Startups

Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, a generative AI content and research startup, as the company looks to deepen its investments in its AI tech stack. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said it’s a mix of cash and stock. All of Leonardo.ai’s 120 employees will

Government websites aren’t known for cutting-edge tech. GovWell co-founder and CTO Ben Cohen discovered this while trying to help his dad, a contractor, apply for building permits. Cohen worked as a full stack engineer at Uber during the day and faxed documents for building permits at night. The difference in tech was stark. Years later,

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. To get Startups Weekly in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. This week we are talking about Wiz’s bold decision, VC’s public feud, legal tech’s new capital and a16z’s close call. Let’s go! Most interesting startup stories

Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is packed with some significant fundraises, a potentially massive acquisition falling apart and looking at what happens when a fintech company suddenly stops serving certain customers. To kick things off, Mary Ann Azevedo walked everyone through Clio’s huge

Venture capital has become a more global industry as the tech sector slowly decentralizes. In 2022, more than 50% of VC deployed globally was invested in startups outside the U.S., according to data available from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — a stark contrast to 20 years ago, when nearly 80% of the world’s venture

A decade-old drama involving VC David Sacks and Rippling founder Parker Conrad over their previous company Zenefits has blown up this week into a finger-pointing fight on X with many among the Silicon Valley elite taking sides. But, as entertaining as it may be for observers, some have weighed in to say that such fights

Disrupt 2024 is the premier event where tech careers are launched, connections are forged, and the future of technology talent takes center stage. The Disrupt Career Fair is the perfect opportunity to showcase your company and attract the best candidates. That’s because it has a diverse array of companies, from tech giants to nimble startups,

Lakera, a Swiss startup that’s building technology to protect generative AI applications from malicious prompts and other threats, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by European venture capital firm, Atomico. Generative AI has emerged as the poster child of the burgeoning AI movement, driven by popular apps such as ChatGPT. But

Reworkd’s founders went viral on GitHub last year with AgentGPT, a free tool to build AI agents that acquired more than 100,000 daily users in a week. This earned them a spot in Y Combinator’s summer 2023 cohort, but the cofounders quickly realized building general AI agents was too broad. So now Reworkd is a

We’re so excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated AI Stage presented by Google Cloud to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and Space as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. We couldn’t possibly host TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 without a huge deep dive on all things artificial intelligence. So,

Ashish Nagar, an engineer by trade, was working at Amazon’s Alexa org on the conversational AI team when he realized that AI had the potential to greatly bolster productivity in contact centers. “Frontline workers, like customer service workers, are the biggest human capital in the world,” Nagar told TechCrunch. “So, my idea was to use

Cyabra, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps public and private organizations detect and fight mis- and disinformation campaigns by finding fake accounts on social media, on Tuesday announced that it plans to merge with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Trailblazer Merger Corporation I and list on the NASDAQ. Founded in 2018, some of Cyabra’s investors

Let’s start with the premise that many people take notes as they work with customers as part of their jobs. As they take notes, they may need to access a customer record in Salesforce or open a Jira ticket to get IT involved with a customer problem, but to do that, they must undertake the

India’s federal government has removed the controversial “angel tax” for all classes of investors, delivering a major victory to the country’s startup ecosystem that had lobbied for years against the measure. “To bolster the India startup ecosystem, to boost entrepreneurial spirit and support innovation, I propose abolishing angel tax for all classes of investors,” Finance

Eric Zhu started building Aviato, an analytical platform for private market data, in a very typical place for an entrepreneur: the bathroom in his Carmel, Indiana, high school. Now the 17-year-old’s startup is emerging from stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding. Aviato tracks funding rounds and headcount, similar to competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, as

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. Bloomberg says that the round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion. That’s more than double

There comes a time in every startup’s life when the leaders and stakeholders have to seriously start thinking about the endgame: What to do when you’ve raised $150 million in VC cash over 15 years en route to building a 100 million-plus community? And how do you go about executing that next step to ensure

Today is the final chance to save up to $800 on TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 tickets. Disrupt Deal Days event will end tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to save big on the tech conference of the year. Book your last-minute ticket savings here. Why attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2024? TechCrunch Disrupt

Fast-growing payroll provider Deel is making a sizable acquisition, its third this year. Deel announced on Thursday that it acquired Hofy, a London-based company that delivers and helps manage office equipment for remote hires. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the deal was worth over $100 million.

Canadian private equity firm PartnerOne paid $28.2 million for HeadSpin, a mobile app testing startup whose founder was sentenced for fraud earlier this year, according to documents viewed by TechCrunch. The fire sale was reported by TechCrunch last week. HeadSpin’s 2023 revenue was $21 million and its Q1 2024 revenue stood at $5 million, the

Coast, a startup that describes itself as “a financial services platform for the future of transportation,” has raised $40 million in Series B funding — just four months after announcing a $25 million venture round and $67 million in debt financing, the startup has told TechCrunch exclusively. Back-to-back fundraises were common prior to and during

The threat of deepfakes is growing as the AI tools to create them become widely accessible. There was a 245% increase in deepfakes worldwide from 2023 to 2024, an uptick spurred in part by coming election cycles, according to verification provider Sumsub. It’s also affecting the corporate sector; a recent Business.com survey found that 10%

Adtech startup InMobi is eyeing a valuation of about $10 billion in an initial public offering it is planning for next year, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  The firm plans to list in India, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are private. InMobi is profitable and plans to shift its

Silicon Valley VC firm Menlo Ventures, one of the biggest investors in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, on Wednesday said the two companies are teaming up to set up a $100 million initiative dubbed “the Anthology Fund” to invest in pre-seed and Series A artificial intelligence companies. Menlo recently climbed to the top of Anthropic’s list

The current secondary ticket exchange system is fraught with several issues, such as tickets being resold at prices much higher than their face value, exorbitant fees and other additional costs. Not to mention the risk of purchasing counterfeit or invalid tickets, resulting in a disappointing user experience.  CrowdVolt wants to disrupt the space with its

Community colleges aren’t immune from the current reckoning higher education is facing. Student enrollment is declining while institutions keep raising tuition prices which can prevent students from finishing their programs. Clearly, it’s time for the industry to try something new. Tade Oyerinde thinks startups can help. Oyerinde is the founder and CEO at Campus, a

While there’s no shortage of startups aiming to replace Google with AI-powered search (we’re looking at you, Perplexity), a startup called Exa has a different idea: a Google for AI. Humans aren’t the ones who desperately need a new kind of search engine, Exa’s founders believe. Rather, as AI increasingly takes hold in corporate and

Former President Donald Trump picked Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday, as he runs to reclaim the office he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Vance, who’s best known for his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” spent years as a venture capitalist before leaving the industry when elected to the U.S. Senate

On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan explored Google’s reported talks to acquire Wiz, a cloud security company, for around $23 billion. Wiz provides an “all-in-one approach to cloud security,” pulling data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and others, then scanning it all for security risk factors — something that Google might

When VanMoof declared bankruptcy last year, it left around 5,000 customers who had pre-ordered e-bikes in the lurch. Now VanMoof is up and running under new management, and the company’s current owners are courting those same customers by offering them a €1,000 discount off a new bike.  It’s an audacious strategy, one that bets on