Fundings and Exits

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 and schools transitioned to online learning, both Joe Titus and Paul Suhr were concerned about how to maintain their children’s activity levels in the absence of mandatory physical education classes and sports. The two friends’ solution was Hiveclass, a New York-based edtech platform that hosts online courses for

Humanoid robotics company Figure raised eyebrows this week when it announced it would be stepping away from a partnership with OpenAI in favor of building its own in-house AI models. Figure CEO Brett Adcock alluded to a “major breakthrough” in their own process and plans to unveil “something no one has ever seen on a

Just six months after defense tech Anduril raised a massive $1.5 billion round that valued the company at $14 billion, it’s in talks to raise another $2.5 billion, at a valuation of up to $28 billion, sources told CNBC. The deal would, not surprisingly, be led by Founders Fund, which is reportedly writing a $1

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 first week of February was busy on the geopolitical front, as well as in the world of startups and VC news, with many announcements and significant

Fizz, the college social app, is looking for ways to enhance and expand its platform, and a recent new hire is poised to help drive these ambitions. The company has brought on David Vasquez, who previously served as TikTok’s head of creator monetization and a product lead for TikTok Shop, as Fizz’s new head of

Philadelphia Eagles’ star running back Saquon Barkley has not only become an investor in fintech startup Ramp, he is also the star of the company’s first Super Bowl commercial. Interestingly, it was Barkley who reached out to Ramp about investing, not the other way around as is so often the case with celebrity endorsements.  Barkley

Cultivated chicken doggie snacks have gone on sale at a U.K. pet food retailer, Pets at Home. The retailer also happens to be a major investor in Meatly, the startup producing the meat ingredient contained in dog food brand The Pack’s Chick Bites, as the slaughter-free, low carbon treats are billed. (Other ingredients in the

A clearer picture of Bench’s downfall is emerging thanks to newly released bankruptcy filings. The records show that the Canada-based startup, which ironically enough offered cloud accounting software for small businesses, consistently struggled to reach profitability. It burned through $135 million from its founding in 2012 to September 2024. By the time of its collapse,

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In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the summit, early-stage VC firm Galion.exe, growth investment

On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected. He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do.  But when they

Fintech-turned-HR outfit Deel is trying to lay the groundwork for an IPO. On Tuesday, it said its annual revenue run rate climbed to $800 million in 2024 after growing by 70%. The startup, which helps businesses globally hire, manage and pay employees remotely, also said it has sold $300 million in secondary shares to General

Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch.  The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner. In May 2024, Volvo teamed up with Aurora Innovation to

Asya Bradley, a former fintech founder and investor, has joined payments giant Stripe as its new head of Startup & Venture Capital Partnerships. Bradley announced the news on February 2 in a post on LinkedIn, though her bio shows that she joined Stripe back in November. Neither Stripe nor Bradley were immediately available for comment. 

French startup Riot has raised a $30 million Series B round after reaching $10 million in annual revenue in 2024. Originally focused on educating employees about cybersecurity risks, the company now wants to go one step further and nudge employees so that they minimize their attack surface. Left Lane Capital is leading today’s round with

OpenAI is announcing a new AI “agent” designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Appropriately enough, it’s called deep research. OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that these this new capability was designed for “people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science,

Google’s X “moonshot factory” this week announced its latest graduate. Heritable Agriculture is a data- and machine learning-driven startup aiming to improve how crops are grown.  As the firm noted in an announcement post published Tuesday, plants are incredibly efficient and impressive systems. “Plants are solar powered, carbon negative, self-assembling machines that feed on sunlight

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur. But what about scaling that one-person business into something meatier

When accounting startup Bench abruptly failed last month, the shutdown was forced when the company’s lenders called in the startup’s loan. In late 2023, the digital freight company Convoy faced financial challenges, leading venture lending firm Hercules Capital to assume control of the company to recover its investments. Divvy Homes, which sold for about $1

Tech is upbeat about more companies going public this year, thanks in part to a new presidential administration that has promised to ease regulations and embrace industries like crypto and AI.  But there were already early signs of bullishness — especially in fintech — thanks to the wildly successful 2024 IPO of ServiceTitan, a SaaS

India announced a new $1.15 billion Fund of Funds for startups on Saturday while unveiling sweeping regulatory reforms and an ambitious nuclear energy program, as New Delhi seeks to boost tech innovation and clean energy in the world’s fifth-largest economy. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, presenting the federal budget for 2025-26, said the fund builds on

A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with advertising, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. In other words, Graze has

DeepSeek, DeepSeek, DeepSeek. We couldn’t escape the headlines around the Chinese AI lab this week. The startup lit a fire under Silicon Valley after releasing its R1 “reasoning” model and displacing ChatGPT as the App Store’s top app. While DeepSeek claims to have built its models more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost

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. The aftermath of DeepSeek’s launch was arguably the biggest tech story of the week, especially for anyone keeping a close eye on public markets. But private companies,

OpenAI may have billions of dollars in the bank. But it’s gearing up to raise billions more, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Per The WSJ, OpenAI is in talks to secure up to $40 billion in a funding round that would value the startup at $340 billion. SoftBank would lead the

Talk to many architects, and they’ll likely tell you that Autodesk’s software, including AutoCAD and Revit, has been indispensable to their work for decades. But despite their widespread use, Autodesk’s former co-CEO and chief product officer Amar Hanspal says that the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is using 20th century tools to design 21st

French startup Swan has raised another €42 million (around $44 million at current exchange rates). The company considers this round as the second part of the Series B round that was originally announced in September 2023. Swan helps other companies offer financial products at scale. The company can generate both virtual and physical cards that

Lily Vittayarukskul was studying aerospace engineering when her aunt was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Her aunt had lived under the same roof as Vittayarukskul while she was growing up and helped raise her. “We went all in on her care,” she recalled. Post-chemotherapy, Vittayarukskul’s aunt “became very frail,” so her family  – originally from

With its 700,000 customers, Alan could be considered as a mature company. But the health insurance company that wants to become a digital companion for your health is still growing like a startup. On Wednesday, the company shared some financial metrics. The most impressive one is its top-line revenue. In 2024, the company generated €505

Swedish shared micromobility giant Voi had its first profitable year in 2024, according to preliminary unaudited results the company shared exclusively with TechCrunch.  Voi, which offers shared e-scooters and e-bikes across more than 100 markets in Europe, recorded €132.8 million ($138 million) in net revenue in 2024. On an adjusted basis, Voi earned €17.2 million