Fundings and Exits

Thoughtly co-founder Casey Mackrell had a big week. First, he got married. Then, he went viral. At his wedding reception, Mackrell needed to quickly give a colleague access to code that could only be unblocked from his laptop. His fellow co-founder Torrey Leonard seized the moment by taking a photo to capture Mackrell wrapping up

In 2016, when Alan originally launched its health insurance product in France, it was the first new health insurance company in the country in 30 years. Now, as Alan announces its expansion to Canada, the startup is about to break a new record: There hasn’t been a new health insurance company in Canada since 1957.

OpenAI said in a post on X that it is opening new offices in multiple cities, including NYC, Seattle, Paris, Brussels, and Singapore, in addition to its existing locations in San Francisco, London, Dublin and Tokyo, as part of the company’s global expansion efforts. The expansion effort follows the San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker’s whopping $6.4

As government and defense sectors increasingly lean on commercial services, opportunities for startups in dual-use technology have never been more promising. Yet, for young, agile companies, the challenge of entering such a highly regulated and traditional landscape is significant. How can emerging businesses compete with established primes for contracts and attention? And how can investors

When you talk to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, your responses are largely linear. You often have to ask follow-up questions to get more information. For instance, when you are planning a trip, you might first ask the chatbot about the place and follow it up with questions on meal planning, activities, tips

Lightdash, a business intelligence (BI) platform and open source alternative to Google’s Looker, is lifting the lid on a new product that allows companies to train “AI analysts” specific to individual teams’ use-cases, enabling anyone in a company to query aggregate business data. To help, the 4-year-old startup also on Tuesday announced that it has

As businesses increasingly integrate artificial intelligence into their workflows and products, there is a growing demand for tools and platforms that make it easier to create, test, and deploy machine learning models. This category of platforms — popularly known as machine learning operations, or MLOps — is already a little crowded, with startups like InfuseAI,

We’re excited to announce the debut of the ScaleUp Startup Exhibitor Program at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! Join us at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28-30 to meet an exciting lineup of startups that are poised to make their mark in the tech world. The ScaleUp Startup Exhibitor Program offers Series A and B

Many screenwriters have embraced modern tools over traditional PDFs to craft their film or TV show pilots. SoCreate, the latest entrant in the screenwriting software arena, is challenging established players like Final Draft and Celtx with its fresh approach to storytelling. And, notably, generative AI imagery is involved. SoCreate offers many of the same features

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 once again brought us AI funding news, as well as some warnings: Some categories and stages are showing signs of overheating. Luckily, we also spotted

The future of work is being redefined, and TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is the place to explore it. As companies look to leverage talent from around the globe, the landscape of hiring is transforming — and there’s a new wave of global HR startups that are making this change possible.  Yet, the question remains: Can these

The tech world took a major double take this year when a security startup called Wiz founded out of Israel just four years earlier became the subject of a record-breaking, $23 billion acquisition attempt by Google — an offer the startup boldly proceeded … to refuse. Really? Yes, really. We will be talking to Assaf Rappaport,

To some degree, every business that has a presence on the web is in the content business — whether that’s for informing customers, finding new clients, or for SEO. That means managing the production of those texts and images, updating them, and potentially optimizing them for a search engine to index and rank. Since large

These days, private investors have a range of options for investing in startups without having to deal with them in real life. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but there are now a plethora of options — such as Carta, Allocations, Vauban and Odin — that startups can use to raise funding and

Transportation and freight network giant J.B. Hunt is on the hunt for software and digital products that will fuel its business and help it adapt to the modern world — and even dominate the industry. And it’s tapping startup incubator UP.Labs to help build them.  On Wednesday at the UP Summit event in Bentonville, Arkansas,

Ali Rowghani, a former Y Combinator managing director and former Twitter executive, is launching a venture firm called Maxq. Maxq is targeting $250 million for its debut fund, Maxq Fund I, according to an SEC filing. The firm will focus on seed-stage investments, Axios reported on Wednesday. Rowghani’s former YC colleagues Mia Mabanta, Simon Lu,

Two years ago, Xiaodi Hou was ousted from his position as CEO of TuSimple, an autonomous trucking startup he co-founded that has since shut down U.S. operations and delisted from the stock exchange — and, in an odd twist, the company has pivoted to AI animation and gaming in China.  Now Hou is back with

Last year, Sound Ventures, the 9-year-old, Beverly Hills, California-based venture firm led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Effie Epstein, announced a new $265 million AI fund that was betting big on large language model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face. In fact, the plan was to invest in just six companies

When Harry Jones, Tom Leathes, and Alex Buttle set out to found Motorway, a startup that connects car owners with dealers looking to buy and resell their vehicles, in 2017, it wasn’t the founding teams’ first startup rodeo. Nor was it their second. Motorway was actually the founding team’s fifth startup, Jones, Motorway’s CPO, said

U.S. asset manager Invesco has raised the value of its stake in Swiggy, ascribing an implied valuation of about $13.3 billion to the Indian food-delivery and quick-commerce startup that is on track to go public in about a month. In a disclosure on Tuesday, Invesco’s Developing Markets Fund said it valued the 28,844 shares it

Tier and Dott, two leading European scooter- and bike-sharing services, are becoming one service called Dott. The two startups have already laid out plans to merge and form a single company back in January 2024. With this merger, the companies didn’t want to build a conglomerate of micromobility services; the operation was all about scale.

It’s been quite the year for gaming industry exec Pany Haritatos.  Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new game studio startup Series Entertainment, according to an SEC document and confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix, Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on investments from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT,

At first glance, Qodo, the startup previously known as CodiumAI, may appear to be yet another AI code generation tool. But the team, which is announcing a $40 million Series A round led by Susa Ventures and Square Peg today, is just as much focused on generating code as on generating the tests and code

Kevin Ryan has had a long and storied career as a pivotal force of New York City tech. He’s the founder and CEO of investment firm AlleyCorp, which has invested in a wide variety of startups, and is a serial founder, participating in the early stages of companies such as Business Insider, Zola, Gilt, Pearl

When the U.S. Feds cut interest rates by half a percentage point last week, it was a dash of good news for venture capitalists backing one particularly beleaguered class of startups: fintechs, especially those that rely on loans for cash flow to operate their businesses.  These companies include corporate credit card providers like Ramp or

While online discourse would make it seem that venture has retreated to the Bay Area, with San Francisco being the most important place to build a startup, Index Ventures is looking to bulk up its New York-based investing team. The firm is currently looking to hire another New York-based investor with plans to add three

WordPress.org has lifted its ban on hosting provider WP Engine until October 1, after putting a block on it earlier this week. The block prevented several sites from updating their plug-ins and themes and exposing them to potential security risk. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who has been in a tussle with WP Engine for over

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 was a busy one for the startup and VC world, with its fair share of funding news and, of course, the latest edition of YC’s

Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator held the second Demo Day for its Summer 2024 cohort on Thursday, and just like we saw on Day 1, AI remains the focus of most startups in this cohort. However, we did also find a few interesting startups that are working on cool tech like drones that can’t be

As OpenAI boasts about its o1 model’s increased thoughtfulness, small, self-funded startup Nomi AI is building the same kind of technology. Unlike the broad generalist ChatGPT, which slows down to think through anything from math problems or historical research, Nomi niches down on a specific use case: AI companions. Now, Nomi’s already-sophisticated chatbots take additional