Fundings and Exits

Bose gave up on Sleepbuds after two generations. It was a sad, premature end for a promising product. The headphone maker came closer to creating a truly great pair of sleep headphones than anyone else. Ultimately, however, it seems the company was no longer interested in pursuing the product, which proved a major setback for

Even though India isn’t at the forefront of the global AI innovation battle, demand for AI in the country is growing as businesses seek efficiencies and tech companies promote AI developments as a cure-all. The South Asian nation is projected to have an AI market touching $17 billion by 2027, according to a joint report

Los Angeles is known for glitz, but there’s also a lot of grit in the air — literally. Thousands of containers are moved off and on ships at the area’s two major ports every day, almost always transferred via pollution-spewing diesel trucks. This has made Los Angeles a hotbed for all kinds of new electric

AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer. The WSJ

As founders plan for an increasingly AI-centric future, Gusto co-founder and head of technology Edward Kim said that cutting existing teams and hiring a bunch of specially trained AI engineers is “the wrong way to go.” Instead, he argued that non-technical team members can “actually have a much deeper understanding than an average engineer on

Mira Murati, the OpenAI CTO who announced her departure last month, is raising VC funding for a new AI startup, according to Reuters. This startup will reportedly focus on building AI products based on proprietary models and could raise more than $100 million in this round. At the time of her departure, Murati wrote on

Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top five apps on the U.S. App Store and has become the No. 2 app in the Social Networking category, up from No. 181 a week ago, according to data from app

Less than two months after Fluid Truck’s board ousted its sibling co-founders from their executive positions, the company has laid off 30% of its staff, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and found a potential buyer to take on the business, pending court approval, according to bankruptcy filings and information from a former employee.  Fluid

Byju Raveendran, the founder of the embattled edtech group Byju’s, acknowledged on Thursday afternoon that he made mistakes, mistimed the market, and that his startup, once valued at $22 billion, is now effectively worth “zero.” Speaking to a group of journalists, Raveendran said the company’s aggressive acquisition of more than two dozen startups to expand

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just a week away. Our beefed-up Startup Battlefield 200 is a major highlight. Two hundred companies have been hand-selected by the TechCrunch editorial staff to grace the expo hall, 20 of which will launch their company for the first time live on our stage. Nail-biting pitches live on the Disrupt Stage,

As we’ve reported before, enterprise CIOs are taking generative AI slow. One reason for that is AI doesn’t fit into existing software engineering workflows, because it literally doesn’t speak the same language. For instance, LLMs (aka large language models) require a lot of cajoling to deliver valid JSON. That’s where a U.S.-based startup called Dottxt

Zepto is in advanced stages of talks to raise $100 million in new investment, its third in the last six months, as the leading Indian quick commerce startup looks to rope in more domestic investors, sources familiar with the talks told TechCrunch. The Mumbai-headquartered startup, which delivers grocery items and office stationery to customers’ doorsteps

Back in 2011, the world held its breath after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan suffered a failure of its cooling systems, in the wake of the country getting hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. The worry was not unfounded: the resulting meltdown — which spread highly radioactive material in multiple directions

Do you want a side of socials with your fast food? Spain’s Glovo, a food delivery and quick commerce service where the bulk of orders are for ready-to-eat food, is experimenting with adding a bundle of social features to drive more in-app activity. It’s also letting restaurant partners upload food preparation videos to spice up

David Karandish has been busy. Capacity, his support automation company, was planning a $5 million “bridge round” to help the company reach the break-even point. But TVC Capital, Toloka.vc, and the venture’s other backers had something grander in mind. So they threw in an additional $21 million for what became Capacity’s $26 million Series D.

Pear VC, a prominent pre-seed and seed-focused venture firm, has been running an accelerator for about a decade with about 10 startups in each batch. Over those years, the small but mighty program has helped launch numerous companies like Viz.ai, whose FDA-approved AI can diagnose strokes (and was valued at $1.2 billion in 2022), relationship

Alert management for developers and ops teams may seem like a solved problem. Notifying an on-call engineer isn’t exactly difficult anymore, after all. But the real question has become when to alert the right person and how to help them when a service goes down, for example. Many are turning to AI to solve some

French startup Gladia, which offers a speech-recognition application programming interface (API), has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. Essentially, Gladia’s API lets you turn any audio file into text with a high level of accuracy and low turnaround time. While Amazon, Microsoft and Google all offer speech-to-text APIs as part of their

TechCrunch has lost one of its beloved former colleagues. Steve O’Hear, who wrote for TechCrunch for more than a decade out of his hometown of London, has passed away after a short illness. He was 49. It’s hard to put into words the remarkable talent that Steve was. Born with muscular dystrophy, he spent his

In just over two weeks, TechCrunch will gather some of the startup world’s leading companies at Disrupt in San Francisco. But our partners provide more than just financial support. Their presence at Disrupt gives startups at any stage the tools, knowledge, and community they need to be a success. We thank Meta for their support

Table Space, an Indian managed workspace provider, is targeting a valuation of $2.5 billion or more for an IPO planned for next year, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup has hired Axis as a bookrunner for the IPO, the sources said. Founded in 2017, Table Space leases large office spaces, transforms

It’s hard to know where to focus when speaking to Christoph Kohstall. The contents of his packed Palo Alto garage compete for attention. To his immediate right stands a tower of electrical components, dotted with flashing lights. To his left is a workbench and the tops of machining tools. A red industrial girder runs along

The dispute between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and hosting provider WP Engine continues, with Mullenweg announcing that WordPress is “forking” a plugin developed by WP Engine. Specifically, Advanced Custom Fields — a plugin making it easier for WordPress users to customize their edit screens — is being taken out of WP Engine’s hands and updated

Japan’s startup sector, despite being one of the biggest in the world, has lagged behind other regions like the U.S., China, and the U.K., in terms of the number of unicorns and the scale of venture capital investment. For years, an aging population, overall economic deflation, and salarymen’s inclination to work at traditional, big corporations

For some, AI fatigue is real — but clearly venture investors haven’t grown tired of the category. AI deals continued to dominate venture funding during the third quarter. AI companies raised $18.9 billion in Q3, according to Crunchbase data. That figure represents 28% of all venture funding. The third quarter also saw the close of

Startup Battlefield 200 is a major highlight at every Disrupt, and we’re thrilled to find out which of the thousands of startup applicants will get the chance to pitch to top-tier VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Join us at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28–30 to witness the epic showdown where every contender

Monzo is now valued at $5.9 billion after the U.K.-based challenger bank confirmed a secondary market share sale to provide liquidity for its employees. The transaction, first rumored yesterday, saw existing investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund (GIC) and StepStone Group procuring additional shares in the London-based fintech. A secondary market sale essentially rewards

Interlagos, the venture capital firm started by former senior SpaceX leaders, is looking to raise $550 million for its first venture fund, according to regulatory filings and a confidential deck sent to prospective LPs and viewed by TechCrunch.  The existence of the firm was first reported by TechCrunch in April, but almost nothing has been

Accountants typically dread month-end and quarter-end closings. That’s because finalizing financial records for a specific period is generally a manual, error-prone and time-consuming endeavor.  In 2020, Parker Gilbert (pictured above; middle) was so fed up with the tedium of managing finance and accounting at an early-stage startup that he decided to co-found Numeric, an accounting

Advances in DNA sequencing and the vast amounts of genomic data being produced by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology have created a startup opportunity to build software for biologists so they can more easily analyze this big data and take the next leap. It could help when it comes to developing new vaccines, cancer treatments and