Category: Fundraising

Fundraising, Global IT News, Global Security News, Startups, TC, TC All Stage, TechCrunch All Stage, Venture

TechCrunch All Stage: Learn how AI can supercharge your MVPs with Chris Gardner

April 4, 2025

TechCrunch All Stage, our big event for founders of startups at all stages of funding (see what we did there?), is coming up July 15 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station. And it’s our pleasure to announce that Underscore VC’s investing partner Chris Gardner will join a loaded lineup of speakers by leading a breakout session…

Grace raises €5.9 million seed to offer insurance to luxury goods

April 3, 2025

Grace, an insurance company for luxury goods, announced a $6.4 million (€5.9 million) seed round led by FinTechCollective and Speedinvest. Grace, an insurance company for luxury goods, works with luxury brands to protect purchased consumer goods. If an item is stolen or damaged, a consumer can create a claim through the Grace app. For the…

Voice AI platform Phonic gets backing from Lux

April 3, 2025

The quality of AI-generated voices is good enough for things like creating audiobooks and podcasts, having articles read aloud to you, and basic customer support. But many businesses don’t think AI voice tech is quite reliable enough to deploy. That’s why two MIT grads, Moin Nadeem and Nikhil Murthy (pictured above), founded Phonic, a company…

Call for speakers: Showcase your knowledge at TechCrunch All Stage

April 3, 2025

Calling founders, VCs, and startup experts — share your scaling strategies! TechCrunch All Stage 2025 is assembling top minds in startups and venture capital on July 15 in Boston. If you have valuable insights on scaling, now’s your chance to share them with 1,200+ founders, investors, and entrepreneurs. Lead thought-provoking sessions, interactive roundtables, and actionable…

New session at TechCrunch All Stage: Jahanvi Sardana on how top startups reshape markets

April 3, 2025

TechCrunch All Stage — the ultimate founder summit — is shaping up to be a powerhouse event where 1,200 founders and VCs across all stages will come together to forge meaningful connections and gain practical insights they can immediately apply to scale their startups. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston…

Runway, best known for its video-generating AI models, raises $308M

April 3, 2025

Runway, a startup developing a range of generative AI models for media production, including video-generating models, has raised $308 million in a Series D funding round. General Atlantic led the round, which had participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank, and others. The fresh capital will be put toward AI research…

Parasail says its fleet of on-demand GPUs is larger than Oracle’s entire cloud

April 2, 2025

Cloud infrastructure is dominated by several large industry players: AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud. While to some it may look like AI is headed in a similar direction, the founders of Parasail think AI infrastructure will look very different — and are betting their company’s fate on it. Parasail works with dozens of providers to…

Fourier is making hydrogen electrolyzers inspired by data centers

April 2, 2025

Most recent hydrogen startups have been focused on making modular electrolyzers, but Fourier has taken that trend to the extreme.

Who are climate conscious consumers? Not who you’d expect, says Northwind Climate

April 1, 2025

Rather than divide people into demographic buckets, Northwind Climate analyzes survey responses for behavioral clues.

Qualcomm acquires generative AI division of Vietnamese startup VinAI

April 1, 2025

Qualcomm has acquired the generative AI division of VinAI, an AI research company headquartered in Hanoi, for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced on Monday. The move marks Qualcomm’s continued expansion into the AI tooling sector. VinAI, which was founded by former DeepMind research scientist Hung Bui, develops a range of generative AI technologies, including…

Construct Capital raises $300M fund for defense and manufacturing tech

March 31, 2025

Construct Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups applying technology to sectors like manufacturing, transportation, and defense, has closed its third fund with $300 million in capital commitments. The Washington D.C.-based firm previously raised a $225 million second fund and a $75 million capital pool for later-stage companies in 2022. While many…

OpenAI raises $40B at $300B post-money valuation

March 31, 2025

OpenAI on Monday announced that it closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history. According to a blog post on the company’s website, OpenAI raised $40 billion in a round that values the company at $300 billion post-money. SoftBank led the financing, CNBC reported. Other participants included Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter, and Thrive, all…

Less than 24 hours to save $300+ on founder and investor passes for TechCrunch All Stage

March 31, 2025

Last chance! Less than 24 hours left to grab your $300+ discount on TechCrunch All Stage founder and investor passes. Planning to bring more than just you? Bundle tickets for even greater savings! Don’t wait — prices rise at 11:59 p.m. PT tonight. TC All Stage is the ultimate event where founders turbocharge growth, and…

Just 2 days to secure your founder or investor pass with $300+ off for TechCrunch All Stage

March 30, 2025

Time is running out! Less than 48 hours left to lock in your $300+ discount for TechCrunch All Stage founder and investor passes. More than just you? Save even more with bundle tickets. Rates increase on March 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. TC All Stage is where founders accelerate their growth and investors discover their…

Only 3 days left to save $300+ on investor and founder tickets for TechCrunch All Stage

March 29, 2025

The final countdown is here! This is your last weekend to lock in Early Bird pricing for TechCrunch All Stage founder and investor tickets. Save up to $320 before the clock strikes 11:59 p.m. PT on March 31. Founders, charge ahead. Investors, power the mission! On July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, 1,200…

Startups Weekly: Mercury more than doubled its valuation, and other news

March 28, 2025

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week reminded us that creative accounting doesn’t only happen in Hollywood. Some hopes were dashed, but startups are delivering on all sorts of promises, from nuclear…

4 days left to lock in $300+ savings for investor and founder tickets for TechCrunch All Stage

March 28, 2025

Time’s running out — 4 days left to save over $300 on Founder and Investor Passes for TechCrunch All Stage! Founders, accelerate your journey. Investors, fuel their success. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, Massachusetts, for TC All Stage, where 1,200 founders and VCs come together to scale from seed…

Ebay backs WunderGraph to build an open-source GraphQL federation

March 27, 2025

A fledgling open-source startup that’s setting out to tackle API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem has secured the backing of e-commerce giant eBay. WunderGraph, as the company is called, today said it has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding to “scale its open source GraphQL federation.” Investors include eBay’s VC arm…

4 days left to lock in $300+ savings for investor and founder tickets for TechCrunch All Stage

March 27, 2025

Time’s running out — 4 days left to save over $300 on Founder and Investor Passes for TechCrunch All Stage! Founders, accelerate your journey. Investors, fuel their success. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, MA, for TC All Stage, where 1,200 founders and VCs come together to scale from seed…

OpenAI will reportedly close its SoftBank-led $40 billion round soon

March 27, 2025

While you’re busy Ghibli-fying your images with ChatGPT’s new image-generation capabilities, OpenAI is out raising a ton more cash. The company is close to finalizing a new $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report noted that other funds, including the hedge fund Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders…

Island lands $250M in funding at a $4.8B valuation

March 26, 2025

Enterprise browser startup Island just raised a sizable funding round — one that bumps up its valuation significantly, and less than one year after its last fundraise. Dallas-based Island raised $250 million in a Series E round led by Coatue that valued the company at $4.85 billion, the startup announced today. This brings the company’s…

Has GetReal cracked the code on AI deepfakes? $18M and an impressive client list says yes

March 26, 2025

The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on these deepfakes is already costing companies millions of dollars — not to mention the implications these could have on national security. A startup that’s built a toolset aimed at governments…

Countdown: 5 days left to save up to $320 on TechCrunch All Stage passes

March 26, 2025

The clock is ticking — less than a week left until TechCrunch All Stage ticket prices go up! Save over $300 on founder and investor passes before March 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Founders, accelerate your path. Investors, empower their rise. On July 15, join 1,200 founders and VCs at SoWa Power Station in Boston,…

AI’s coming to the classroom: Brisk raises $15M after a quick start in school

March 26, 2025

It’s virtually impossible today to determine when a student’s writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another GenAI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. An AI edtech startup called Brisk has built a tool that could at least help teachers identify some of the telltale signs, and it’s now announcing…

Plural’s platform allows enterprises to manage their Kubernetes clusters in one place

March 25, 2025

When Sam Weaver was vice president of product management at Unqork, he realized that the company needed a better way to manage its sprawling network of Kubernetes clusters — which are groups of computing nodes. When Unqork couldn’t find anything off the shelf, it assembled a 15-person team to build a Kubernetes management product. Despite…

Less than a week to save $300+ on TechCrunch All Stage passes

March 25, 2025

The premiere founder conference brought to you by TechCrunch is heading back to Boston on July 15. TC All Stage 2025 (formerly known as Early Stage) is our tentpole East Coast event that promises an agenda full of founder knowledge — for all stages — that will be passed along to you. What’s more, if…

Step into the spotlight: Apply to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

March 24, 2025

Calling all tech innovators, startup fanatics, marketing gurus, and emerging VCs — this is your moment! You’ve waited long enough, and now the time has come to step into the spotlight at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, taking place October 27–29 in San Francisco. Share your expertise with over 10,000 eager attendees and make an impact by…

Apply to compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 today!

March 24, 2025

Start your engines … applications for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 competition are open! If you’re a pre-Series A startup founder looking to make your mark on a global stage, this is an opportunity you can’t pass up. We want to see you showcase your game-changing innovations to the world at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025’s premier startup pitch…

Only 7 Days Left: Founders and VCs Save $300+ on TechCrunch All Stage Passes

March 24, 2025

TechCrunch All Stage is returning to Boston, MA on July 15 for a jam-packed day where founders – no matter what stage they’re in — will gain practical insights to fuel their startup growth. With a lineup of expert-led sessions, founders will leave with actionable strategies they can implement right away. Investors will also be…

Browser Use, the tool making it easier for AI ‘agents’ to navigate websites, raises $17M

March 23, 2025

We may not have an agreed-upon definition of AI “agent” yet, but a multitude of startups want to create “agentic” tools to automate various tasks online. One such firm, Browser Use, has attracted a ton of interest from developers and investors thanks to its solution that makes websites more “readable” for AI agents. Browser Use…

Commercial services platform BuildOps becomes a unicorn, raises $127M

March 21, 2025

Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series…

Next Insurance gets scooped up by Munich Re for $2.6B

March 20, 2025

Germany’s Munich Re has signed a definitive agreement to acquire digital insurance company Next Insurance for $2.6 billion, the firms announced on Thursday. Founded in 2016, Palo Alto-based Next Insurance is focused on providing insurance to small-to-medium-sized businesses. It was last valued at $2.5 billion in late 2023 when it raised $265 million. Next Insurance’s…

Amid calls for sovereign EU tech stack, Evroc raises $55M to build a hyperscale cloud in Europe

March 20, 2025

A Swedish startup aiming to build a hyperscale cloud company in Europe has raised €50.6 million ($55 million) in Series A funding. Evroc, as it’s called, says it’s laying the foundations for a “secure, sovereign and sustainable hyperscale cloud to reimagine the digital future of Europe.” The announcement comes amid growing calls to create a…

Nvidia reportedly acquires synthetic data startup Gretel

March 19, 2025

Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that’s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag is reportedly nine figures and exceeds Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded…

Elon Musk’s X reportedly bounces back to $44B valuation

March 19, 2025

Social media site X’s valuation has bounced back to $44 billion, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Elon Musk purchased the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion back in 2022. However, a report from Bloomberg states that X has raised close to $1 billion from investors in a deal that…

Agentic AI startup AMT aims to be ‘Google Adwords for influencers,’ raises seed round

March 19, 2025

Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they…

Aletiq secures $6.5M for its SaaS tool focused on product lifecycle management

March 19, 2025

Aletiq has raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the founding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury and more. When you…

Factorial snaps up $120M from General Catalyst to boost its HR sales and marketing

March 19, 2025

While Rippling and Deel duke it out in the field and in the courtroom alleging illegal sales and marketing tactics, here’s another way to boost business growth: pick up a massive sum of cash to expand your operations in those areas. Factorial, the Barcelona-based “unicorn” startup that provides an all-in-one HR platform in the cloud…

New $5M deep tech fund aims to lure founders from universities

March 18, 2025

Critical Venture Partners is betting that young founders plucked fresh from universities can solve some of the world’s most intractable problems. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Al Gore’s Just Climate fund raises $175M from Microsoft and CalSTRS for nature-based climate investments

March 18, 2025

Anthropic-backed AI-powered code review platform Graphite raises cash

March 18, 2025

AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman recently claimed that a quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. Sensing an opportunity, VCs are rushing to back startups developing…

Coreshell has a plan to slash the price of American made batteries

March 18, 2025

TurinTech reveals $20M in backing to fix problems in ‘vibe coding’

March 18, 2025

So-called “vibe coding” with LLM-driven tools like Cursor Composer — a term coined by renowned computer scientist Andrej Karpathy — describes a hands-off approach to writing code using Gen AI models, and it has really taken off recently. According to Y Combinator, one quarter of the startups in its latest batch relies on AI to…

GrubMarket raises $50M at a $3.5B+ valuation to build AI for the $1 trillion food distribution industry

March 18, 2025

U.S. President Trump’s wide-ranging tariff hikes are already resulting in growth forecasts being cut amid other uncertainty — actions that will inevitably impact the technology sector, too. Today, however, one food e-commerce startup, GrubMarket, is announcing a new equity round of $50 million on a raised valuation of over $3.5 billion — a signal of…

TechCrunch All Stage unveils a powerhouse agenda for founders

March 17, 2025

TechCrunch All Stage (formerly Early Stage) returns to Boston on July 15, and the agenda for our tentpole East Coast founder event is almost complete. We’re excited to share this sneak peek at some of the fantastic speakers and sessions we have on tap. For builders who are just starting on their founder journey, our…

Nvidia’s AI empire: A look at its top startup investments

March 16, 2025

Over the last two years, Nvidia has used its ballooning fortunes to invest in over 80 AI startups. Here are the giant semiconductor’s largest investments. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Geothermal unicorn Fervo Energy may IPO as early as next year

March 13, 2025

TechCrunch All Stage unveils a powerhouse agenda for founders

March 13, 2025

Omni raises $69M to design tools that help companies better analyze their data

March 13, 2025

Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don’t exist. That’s according to Colin Zima, the CEO of Omni, a business intelligence (BI) platform that aims to help organizations simplify how they…

Bria lands new funding for AI models trained on licensed data

March 13, 2025

AI-powered image generators, which are at the center of a number of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, are frequently trained on massive amounts of data from public websites. Most of these companies argue that fair use doctrine shields their data scraping and training practices. But many copyright holders disagree. That’s why some startups and firms developing image…

Estonia-based Blackwall raises €45 million Series B to protect SMBs from malicious online traffic

March 13, 2025

A huge chunk of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad — but AI is boosting the latter. From DDoS attacks to scraping, there’s a renewed barrage of threats that companies have to deal with. According to cybersecurity entrepreneur Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more severe for SMBs. “The main difference is…

Project Europe, a new early-stage fund, will back people under 25 to build the next tech titan

March 12, 2025

A recurring theme in Europe’s tech world is that the region needs its own Google or Microsoft. Now comes the launch of a new fund to support this initiative. Project Europe — a new fund for founders “solving hard problems with technical solutions” — says it has initially pulled together $10 million from 128 different…

Pentera nabs $60M at a $1B+ valuation to build simulated network attacks to train security teams

March 12, 2025

Strong and smart security operations teams are at the heart of any cybersecurity strategy, and today a startup that builds tooling to help keep them on their toes is announcing some funding on the back of a lot of growth. Pentera — which has built a system that launches simulations of network attacks to stress…

Scimplify raises $40M to help manufacturers access specialty chemicals

March 12, 2025

BaaS startup Synctera raises $15M, signs Bolt as a customer

March 11, 2025

The banking-as-a-service space took a hit last year when Synapse collapsed. But that hasn’t stopped BaaS startup Synctera from raising another $15 million in funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Synctera works to provide companies “of all shapes and sizes with everything they need to launch and operate fintech and embedded banking products,” including: accounts, cards,…

The sibling founders of Stax Payments are back with a $20M seed raise for their new fintech, Worth

March 11, 2025

Worth, a company focused on helping fintechs, banks, and enterprises underwrite small and medium-sized businesses more easily, has raised $20 million in a seed funding round, the startup tells TechCrunch exclusively. It’s a large seed round, especially these days when capital is harder to come by. But the founders’ history may have something to do…

Sola emerges from stealth with $30M to build the ‘Stripe for security’

March 11, 2025

Enterprises these days can choose from hundreds of apps and services available to secure their networks, data and assets — nearly as many more to help them manage all the alerts and extra work that those security apps generate. But what if you could build your own apps, customised to your own workloads, to simplify…

Startup studio Hexa acquires majority stake in Veevart, a vertical SaaS platform for museums

March 11, 2025

Hexa is trying something new. Instead of fostering startups from the ground up and incubating them for the first year or so, the Paris-based startup studio is acquiring a majority stake in Veevart, a vertical software-as-a-service company for museums that provides solutions for ticketing, fundraising, CRM and collection management. Hexa is a familiar name in…

Infinite Uptime bags $35M to help factories optimize equipment usage

March 10, 2025

Infinite Uptime, which offers predictive maintenance solutions for factories, has raised $35 million in a Series C round to expand its footprint in the U.S. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Daqus Energy has a plan to make EV sports cars fast, light, and cheap

March 10, 2025

Cheaper, lighter, and denser: the trifecta defines an ideal battery. No one has devised a perfect cell quite yet, but one stealthy startup thinks it has found a new material that solves at least two of those challenges. Daqus Energy has been quietly operating for the past four months, refining a compound known as TAQ…

AvatarOS snags $7M seed round from M13 to build an AI-powered virtual influencer platform

March 10, 2025

A few years ago, several startups with a specific focus on digital avatars appeared because of all the metaverse buzz. While that buzz died down, generative AI has given a new life to avatars as it is easier to spin up different virtual identities. Companies are trying out different use cases for avatars, including D-ID…

Applications are open for Startup Battlefield 200 — apply today!

March 10, 2025

Are you a pre-Series A startup founder looking to make your mark on a global stage? This is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Applications for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 — the premier startup pitch competition — are officially open. We want to see you showcase your game-changing innovations to the world at TechCrunch Disrupt…

Maximize your brand: Secure an exhibit table at TechCrunch All Stage 2025

March 10, 2025

On July 15, 1,200 founders and VCs across all stages will gather at SoWa Power Station in Boston for TechCrunch All Stage 2025 — the ultimate summit for startup founders. What does this mean for you? A golden opportunity to showcase your brand to a powerhouse crowd eager to scale. It’s easy — just head…

ServiceNow to buy Moveworks for $2.85B to grow its AI portfolio

March 10, 2025

ServiceNow said on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools. ServiceNow will pay $2.85 billion for Moveworks in a mix of cash and stock. The former expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025. Bloomberg reported the deal late on Sunday night. As of…

Nirvana keeps on truckin’ with $80M at a $830M valuation for its AI-powered insurance

March 10, 2025

As the U.S. trucking industry gears up for the negative impacts of new Trump tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, a startup building a new kind of trucking insurance — a critical cost for truck drivers — has raised some money to grow, and (it hopes) help truckers weather the changes. Nirvana, an AI-based…

9 US AI startups have raised $100M or more in 2025

March 8, 2025

Last year was a monumental year for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch. Three companies raised more than one “mega-round” last year, and seven companies raised rounds at $1 billion or larger. How…

Cursor in talks to raise at a $10B valuation as AI coding sector booms

March 7, 2025

Investor interest in AI-coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a pre-money…

Startups Weekly: Startups raised funding to help others navigate challenges

March 7, 2025

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Sometimes problems are just that: problems. But often, they are also fodder. This week brought us a mix of startups facing adversity, sometimes of their own doing,…

Founder of battery startup Our Next Energy returns as CEO following new funding

March 6, 2025

Why VCs ghost founders, or reject deals and never speak to the founder again

March 6, 2025

Getting ghosted is never fun. Especially if you’re a founder seeking capital from investors. It’s similar to dating. You might be left wondering “Why is this person not getting back to me? Did I do something wrong?” Did the investor hate the product? Did they not care for me personally?” It’s enough to drive anyone…

Faireez raises $7.5M for AI-powered hotel-style housekeeping for condo residents

March 6, 2025

Faireez, which aims to bring “5-star hotel-style housekeeping” to multifamily buildings, is emerging from stealth with $7.5 million in seed funding, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. Founded in 2023, New York-based Faireez’s goal is to make the cleaning services it offers as customized as possible. It offers a subscription model where each building is assigned…

Turing, a key coding provider for OpenAI and other LLM producers, raises $111M at a $2.2B valuation

March 6, 2025

As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in fulfilling that effort is announcing a significant round of funding to expand. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects —…

Crogl, armed with $30M, takes the wraps off a new AI ‘Iron Man suit’ for security analysts

March 6, 2025

AI agents are marching across the world of IT, and on Thursday a startup called Crogl is debuting its contribution to the field: an autonomous assistant for cybersecurity researchers to help them analyse thousands of daily network alerts to find and fix actual security incidents. The assistant — described by Crogl’s CEO and co-founder Monzy…

Renaissance Fusion raises €32M to radically simplify complex fusion reactors

March 6, 2025

Alpine Eagle secures funding from European backers for counter-drone tech amid rising threats

March 6, 2025

The war in Ukraine has brought drones to the forefront of modern warfare, creating a surge in demand for counter-drone systems. However, legacy solutions to counter drones, such as ground-based defense systems and cyber warfare, often come with a hefty price tag. For German startup Alpine Eagle, these solutions fall short: When now-ubiquitous $500 first-person…

Anna Patterson’s Ceramic.ai looks to help enterprises build AI models faster and more efficiently

March 5, 2025

Anna Patterson has had a storied career in Silicon Valley. She founded three startups, including search engine upstarts Xift and Cuil, as well as recall.archive.org, which became the Internet Archive. She was the vice president of engineering at Google, and later on started Gradient Ventures, an AI-focused seed fund. And she isn’t done building. Patterson…

Flex, a Brex for business owners, has raised $25M at a $250M valuation

March 5, 2025

Flex, which offers personal finance software and payments infrastructure for business owners, has raised $25 million in equity funding while securing a $200 million credit facility, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The equity funds were raised at a valuation of “just under $250 million.” The company last raised a $20 million Series A announced in September…

Grain emerges from stealth with $50M to help any business hedge against FX volatility

March 5, 2025

Foreign exchange fluctuations can make or break a business that trades across borders, but keeping up and responding to the FX market can be tricky if you’re anything smaller than the world’s largest enterprises. Today, a startup called Grain is emerging from stealth with a product that it says will let finance teams at companies…

Darwinbox, the HR upstart from India, raises $140M to take on Deel and Rippling

March 5, 2025

Darwinbox, an Indian startup building a SaaS platform for hiring, onboarding and employee administration, has raised $140 million to take on the likes of Rippling and Deel as it seeks to expand internationally, especially in the U.S. The funding is being co-led by KKR and Partners Group, and is a mix of primary and secondary…

CoreWeave partner EcoDataCenter racks up half a billion dollars to build more sustainable buildings for AI

March 5, 2025

EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be…

Defense tech startup Epirus raises $250M Series D to counter drone swarms

March 4, 2025

Quantexa nabs $175M at a $2.6B valuation to double down on data analytics for AI

March 4, 2025

London startup Quantexa has made its name over the years with an enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to fight money laundering and fraud. Today, it is announcing new funding of $175 million to double down on that business while also moving deeper into another hot area: using its technology to help organizations…

Foundation Capital, an early backer of Solana and Cerebras, raises $600M fund

March 4, 2025

Foundation Capital has come a long way since it was forced to scale down its fund size from $750 million in 2008 to $282 million (its sixth main fund) in 2013. On Tuesday, the 30-year-old firm announced that it raised a $600 million eleventh flagship fund, which is 20% larger than the predecessor $500 million…

Didi reportedly seeking funds for self-driving unit at $5B valuation

March 4, 2025

Chinese ride-hail firm Didi is on the hunt for fresh funds for its autonomous vehicle technology unit that could value it at $5 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Investor interest in self-driving cars is high in China on the backs of IPOs from WeRide and Pony AI, which have a market capitalization of $4.7 billion…

Swap banks $40M to build tools for merchants to deal with tariffs and other cross-border trading nightmares

March 4, 2025

Cross-border trade could become significantly more challenging with the wave of new tariffs getting introduced across different markets. Today, in a timely piece of news, a London-founded startup called Swap — which is building tools for e-commerce companies to better navigate the cross-border trading world — is announcing $40 million in funding to expand. Iconiq…

LlamaIndex launches a cloud service for building unstructed data agents

March 4, 2025

Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists, Jerry Liu and…

Hotel management platform Mews books $75M round led by Tiger Global

March 4, 2025

Despite clouds of uncertainty looming over the economy and geopolitics, people still want to travel. To meet that demand, Mews, an Amsterdam-founded ‘unicorn’ building an SaaS platform for hotel management, has raised a fresh $75 million. The funding is coming at a crossroad in the travel industry. On one hand are positive signals. Analysts at…

Cino cracks bill-splitting at the moment of payment, raises seed round

March 4, 2025

While Venmo or Splitwise are effectively ‘debt collector’ tools, which require one person to pay a full bill and then request funds from others, neither have cracked bill-splitting at the moment of payment. European startup Cino, which has come up with just such a product, has now raised €3.5m in a Seed funding round led…

Dutch startup QuantWare seeks to fast-track quantum computing

March 4, 2025

Big tech companies aren’t sleeping on quantum chips: Amazon Web Services introduced Ocelot; Microsoft, Majorana; and Google, Willow. But although all of these can be considered to be breakthroughs, quantum startups often focus on more practical advancements — and they are making progress. Founded in 2020, Dutch startup QuantWare is one of these, which claims…

HackerPulse wants to help enterprises spot engineering bottlenecks

March 3, 2025

Cloudsmith raises $23M to improve software supply chain security

March 3, 2025

The software supply chain is notoriously porous: a reported 81% of codebases contain high- or critical-risk open source vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability can have a far-reaching impact on the wider software supply chain, as evidenced by the likes of the Log4Shell exploit that saw millions of applications exposed to potential remote code execution hacks via…

OpenAI’s startup empire: The companies backed by its venture fund

March 1, 2025

Only 3 more days to save up to $325 at TechCrunch Sessions: AI

February 28, 2025

The AI revolution won’t wait — will you? Secure your seat at TechCrunch Sessions: AI before time runs out! You’ve got only three days left to save up to $325. The clock stops on March 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Don’t miss out on the lowest rates of the year! AI is transforming everything, and…

TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: Final 24 hours to save up to $1,130

February 28, 2025

The early bird gets the worm and time is running out! You have less than 24 hours left to save up to $1,130 when purchasing passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. If you want massive savings on Disrupt 2025 individual passes and up to 30% on group tickets, secure your low ticket rate today. These offers…

Snowflake grows startup accelerator with $200M in new capital

February 27, 2025

Snowflake plans to expand its startup accelerator with $200 million in additional commitments, the tech giant that specializes in cloud-based data storage said Thursday. The new injection of capital follows a string of activity by Snowflake over the past several months that illustrates that company’s growth ambitions. The Snowflake Startup Accelerator, formerly known as the…

Archipelo comes out of stealth with $12M funding to secure human and AI-driven code

February 27, 2025

When it comes to AI software, you can build something clever, but that’s not always the same as building something that is secure. With so much software now getting written by AI, having a window into its security can be a challenge. That’s the premise of Archipelo, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that is today…

Workhelix taps years of research to help enterprises figure out where to apply AI

February 27, 2025

AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn’t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem. Workhelix is…

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