TechCrunch Startup News

Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, announced that it raised over three hundred million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation. The company’s value has increased two and a half times since its last fundraise just three months ago, when it was valued at two billion dollars. Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has lost one...

Reflection, once focused on autonomous coding agents, has raised $2B at an $8B valuation to expand into both an opensource alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Novoloop has signed a deal with a contract manufacturer to produce its Lifecycled TPU material. Also, Knapsack creates a unified workspace that integrates design and coding tools to ensure design and engineering teams are on the same page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Base Power's Series C will help the company expand beyond Texas, its beachhead market, and build batteries in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trump's Department of Energy wants to cancel billions more in awards that were granted by the Biden administration, and startups are in the crosshairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By coating regular rebar with a thin layer of stainless steel, Allium Engineering could reduce the amount of concrete needed to build a bridge while also prolonging its life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The third-party app store known as AltStore, one of the first companies to offer an alternative app marketplace in the European Union, is preparing to connect its platform with the open social web known as the fediverse. Also, ÄIO has developed a process to turn agricultural waste like sawdust into fats for the food and cosmetic industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

19-year-old Dhravya Shah, who is originally from Mumbai, has built a memory layer for AI applications with Google's AI chief's backing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Heidi Health raised a $65 million Series B led by Steven Cohen’s Point72. Also, Sugar Free Capital raises $32M inaugural fund to invest in MIT early-staged founders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social event planning app Partiful, which calls itself “Facebook events for hot people,” has firmly replaced Facebook as the go-to platform for sending party invitations. But what Partiful also has in common with Facebook is that it’s collecting a tsunami of user data, and Partiful could have done better at keeping that data secure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Zehra Naqvi grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s and recently started Lore, a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions. The company has already raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. It is set to emerge from stealth on October 6th. Also, when Jamie Gull graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with a master’s degree in aeronautics, there was one place he...

The U.S. government shutdown could stifle deal flow, freeze visa processing for workers, and cause other problems for startups and the broader tech sector, especially if it lasts longer than a week, according to experts who spoke to TechCrunch. Also, Bryan Onel’s father was a locksmith. As for Onel, he described himself as the digital equivalent. Ethical hacking was Onel’s hobby growing up. He stu...

Simple is an AI-powered health coaching app that helps people lose weight. Electroflow drew inspiration from batteries themselves to develop a new way of producing LFP material for EVs. The process could undercut today's lowest price sources in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup was started earlier this year by Yang Fan Yun and Charlie Deane. Yun is a former product manager at Uber, while Deane founded a company selling server proxies. When he was at Uber, he realized that a lot of people around him were doing grunt work in their browsers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Periodic Labs was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMind, where one of his projects was, for instance, an AI tool called GNoME. Researchers say that tool discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023, materials that could one day be used to power new generations of technology.  Whoop Advanced Labs offers health-screening...

CommanderAI launched in early 2024 as a customer relationship manager and sales prospecting platform built for waste management — and other industrial services like dumpster rentals and industrial recyclers – to fill that gap.   Also, Silicon Valley-based Cerebras announced it raised a $1.1 billion Series G round on Tuesday that valued the AI hardware company at $8.1 billion. The round was co-led...

It’s no secret that vibe coding — using AI-powered coding tools to build apps and websites via natural language prompts — is exploding in popularity. In July, Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch, plans to close the year at $250 million ARR and thinks it will hit $1 billion ARR within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Replit s...

Polars, the Amsterdam-based company behind the popular open source project of the same name, has raised about $21 million in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Bain Capital Partners and angel investors. But while raising this kind of money is the dream of many developers, its creator Ritchie Vink didn’t set out to do so. Also, making democracy work isn’t easy, as recent events...

Paid just closed an oversubscribed $21.6 million seed round led by Lightspeed. With the €10 million pre-seed round it raised in March, London-based Paid has already raised $33.3 million and hasn’t even hit its Series A yet. A source familiar with the deal says the startup’s valuation is over $100 million. Also, despite millions spent on financial software, many finance teams still rely on Excel to...

A Y Combinator startup called Burnt thinks AI agents — software that can automatically handle tasks typically done by humans — can succeed where traditional enterprise software hasn’t in the trillion-dollar U.S. food market. Doorstep integrates into existing delivery apps and then, using phone sensors, tracks when a driver has entered a building, gone up an elevator, and made it to the desired doo...

Starpath’s new space-rated solar panel business kicked off sales in the U.S. on Thursday with an eyebrow-raising pitch. The company says its solar panels, called “Starlight,” are priced around 10 times cheaper than typical industry pricing of $72.50 per watt, roughly a 90% cost reduction versus the status quo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hardware startup Nothing said Thursday that it plans to make its affordable device brand, CMF, into an independent subsidiary with India serving as its headquarters for manufacturing and R&D. The company first launched CMF in 2023 with a pair of earbuds and a smartwatch. Since then, it has introduced smartphones under the brand as well. Also, the accelerator has introduced a new application track...

On Wednesday, Enterprise AI model-maker Cohere said it raised an additional $100 million in an extension to a round announced in August, bumping its valuation to $7 billion. The company said at the time that the  August round was an oversubscribed $500 million round at a $6.8 billion valuation. Also, Waymo’s ever-expanding robotaxi aspirations have spread to the corporate world. The Alphabet-owned...

The US loves trucks. So is the key to making them love electric trucks… a very small one? That’s the bet that California-based startup Telo has been making since its inception in 2022. The company has designed a bite-sized truck called the MT1 with an admittedly not-so-small starting price of around $41,000. Also, Sila, the battery materials startup, started operations Tuesday at its facility in M...

Tim Chen, solo VC at his firm Essence VC, said he just closed his fourth fund, a fresh $41 million, without even trying. Limited partner investors were so eager to invest, they preempted it, he told TechCrunch. He didn’t even have time to generate a pitch deck.  Also, For Julien Emery, the problem has always been personal.  He’s the CEO and co-founder of Superpanel, a platform that helps law firms...