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Senators revive bill to harmonize conflicting cybersecurity regulations

A bipartisan Senate duo is reintroducing legislation Thursday that would establish an executive branch panel to align conflicting cybersecurity regulations on the private sector. Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is bringing back the Streamlining Federal Cybersecurity Regulations Act with co-sponsor James Lankford, R-Okla. “By reducing…

The wild story of how gut health AI toilet startup Throne raised $4M led by Moxxie 

The tale of how smart toilet startup Throne landed its seed round is so full of serendipities, one could almost believe it was orchestrated by the hand of Fortuna, Roman god of providence. Throne is an Austin-based company working on an AI-powered toilet device for consumers. It uses computer vision (cameras pointing in the bowl…

Alt Carbon scores $12M seed to scale carbon removal in India

From a struggling family tea estate to an innovative climate venture, Alt Carbon has raised $12 million in a seed round as it plans to scale its carbon dioxide removal work in the South Asian nation. The climate-tech startup, which locks away carbon for thousands of years through enhanced rock weathering on farmlands, attracted investment…

Uber Freight bets big on AI tools to grow its business

Three years ago, as the pandemic caused chaos for companies big and small, Colgate-Palmolive’s chief supply chain officer Luciano Sieber orchestrated a “logistics blitz.”  The result gave Sieber a better understanding of how Colgate-Palmolive moves its products around the world. But it stuck Sieber with another problem: too much data.  About a year ago, Sieber…

Brex partners with former competitor Zip, with an eye on reducing cash burn to get to an IPO

Brex has once again made the surprising, but perhaps realistic, decision to partner with another one-time competitor. This time Zip, the CEOs of both companies told TechCrunch exclusively.  In April 2022, fintech Brex announced it was making “a big push” into both the enterprise and software. The news was notable considering that Brex originally was…

South Loop Ventures closes $21M fund in Houston to build up local tech ecosystem

South Loop Ventures, a Houston-based venture firm, announced a $21 million Fund I, with Rice Management Company and Chevron Technology Ventures serving as anchor investors.  The firm, which launched in 2022, focuses on seed and pre-seed companies, with $400,000 as the average check size. It also primarily hopes to focus on backing founders of color. …

Deel wants Rippling to hand over any agreements involving paying the alleged spy

Deel has lobbed a new volley in the ongoing legal battle with rival HR tech startup Rippling. Deel filed a motion, containing a series of letters, asking the Irish court to make Rippling hand over information. In one letter, Deel wants unredacted versions of witness affidavits, including the famed one by former Rippling employee, Keith…

Fake fired Twitter worker ‘Rahul Ligma’ is a real engineer with an AI data startup used by Harvard

The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”  His real name is Rahul Sonwalker but the prank went viral. He piled on his character’s notoriety when he went to the Bahamas to…

Cognichip emerges from stealth with the goal of using generative AI to develop new chips

Chips are a critical component of the AI industry. But new chips don’t hit the market with the same speed as new AI models and products do. Cognichip has a lofty goal of creating a foundational AI model that can help bring new chips to market faster. San Francisco-based Cognichip is working to build a…

Who needs VC funding? How cybercriminals spread their ill-gotten gains to everyday business ventures

Cybercriminals aren’t so different from the rest of us — they live in the real world, and their spending and investment habits, though funded through crime, can look surprisingly ordinary. Luxury cars and lavish vacations may still grab headlines, but those perks are reserved for the most elite cybercriminals. In reality, everyday businesses — like pizza…

Tensor9 helps vendors deploy their software into any environment using digital twins

Enterprises want access to new software and AI tools but can’t risk sending their sensitive data out to a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Tensor9 looks to help software companies land more enterprise customers by helping them deploy their software directly into a customer’s tech stack. Tensor9 converts a software vendor’s code into the format needed…

UP.Labs-Porsche’s newest startup wants to be the Plaid of automotive retail

As serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, scaled, and then successfully sold mobile auto repair service startup RepairSmith to AutoNation, he was plagued by a persistent problem.  The automotive retail industry has a communication problem. And it’s an expensive one. Thousands of dealerships and mechanic shops — each one with an array of software systems —…

Insurtech Bestow lands $120M Series D from Goldman Sachs, Smith Point Capital

Melbourne O’Banion co-founded insurtech Bestow with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 after struggling to secure his own life insurance policy. His goal was to make it easier for people to obtain life insurance and make the process more tech-enabled. Initially, Bestow operated as a direct-to-consumer insurance provider — selling, underwriting, and servicing life insurance policies. In…

Slate Auto crosses 100,000 refundable reservations in two weeks

Buzzy new EV startup Slate Auto has racked up more than 100,000 reservations for its customizable low-cost electric pickup truck, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch. Slate crossed the milestone over the weekend, just a little more than two weeks after coming out of stealth mode and unveiling the truck at an event in Los…

The Department of Labor just dropped its investigation into Scale AI

The U.S. Department of Labor has dropped its investigation into Scale AI’s compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to a source directly familiar with the matter.  The FLSA is a federal law that regulates misclassification of employees as independent contractors and unpaid wages. TechCrunch first reported that Scale was the subject of such…

Sequoia leads $1.5B tender offer for sales automation startup Clay

It took seven years of hard work for Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of sales automation startup Clay, to see the company’s product finally take off in 2022. Since then, the startup has experienced explosive growth, reached a valuation exceeding a billion dollars, and expanded its employee count from low double digits to over 200.…

Why Hims & Hers turned to the autonomous vehicle industry to find an AI-savvy CTO

Hims & Hers, the telehealth and wellness company, has hired a veteran of the autonomous vehicle industry as its next chief technology officer. The move, according to Hims & Hers co-founder and CEO, Andrew Dudum, was intentional. Hims & Hers on Thursday said its next CTO would be Mo Elshenawy, the former president and CTO…

Fastino trains AI models on cheap gaming GPUs and just raised $17.5M led by Khosla

Tech giants like to boast about trillion-parameter AI models that require massive and expensive GPU clusters. But Fastino is taking a different approach. The Palo Alto-based startup says it has invented a new kind of AI model architecture that’s intentionally small and task-specific. The models are so small they’re trained with low-end gaming GPUs worth…

Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ and ‘Cybercab’ trademarks hit roadblocks ahead of June launch

Tesla’s attempt to trademark the term “Robotaxi” in reference to its vehicles has been refused by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for being too generic, according to a new filing. Another application by Tesla to trademark the term “Robotaxi” for its upcoming ride-hailing service is still under examination by the office. In addition, applications…

BluSmart investors propose $30M in new funding to revive the Uber rival

A group of investors are considering a plan to inject another $30 million into BluSmart in a bid to revive the Indian cab-hailing startup, which abruptly halted operations last month, TechCrunch has learned. The proposal from these existing investors has a catch: It’s contingent on BluSmart co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi agreeing to resign. The proposed…

Finom, a challenger bank aimed at SMBs, lands $105M in growth funding from General Catalyst

Finom, an Amsterdam-based digital bank for small- and medium-sized businesses, has raised €92.7 million (roughly $105 million) in a growth investment from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. The capital infusion “will be used exclusively and only for growth” and not for operational expenses or product development, Kos Stiskin, Finom’s chairman…

Agree.com raises $7.2M to take on Docusign, Bill.com with AI

Agree.com says its AI-powered e-signature platform is different from competitors because it includes invoicing and payment processing. That’s why the company might have a shot at tackling the industry goliath, Docusign.  Because the startup makes its money from transaction fees for any money movement facilitated by its platform, Agree.com has made e-signatures free to all…

A stealth AI model beat DALL-E and Midjourney on a popular benchmark. Its creator just landed $30M.

Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious image model that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a respected industry benchmark last year, has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Accel, it exclusively told TechCrunch.  Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Based in San Francisco, Recraft previously raised a $12…

Fintech Bench conducts layoff while others still work month-to-month

Bench, the accounting and tax startup that was bought in a fire sale last December, has conducted a round of significant layoffs, it confirmed to TechCrunch. Bench didn’t specify how many people were affected, but one person who works there estimated that Bench was eliminating dozens of positions – that’s a big chunk of the…

Nuvo, a network for B2B trade, has nabbed $34M from Sequoia and Spark Capital

Nuvo, a company that has built a social-like platform to facilitate easier purchasing of physical goods between businesses, has raised a $34 million Series A from Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. The San Francisco-based startup previously raised $11 million in an undisclosed seed round led by Founders Fund and Index Ventures…

AI sales tax startup Kintsugi had doubled its valuation in 6 months

Kintsugi, a Silicon Valley-based startup that helps companies offload and automate their sales tax compliance, has raised $18 million in new funding led by global indirect tax technology solution provider Vertex. The startup plans to enable more small and medium businesses to use its AI-enabled capabilities for tax calculations and filings. The ongoing growth of…

Figure AI sent cease-and-desist letters to secondary markets brokers

Last month, Brett Adcock, founder of a robotics startup Figure AI, claimed in a post on X that his company “is now # 1 most sought-after private stock in the secondary market.” But the company has sent cease-and-desist letters to at least two brokers who run secondary marketplaces, those brokers told TechCrunch.These people said Figure…

Amazon-backed Glacier gets $16M to expand its robot recycling fleet

The world has a trash problem. The amount of stuff we throw away is expected to nearly double, to 3.8 billion metric tons, by 2050. Reducing what we use would go a long way to addressing the issue, but let’s face it, we’re not very good at buying less either. That leaves recycling, which has…

Slate Auto eyes former Indiana printing plant for its EV truck production

Slate Auto, the buzzy new EV startup that broke stealth this week, is close to locking in a former printing plant located in Warsaw, Indiana as the future production site for its cheap electric truck, a review of public records shows. The company is expected to lease the 1.4 million-square-foot facility for an undisclosed sum.…

Prince Harry meets, funds youth groups advocating for social media and AI safety

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, walked into the sunlight-lit hotel conference room in Brooklyn on Thursday to meet with a dozen youth leaders working in tech safety, policy, and innovation. The young adults chatted away at black circular tables, many unaware of his presence until he plopped down at a table and started talking with…

Flex acquires a16z-backed Maza for $40M as fintech M&A heats up

Flex, a startup that offers personal finance software for business owners, has acquired Maza, a finance app aimed at Spanish speakers in the U.S., for $40 million, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively. At first glance, the pairing may seem a bit curious. Flex’s software and payments infrastructure is to help business owners have a single…

Why OpenAI wanted to buy Cursor but opted for the fast-growing Windsurf

Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly, it’s not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI, a source close to the company tells TechCrunch. It’s been a hot target. Cursor is one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools and its revenue has been growing astronomically – doubling on…

Ex-Meta engineer raises $14M for Lace AI, a revenue generation software startup

As an AI engineer at Meta, Boris Valkov helped build PyTorch, one of the world’s largest machine learning libraries. During his time there, Valkov realized that artificial intelligence “was about to unlock capabilities…in the application layer in the software stack.” He left Meta in late 2021 to start Lace AI, a startup that has developed…

Bezos-backed EV startup pitched investors on ‘Transformer’-like customization

Jeff Bezos-backed Slate Auto has planted multiple concept versions of its EV on the streets of California. It’s a marketing tactic that teases the secretive startup’s strategy to sell a “Transformer”-like vehicle, people familiar with the company’s internal discussions told TechCrunch. This unconventional real-world tease comes days before Slate’s April 24 launch event at Long…

Bolt’s Ryan Breslow pins his hopes on a new app that takes on Coinbase, Zelle, and PayPal

Ryan Breslow is officially back. While the founder of one-click checkout company Bolt re-assumed its helm as CEO in March, Breslow is unveiling Wednesday a new “superapp” that he hopes will formally mark his return as the fintech’s leader. He describes the new product as “one-click crypto and everyday payments” in a single platform, in…

Exclusive: Peters, Rounds tee up bill to renew expiring cyber threat information sharing law

A bipartisan pair of senators are kicking off the race Wednesday to reauthorize a 2015 cyber threat information sharing law, a move that industry groups and cyber experts are eager to see happen before it’s set to expire in September. Advocates say the 10-year-old Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act has been vital to sharing threat information…

Deel’s CEO is now in Dubai, complicating Rippling’s lawsuit

Rippling’s efforts to serve Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz have been significantly complicated by the fact that Bouaziz and his lawyer are now in Dubai, according to internal correspondence seen by TechCrunch. The UAE is a country with a reputation of being a safe haven for those wanting to avoid extradition. Rippling is trying to serve…

Former Tesla supply chain leaders create Atomic, an AI inventory solution

Tesla famously struggled to scale up production of the Model 3 sedan in 2018 — so much so that CEO Elon Musk said his company was weeks away from collapsing. That near-death experience helped spawn a whole new company called Atomic that’s built around using AI to streamline supply chains. Co-founded by former Tesla employees…

Phantom Neuro grabs $19M to help amputees put their phantom limbs to use

The science fiction trope of humans superpowered by computer and bionic implants is fast becoming a reality, and today, a startup hoping for a role in how that plays out is announcing some funding.  Phantom Neuro, which is developing a wristband-like device that gets implanted under the skin to let a person control prosthetic limbs,…

Conifer locks down $20M seed round for its ‘drop-in’ electric hub motor

A handful of engineers who worked at Lucid Motors and on Apple’s electric car project have launched a new startup that puts a fresh spin on electric hub motors. The new startup, called Conifer, has developed its motor to be free of rare earth elements by using more abundant ferrite magnets, which the company says…

Bezos-backed EV startup Slate Auto’s pickup truck spotted in the wild

Just one day after TechCrunch revealed that Jeff Bezos is backing a secretive EV startup called Slate Auto, an early version of the company’s low-cost electric pickup truck was spotted in the wild. Reddit user u/discostranger09 posted a photo to the r/whatisthiscar subreddit on Wednesday of a small, dark gray, two-seater pickup truck on a…

Bezos-backed EV startup Slate Auto’s pickup truck spotted in the wild

Just one day after TechCrunch revealed that Jeff Bezos is backing a secretive EV startup called Slate Auto, an early version of the company’s low-cost electric pickup truck was spotted in the wild. Reddit user u/discostranger09 posted a photo to the r/whatisthiscar subreddit on Wednesday of a small, dark gray, two-seater pickup truck on a…

Bezos-backed EV startup Slate Auto’s pickup truck spotted in the wild

Just one day after TechCrunch revealed that Jeff Bezos is backing a secretive EV startup called Slate Auto, an early version of the company’s low-cost electric pickup truck was spotted in the wild. Reddit user u/discostranger09 posted a photo to the r/whatisthiscar subreddit on Wednesday of a small, dark gray, two-seater pickup truck on a…

Inventex founder, an engineer for Coinbase at 14, wants to revolutionize patent applications

Daniel Ruskin started his career when he was a mere 14 years old as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a teenager “who knew how to code and wanted to build cool things.” Obviously too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did freelance development work he found on reddit in…

Solid, which claimed to be the ‘AWS of fintech,’ files for bankruptcy after raising nearly $81M in funding

Banking-as-a-service startup Solid (formerly called Wise) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to documents filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on April 7. Founded in 2018, the fintech company had raised a total of nearly $81 million in funding from investors such as FTV Capital and Headline.…

Artisan, the ‘stop hiring humans’ AI agent startup, raises $25M – and is still hiring humans 

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year…

Tessell snags $60M to drive data management at scale

Tessell, a startup developing a multi-cloud database-as-a-service, has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital ahead of its plans to expand its market presence and launch an AI-powered conversational database management service. As data becomes more critical than ever, many companies are struggling to manage and store it efficiently. Legacy…

Inside the EV startup secretly backed by Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is funding a secretive EV startup based in Michigan called Slate Auto that could start production as soon as next year, according to multiple sources and documents that link the billionaire’s family office to the startup. Slate, which took root in another Bezos-connected company called Re:Build Manufacturing, has been operating quietly since its…

Los Angeles-based Rain raised a $75M Series B in another good sign for fintech

Rain, a startup offering employer-integrated earned wage access (EWA) app coupled with financial-wellness features like overdraft alerts and spending trends, has raised $75 million in an all-equity Series B round. The round was led by Prosus at a post-money valuation of $340 million. Rain plans to use the new funds to help it add credit…

Nikola founder Trevor Milton wants to buy the bankrupt startup’s assets

Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was recently pardoned after being convicted of securities fraud, is trying to buy the assets of his former company out of bankruptcy, according to new court filings and a person familiar with the matter. Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February and has said it hopes to sell…

Thatch raises $40M to give employees more control of their health care choices

Thatch, a startup that aims to transform the health insurance experience for employers and employees alike, has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Index Ventures led the financing, which included participation from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), General Catalyst, SemperVirens, PeopleTech Partners, The General Partnership, and new…

Redwood Materials preps for expansion spree with new R&D center in San Francisco

Redwood Materials has been on an expansion tear in recent years — growth that has extended the lithium-ion battery recycling and materials startup’s footprint well beyond its Carson City, Nevada headquarters as it locked up deals with Toyota, Panasonic, and, GM, started construction on a South Carolina factory, and made an acquisition in Europe. And…

Khosla’s Keith Rabois leads $11.5M Series A for startup Roam, calls it ‘the future of the housing market’

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mortgage interest rates dropped to historic lows — as low as 2.5%. Fast-forward a few years and rates soared — to highs nearing 8% in 2023, with the national average 30-year fixed mortgage APR as of April 1 still at 6.84%.  The whiplash has left many people seeking to buy homes…

Temporal lands $146 million at a flat valuation, eyes agentic AI expansion

Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Now, Temporal has raised…

Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal

The encrypted messaging app Signal is getting some unexpected attention this week. High-ranking officials in the Trump administration, including Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, communicated the plans for an attack on the Yemeni Houthis via a potentially unauthorized group chat on Signal. However, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly…

YC alum Mendel, a ‘Ramp for LatAm enterprises,’ raises $35M Series B

Mexico City-based Mendel has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Corporate spend management platform Mendel last raised in December 2021 — a $15 million Series A round and $20 million in debt — after participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. With this latest capital infusion, the…