Startups

Archer Aviation and Southwest Airlines are teaming up to figure out what it will take to build out a network of electric air taxis at California airports. Southwest’s customer data is at the heart of it.  The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding Friday, which sets the foundation for Archer to tap Southwest’s customer

Canadian private equity firm PartnerOne has acquired HeadSpin in a fire sale, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. And most of its former employees received nothing for their options, according to multiple sources. HeadSpin is the mobile app testing company whose founder was sentenced to prison for fraud earlier this year. In total, HeadSpin raised $117 million

Joby Aviation is still a year away from commercially launching its electric air taxi designed for urban environments, but the startup is already looking toward its next chapter: intercity flight, powered by hydrogen.  To get the conversation started with regulators and demonstrate hydrogen’s capabilities, Joby told TechCrunch that it completed a 523-mile test flight with

Formlabs on Thursday announced its acquisition of 3D printing firm Micronics. The Wisconsin-based startup is as plucky as they come, with a headcount of exactly two. Co-founders Henry Chan and Luke Boppart will be joining the more established firm, as Formlabs works to incorporate Micronics’ accessible SLS approach to 3D printing. There are plenty of

When Aizada Marat moved from New York to California in 2018 with her husband, KODIF co-founder and CEO Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov, she needed to sort out her immigration status. That’s when everything started going badly. The Kyrgyzstan-born, Harvard-educated attorney came to the U.S. when she was 17 for an exchange year with FLEX (future leaders exchange)

Intel could be giving its burgeoning foundry ambitions a much-needed shot in the arm, as the chip giant’s venture capital arm today revealed that it’s making a “strategic” investment in an Israel- and U.K.-based AI construction startup. Intel Capital is leading a $15 million investment into Buildots, a company that uses AI and computer vision

The distance between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon just keeps getting smaller. As venture capitalists continue to pour money into defense tech startups, they’re turning to a new hiring pool: veterans and ex-Department of Defense officials.   Andreessen Horowitz hired Matt Shortal, an ex-fighter jet pilot, as its chief of staff; Lux Capital brought on Tony

Bang. Bang. In the winter of 2014, a 25-year-old Anthony Pompliano was reading a book on a plane that would change his life.  The former army sergeant from North Carolina — who had turned 21 while serving in Iraq — was on his way to a job interview at Facebook for a product manager role.

Iceland’s startup scene is punching above its weight. That’s perhaps in part because it kept the 2021 hype in check, but mostly because its tech ecosystem is coming of age. Iceland attracted the most venture capital per capita of all Nordic countries in 2023, but that stat is somewhat skewed by its relatively small population

As the demand for AI grows, so, too, does the demand for expertise in maintaining databases — a critical part in any AI pipeline. Databases store the information used to train, run and fine-tune AI systems, and it’s been shown that good data management can smooth the pathway to AI adoption in an enterprise. One

Quantum Rise, a Chicago-based startup which does AI-driven automation for companies like dunnhumby (a retail analytics platform for the grocery industry), has raised a $15 million seed round from Erie Street Growth Partners. Its approach is somewhat akin to UIPath’s, a company famous for bringing robotic process automation to the enterprise, but with a broader

CoinDCX, India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis, a digital asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, the companies said Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based startup said BitOasis’s team is joining CoinDCX, with the original leadership continuing to manage the exchange, which offers trading in more than 60 tokens. BitOasis

What’s the common thread between Tesla, building startups, General Motors venture capital and Lyft?  Jon McNeill, co-founder and partner of DVx Ventures, joins TechCrunch editor Kirsten Korosec on Equity to discuss how Elon Musk’s pay package has influenced founders, when it makes sense to go light on cash and heavy on equity, and his firm’s

The venture fundraising trend in 2024 is fairly clear by now: Large, established VC firms are continuing to attract capital from limited partners, while smaller, newer funds are finding it more difficult to raise.  But Industry Ventures’ latest fundraise should offer a dash of good news for emerging managers. On Tuesday, the 24-year-old firm announced

Electricity demand is booming on account of AI. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, as cloud service providers expand to meet the demand for AI infrastructure. Assuming the current trend holds, U.S. utilities will need to

In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one.  Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine with a large language model

SmartHR, a cloud-based human resources and labor management software startup, said on Monday that it has raised $140 million in a funding round led by KKR and Teachers’ Ventures Growth, an investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, with participation from existing investors. The Series E round, which comes three years after the company raised

Exciting news for tech enthusiasts and innovators! TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and we have an incredible opportunity for you to elevate your brand’s visibility. How? By hosting your own Side Event at the most anticipated tech gathering of the year! Why host a Side Event? Imagine being at the helm of

There are plenty of resources to learn English, but not so many for near-native speakers who still want to improve their fluency. That description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and this is what inspired them to create Fluently. Making use of AI, Fluently operates as a coach that gives users feedback and tips

Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is jam-packed with deals, hot topics, and the latest dramaaaaaa in the tech world. If you haven’t listened yet, consider this your spoiler-filled invitation to dive in. Three Deals of the Week Formation Bio’s $372M Raise First up,

By now we know how crucial it is to have quality data for use by large language models (LLMs), but getting data ready for the models has been an early challenge for companies, an opening that represents an opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur. Enter Illumex, a two-year-old Israeli startup from the former VP of AI

These days, when you hear about students and generative AI, chances are that you’re getting a taste of the debate over the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they a help? (Yay! Great for research! Fast!) Or are they a harm? (Boo! Misinfo! Cheating!). But some startups are taking the arrival of generative AI in

The generative AI boom is driving the demand for AI chips, which are purpose-built to train and run generative AI models. And major players, from VCs to startups, are scrambling to get in on the ground floor. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son is reportedly looking to raise $100 billion for a chip initiative that would compete with

When Napster emerged in the late 1990s, it made it easy for people to grab music files without compensating the content owners. The iPod and the iTunes music store changed that by allowing artists or publishers to get paid for reusing their content in a digital context. Fast-forward to today, and there are companies scraping

Formation Bio, a startup focused on applying AI to drug development with backing from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has raised over a quarter-billion dollars to support its ambitious product roadmap. Formation announced Wednesday that it raised $372 million in a Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from drug maker Sanofi, Sequoia,

You can barely go an hour these days without reading about generative AI. While we are still in the embryonic phase of what some have dubbed the “steam engine” of the fourth industrial revolution, there’s little doubt that “GenAI” is shaping up to transform just about every industry — from finance and health care to

Tengo uses AI to find, evaluate and respond to public tenders. It’s a software-as-a-service tool that helps companies handle public tenders at scale — a bit like Govly in the U.S. Originally created within the startup studio Hexa, the startup has raised a €3 million funding round led by Point Nine ($3.2 million at current

On Monday, Fearless Fund’s cofounder Ayana Parsons announced that she was stepping down from her leadership role from the firm. She will no longer be its general partner and COO but will be off “enjoying island life” with her family, she said in a LinkedIn post. She cofounded the fund in 2019 with partner Arian

Popular productivity tool Notion has long allowed its users to make any of their pages public. Now, the company is expanding on this with the launch of Notion Sites, which adds several new features to its existing publishing tools. For the most part, these are pretty straightforward, but together, they do make for a more

Pennylane, Qonto, Agicap, Pleo and Mollie have one thing in common. They all use Chift in one way or another to manage integrations with other services. And this relatively young Belgium-based startup just raised a €2.3 million seed round ($2.5 million at today’s exchange rate). Many fintech startups rely on integrations to make their product