercarbon Capital is raising a second fund to back nuclear fusion energy hopefuls, the VC said at the SOSV Climate Tech Summit on Thursday, as reported by Bloomberg.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evotrex joins startups like Lightship, Pebble, and Grounded in trying to disrupt the RV market, which is skewing younger.

Also, diffusion models already power AI image generators, but Inception thinks they can be even more powerful applied in software development.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wabi, a startup from the founder of Replika, has just raised a $20 million pre-seed round. Wabi is like "YouTube for apps" -- a social platform where anyone can use prompts to instantly create mini apps and share them with friends.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alloy Enterprises has developed a new additive manufacturing technique that can improve liquid cooling performance while bringing it to new parts of the server rack.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 star...

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

After struggling to retain customers at his e-commerce site Headphones.com, founder Andrew Lissimore built his own loyalty solution — and it’s now a startup called Lantern. The Shopify-native platform helps brands boost retention through customizable loyalty, referrals, and account management tools.

Also, Deel says it's been profitable for three years and surpassed $1 billion in ARR, including having a month.

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...

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...

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, an...

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 th...

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 rat...

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 interv...

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...

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 wo...

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, an...

On Wednesday, Enterprise AI model-maker Cohere said it raised an additional $100 million in an extension to a round announced in August, bumping its valuation to $7 billion. The company said at the time that the  August round was an oversubscribed $500 million round at a $6.8 billion valuation.

Also, Waymo’s ever-expanding robotaxi aspirations have spread to the corporate world.

The Alphabet-owned self-driving vehicle unit has launched “Waymo for Business,” a new service designed for companies to set up accounts so their employees can access robotaxis in cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

<...