TechCrunch Startup News

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

Stress isn’t just bad for you — it’s also bad for your employer. Factoring in absenteeism, diminished productivity, turnover, medical costs, and accidents, the non-profit American Institute of Stress estimates that workplace stress costs U.S. businesses over $300 billion annually. One way to measure stress is by monitoring cortisol levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

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 2024. Swan helps other companies offer financial products at scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jared Zhao originally got interested in data analytics during his time at UC Berkeley because he was drawn to how it could turn raw data into a story. Zhao founded his first data analytics startup Polyture in 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve ever tried to book a venue for a company event, you’ll know how onerous a task it can be. You have to contact multiple vendors, wait for quotes, evaluate them, see if you can get a good deal, and then get all that approved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lily Vittayaruksku was studying aerospace engineering when her aunt was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Her aunt had lived under the same roof as Vittayaruksku while she was growing up and helped raise her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Barcelona-based business travel management platform TravelPerk has raised $200 million at a hefty $2.7 billion valuation — almost double the $1.4 billion valuation at its previous fundraise last year. Alongside the raise, TravelPerk also announced it has acquired Swiss startup Yokoy to bring native expenses management into the fray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Quantum computing remains something of a holy grail in the world of technology: it promises a huge leap in computing power, but only if someone can figure out how to square away the fault rates that prevent any scaling of the tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kodiak Robotics has officially handed off two autonomous trucks to customer Atlas Energy Solutions, marking the startup’s first commercial launch.  Atlas, a provider of proppant (i.e., sand) and oilfield logistics, received its first Kodiak-equipped trucks in December and began driverless operations in an off-road environment in West Texas’s remote Permian Basin shortly after. Learn more about you...

If you’ve been following the AI industry, Mistral should be a familiar name by now. The French AI startup with a $6 billion valuation is arguably the biggest AI company working on foundation models in Europe. Alan, on the other hand, isn’t as well known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many nonprofits are stuck with outdated, expensive, and limited tech that hinders their ability to fund their mission or cause. While most consider adopting tech to be a priority, they’re faced with a number of blockers, including siloed data and issues with integration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Growing up with an OB-GYN father, Rachel Blank assumed that most women received excellent gynecological care.  She regularly witnessed her dad’s patients thanking him for delivering their child when they would bump into him around town. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The $1 billion acquisition of rent-to-own startup Divvy Homes, which was announced Wednesday, is expected to leave some shareholders without a payout, according to sources familiar with the deal.  The terms — and Divvy’s journey from buzzy startup to acquisition target — reflects the rollercoaster ride the proptech industry has endured over the past decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers wanting to learn about their state of health and how to prevent things going wrong. Now, investors are making a big bet on Neko.  The startup has raised a fresh $260 million in funding, a Series B that values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When George Avetisov was the founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup HYPR, he spent a lot of time in the trenches with the company’s sales team. He quickly realized that regardless of how good his sales team was, they were consistently pulling in other departments to answer customer questions or fill out technical questionnaires. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

London startup Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the very crowded world of expense management with a focus on applying AI to optimize a single area where businesses, collectively, are currently sinking hundreds of billions of dollars in IT budgets that are exceeding $5 trillion annually. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A U.S. federal safety regulator has “upgraded” its investigation into Ford’s hands-free advanced driver assistance system known as BlueCruise — a required step before a recall can be issued. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation launched a probe into Ford BlueCruise last April after the agency confirmed the system was active. Learn more about your ad...

An arena. A hype tunnel, the kind through which NBA players typically streak. A competitor dressed in a jersey patterned with a six-pack abs. In a new piece, the New York Times takes readers to an event that organizers call the Microsoft Excel World Championship, a 40-minute, Las Vegas-based competition featuring 12 contestants; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that the company plans to release a “...

The process of getting screened for cervical cancer is quite intimidating. It’s the once-a-year, sometimes life-changing treatment that involves the bright lights of a doctor’s office and an uncomfortable insertion that always seems to last too long.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday. In anticipation of the coming U.S. TikTok ban, which will go through on Sunday unless paused by the Supreme Court, users have been fleeing to other video platforms Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the last few weeks, PayPal-owned Honey, which claims to find you the best coupon codes for a deal, has been at the center of controversy. Allegedly, the tool sneakily earned affiliate money by changing attributes of product links creators posted on their videos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chinese firms continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other U.S.-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, an Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup that has raised around $850 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $2.5 billion, debuted three new models: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

French startup Hyperline wants to build the next-generation Chargebee. Over the past two years, the startup has built a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-off purchases, usage-based billing and more. Hyperline raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Nvidia has been doubling down on the opportunity to build robotics and other industrial AI applications, with the launch of its Omniverse platform, and most recently Mega, an Omniverse Blueprint framework to create digital twins to operate these applications. It’s also investing in digital twin startups to get the effort off the ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/ad...