Startups News

A UC Berkeley dropout's dating app ditches the swipe model, using AI to predict chemistry and arrange Wednesday-night dates for Gen Z users tired of endless scrolling.

The startup has onboarded 30,000+ developers by automating LLC formation, payments, and cloud setup through a single API.

Athens-based customer support automation firm closes $67M funding round led by Expedition Growth Capital, bringing ARR to $60M.

Three former Spotify engineers raised $10M to bring intent-prediction technology from music streaming to online retail, enabling personalized shopping experiences without user accounts.

Elon Musk's AI-generated encyclopedia has remained frozen for over three months, with no edits accepted despite millions of user suggestions.

Google veteran Jeff Dean and three top researchers are launching Discovery Loop, a startup aimed at automating experimental loops to accelerate scientific discovery.

The e-commerce automation giant acquires AI-powered customer success startup Agency, bringing its founder back to work alongside Andrew Bialecki after two decades of parallel exits.

Google loses four of its most senior AI researchers—including the legendary Jeff Dean—to a new startup focused on automating scientific discovery.

Ukraine-based MacPaw partners with Liquid AI to build locally hosted AI inference, positioning SetApp as a platform for AI-native applications with credit-based pricing.

The weather-balloon startup raised funding to commercialize AI forecasts, but converting sensor data into private-sector revenue remains the industry's open question.

Startup aims to replace undersea cables with orbital laser links delivering 2.4 terabits per second between data centers.

Intelligence, the company behind DesignArena, closed a seed round to expand its human-evaluation platform, now generating $60M ARR from frontier labs seeking design-space feedback.

A Marc Benioff-backed startup tackles the growing complexity of deploying AI in legacy corporate environments by automating process discovery and integration.

The startup is developing specialized voice models that process speech in real-time, mimicking natural human dialogue instead of relying on large language models for voice interactions.

The AI compliance startup, backed by Khosla Ventures, tackles overlapping federal rules for data-center and construction projects.

The domestic lifestyle icon joins Kyle Rush's startup to build an AI system that helps homeowners manage maintenance, energy, and property data.

Encore AI, a startup that mines customer interactions to train AI agents for sales and support roles, closed a $30M Series A led by Team8, with 40+ enterprise customers and 5x ARR growth.

New York startup Pangram raised $9M to detect AI-generated text and images, launching Pangram 4 with claimed 99%+ accuracy amid growing internet-wide synthetic content.

Cybersecurity startup Spur closes Series funding round led by Insight as agentic AI traffic overtakes human activity on the internet.

An MCP infrastructure startup alleges that HR software maker Rippling copied its product design after a failed enterprise trial.

The stealth-exit startup dedicates nearly all its Series A funding to infrastructure as it targets product launches by October.

Fish Audio, a voice synthesis startup with 8M users and $21M ARR, closes seed round led by Coreline Ventures to scale customizable voice models across creative and business applications.

The AI coding platform introduces Cursor Start, a localized subscription priced 65% below its global Pro tier, targeting India's 27M-developer market.

Ilya Sutskever's alignment-focused startup partners with Nvidia on multi-billion dollar investment, securing access to Vera Rubin GPU platform to scale research operations.

Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus-backed Prentis is building AI models to automate office workflows, targeting $1B valuation with $50M in signed contracts.

The AI image-generation startup has purchased the personalized astrology app Co-Star, signaling a shift toward standalone software beyond Discord.

AI interaction style is becoming a competitive differentiator as Cognition integrates conversational AI startup Poke into its engineering assistant.

Midjourney has acquired Co-Star, a social astrology app with 4.3 million monthly active users and a 24-person team, as the AI lab expands beyond its Discord-based image generator.

Google security veterans launch AegisAI with $36M Series A to counter increasingly sophisticated AI-powered email attacks that bypass traditional defenses.

Northzone-led funding backs a privacy-first social platform targeting young users fatigued by algorithmic feeds and creator culture.

Kalanick's manufacturing-focused startup Atoms closed a $1.7B Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Uber and Bain Capital.

Anthropic's $47B revenue run rate in May reflects a shift from model-centric to platform-centric competition, according to Menlo Ventures investor Matt Murphy.

German startup Passionfroot secured $15M led by Insight Partners to expand its creator-brand platform into the US market, riding demand for influencer-driven B2B marketing.

Former Meta and Snowflake security leaders raise $180M to build AI agent-powered device management for enterprises deploying LLMs at scale.

The former Intel CEO joins Playground Capital to back semiconductor startups pursuing nanometer-scale light-etching as the path forward for chip scaling.

Block founder unveils Buzz, a decentralized group chat platform designed to integrate human teams with AI agents in a single workspace.

Databricks' latest funding round values the data platform at $188B, reflecting its successful transition from big-data software to AI-native enterprise infrastructure.

Hemispheric, co-founded by FaceID inventor Gidi Littwin, raised $52M to deploy deep-learning models that diagnose cognitive disorders from non-invasive brain recordings.

London startup's Orbital model combines time-series, physics, and language AI to compress multi-week facility investigations into minutes, attracting KBR and energy majors as early customers.

Former Google DeepMind researcher Andrew Dai raised $55M at a $300M pre-seed valuation, prioritizing strategic partners like Nvidia over higher offers.

Bhavin Turakhia is bootstrapping $30M into Neo, a workplace platform redesigned from scratch for generative AI rather than retrofitted with chatbots.

Actor-investor exits 11-year-old VC partnership to pursue early-stage bets on AI hardware, energy, and deep tech alongside NFX and Meta veteran.

Privacy-focused AI platform Venice AI raises $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at $1B valuation, citing $70M+ ARR and 3M active users.

The autonomous-driving startup distributes $85M in liquidity to staff, signaling investor confidence as AI companies increasingly use tender offers as retention tools.

Three former DeepMind scientists who created a poker-playing AI have applied reinforcement learning to stock trading through EquiLibre Technologies, now valued at $500M after a Creandum-led Series A.

Singapore startup Acti launches an AI-powered keyboard for iOS and Android that executes tasks across apps without requiring users to switch contexts.

Crypto exchange OKX opens AI agent marketplace with blockchain payments, stablecoin settlements, and on-chain reputation systems.

Wix-owned no-code platform Base44 rolls out proprietary Base1 model trained on tens of millions of real user interactions, betting on specialization over dependence on external LLMs.

Startup's real-time fluid monitoring spectrometer targets a critical failure mode as data centers push thermal limits.

JackHamr's inference platform is offering $5,000 in combined compute and LLM credits to the first 30 qualified startups, lowering barriers to entry for early-stage teams.

The stress-testing startup lands backing from Greenfield Partners to expand its simulated environments for autonomous AI systems.

The startup claims a unified model that learns spatial reasoning from gameplay action labels can transfer to physical robot control with minimal fine-tuning.

Network automation startup Netris raised $15M Series A from a16z to help emerging GPU cloud operators reduce time-to-market by automating data center configuration and multi-tenancy management.

Vishal Sikka's Hang Ten Systems raised $32M to automate enterprise software development, positioning AI as a disruptor to traditional IT outsourcing.

Indian marketing platform MoEngage bought San Francisco startup Aampe for tens of millions to embed autonomous AI agents that personalize customer interactions at the individual level.

Stockholm startup Fika Jobs secures pre-seed funding to expand video-first recruiting platform powered by Google's Gemini models.

Allbirds' pivot to AI infrastructure is now Smartbird, with former AWS executive Nadia Carlsten leading the charge into data-sovereign compute.

The inference infrastructure startup is raising at a $13B valuation just five months after a $300M Series E, but split pricing reveals how startups are gaming funding rounds.

Snap separates its generative AI video division into independent venture Dotmo, retaining equity stake while CTO Bobby Murphy leads funding.

The spatial-reasoning startup, backed by Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, plans to build AI agents using a unique gaming dataset.

Netflix's 'Queer Eye' life coach debuts Kē, a personalized fitness and mental health app powered by his AI-generated digital replica.

World model startup Odyssey, founded by autonomous vehicle veterans, secures unicorn status with backing from Amazon, AMD Ventures, and prominent angels.

DeepL expands into live-event audio with Mixhalo acquisition, positioning voice translation as a conferencing and sports broadcasting differentiator.

The startup applies mathematical verification techniques to constrain LLM hallucinations in law, pharmaceuticals, and tax.

The AI notetaker maker has shipped over 2 million devices and built a subscription business generating $100M+ in annual revenue by targeting professionals in meetings.

Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup Probably uses validator systems and smaller models to achieve 99.99% accuracy in AI outputs, reducing hallucination risk and token costs.

SpaceX's market cap climbs past $2.7 trillion following its IPO and AI startup acquisition, despite operating at a loss.

Malaysia's customer conversation platform Respond.io has closed a $62.5M Series B at $35M ARR, positioning AI agents as a defensible alternative to email-first CRM incumbents.

Cybersecurity startup NewCore launches with $66M seed funding to build identity and governance systems for AI agents operating alongside human employees.

Bengaluru startup Sarvam becomes India's newest AI unicorn with $234M Series B led by HCLTech, signaling India's shift toward homegrown AI capabilities.

Yang argues that as AI displaces workers, the next wave of startups should focus on lowering living costs rather than extracting margins—and he's betting on it with his mobile carrier.

French AI startup Mistral is in early talks to raise €3B, nearly doubling its valuation from last year's Series C and positioning Europe's leading LLM lab against US rivals.

Bezos-backed AI startup Prometheus raises $12B to build engineering design tools for physical product development across robotics, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace.

Peak XV-backed startup releases culturally-tuned video generation model at ₹0.48/second, positioning open-weights AI for mass adoption across India.

Jeff Bezos's Prometheus raised $12B from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock to automate engineering design and manufacturing at a $41B valuation.

Datadog alumni launch vendor-neutral coding infrastructure startup to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic's vertical expansion into software markets.

New York startup Jedify closes Series A funding to help AI agents understand business-specific context through multi-source knowledge graphs.

Sabertooth Capital deployed nearly $500M across 10 AI and deep-tech startups in 12 months using SPVs and nominee structures, avoiding the 12-18 month fund-raising timeline.

Sabertooth VC deployed nearly $400M across 10 companies in 12 months using special purpose vehicles, bypassing traditional fund formation timelines.

European AI code generation platform Lovable claims $500M annualized revenue run rate, up from $400M in February, with 50M cumulative projects built.

The legal AI startup lands Series A backing to tackle workflow automation for in-house counsel teams, differentiating from litigation-focused competitors.

Google DeepMind selects 15 early-stage robotics companies across Europe for intensive mentorship, AI model access, and technical support to commercialize physical AI applications.

Sam Altman's biometric verification startup is laying off employees amid revenue challenges, even as his primary company OpenAI moves toward public markets.

A wave of startups are raising capital for in-person, human-centric products—from social games to climate tech—while AI funding reaches record levels.

While AI funding hits records, founders like Brynn Putnam are raising capital for analog experiences—in-person games, DIY hardware, and human connection.

A new AI tool claims to predict film success from scripts alone, but early tests show it confidently misread both a future flop and Oscar winner.

Airbnb's Brian Chesky is backing a new AI research lab focused on user interaction and design, marking a shift from advising frontier labs to competing directly in the space.

Rocket engine startup Impulse Space secured $500M in Series D funding to hire 200 engineers, betting that physics-based spacecraft design still requires human expertise over machine learning.

A Stanford-founded startup claims its AI system beats the ECMWF's forecasts by leveraging proprietary sensor data and faster inference cycles.

The AI chip startup is shifting focus to its inference-as-a-service platform following its $20B partial exit with Nvidia.

The AI chip startup is pivoting toward inference-as-a-service, backed by existing investors including Disruptive and Infinitium.

An AI startup is launching a free cleaning service that records workers to gather training data for household robots.

The enterprise AI search startup tripled its top line in 15 months, pivoting its pitch toward cost savings as tech giants enter the market.

Anthropic secures $65B in funding at a $965B post-money valuation, with lead investors including Altimeter Capital and Sequoia, ahead of expected public listing.

Asana's $75M acquisition of Stack AI signals a strategic pivot toward AI-native workplace tools as the work-management platform battles market skepticism.

The Oculus-founder-backed startup debuts four distinct AI agents capable of running parallel searches mid-conversation, positioning itself toward agentic capabilities and 2027 eyewear hardware.

A new inference cloud startup backed by FUSE VC is deploying specialized chips to undercut GPU-heavy competitors in the race for AI inference capacity.

Visa backs coding platform Replit to integrate payment infrastructure for developer-built AI agents, signaling enterprise focus on agentic commerce.

The Devin maker's funding round from Lux Capital and General Catalyst reflects VC confidence in standalone AI engineering tools despite competition from model makers.

A startup led by ex-Google and Apple researchers is building infrastructure to let AI models improve from real-world user interactions, not just training data.

The open-source database company has tripled its annual run rate and hired a CFO from Snowflake as it eyes public markets.

TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 program closes applications tonight, offering 200 early-stage startups equity-free funding, investor access, and global exposure.

AI gateway OpenRouter raises $113M Series B from CapitalG, doubling its valuation in 12 months as enterprises increasingly avoid vendor lock-in.

TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200 closes applications on May 27, offering 200 early-stage startups equity-free funding, investor access, and global stage exposure at Disrupt 2026.

Recycling startups Sortera and Amp are deploying machine-vision systems to recover aluminum from waste streams as prices hit multi-decade highs and the US faces critical-mineral supply constraints.

The startup uses AI and a 100K-creator network to optimize viral video clips across platforms, backed by Slow Ventures and others.

A new desktop agent backed by Ng's fund learns user workflows and automates repetitive office tasks with minimal prompting.

TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200 applications close in one week, offering early-stage founders VC access, global visibility, and non-dilutive capital ahead of Disrupt 2026.

Venture-backed startups including Exa Labs and Parallel Web Systems are raising hundreds of millions to build alternatives to traditional search and ChatGPT's search interface.

TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200 competition closes applications on May 27, offering 200 early-stage startups equity-free funding, VC access, and a platform at Disrupt 2026.

NanoClaw creators turn down a buyout offer and secure seed funding from Valley Capital Partners, Hugging Face's Clem Delangue, and others, betting on community-driven growth over quick exit.

A cybersecurity startup founded by a former Israeli defense researcher is raising significant capital to combat phishing attacks automated by large language models.

South Korean startup LetinAR raised $18.5M to scale its PinTILT optical technology as AI glasses shipments surge toward 15M units annually.

The video-generation startup is expanding into physics-aware world models, positioning itself as an alternative to Google's language-dominated AI strategy.

The ex-OpenAI CTO's startup previews interaction models designed to keep humans in decision-making loops, contrasting with big labs pursuing autonomous superintelligence.

Khosla Ventures leads a $10M seed round in Synthetic, the new AI bookkeeping startup from Bench Accounting's ousted founder Ian Crosby.

Richard Socher's new startup wants to create AI that redesigns itself autonomously — no humans required.

DeepSeek is raising its first outside funding at a $45B valuation, led by a Chinese state investment vehicle, to counter researcher poaching.

London-based startup Ethos secured $22.75M Series A led by a16z to build an expert network using voice onboarding to capture professional knowledge beyond job titles.

ElevenLabs names all $500M Series D investors — BlackRock, NVIDIA, and celebrity backers among them — as the voice AI startup confirms crossing $500M in annual recurring revenue.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad says strong margins and 300% net revenue retention give the company the financial footing to stay solo — for now.

Parag Agrawal's AI agent infrastructure startup closed a $100M Series B at a $2B valuation, nearly tripling from its Series A just five months prior.

Runway's CEO argues the company's video tools are a foundation for general world models with applications in gaming, robotics, and beyond.

The social app embeds AI characters into shared conversations, positioning itself as a mental-health-conscious alternative to solo AI companionship.

Defense startup Scout AI closes a nine-figure Series A to develop Fury, an AI model designed to command military assets and eventually autonomous weapons.

Pre-Series A startups have until May 27 to compete for $100,000 equity-free funding and investor access at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.