Tootfinder

Porsche-Holding investiert Geld in Militär-Startups
Russlands Angriffskrieg beunruhigt die Familie Porsche–Piëch. Mit Geld für Start-ups für Militärtechnik will sie helfen, Demokratie und Freiheit zu verteidigen.
https…

Donnerstag: Porsche-Geld für Militär-Startups, Google-KI mit Erinnerungsvermögen
Investitionen in Militär-Technologie Gemini schaltet Hirn ein Fortnite-Horrorspiel der Sparkassen MediaMarktSaturn mit Online-Wachstum #heiseshow

US tech startups are reviving US hiring plans as President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill lets companies accelerate R&D tax deductions, starting in 2025 (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-startups-hiri…

📈 More than 10 European startups became unicorns this year
#europe

More than 10 European startups became unicorns this year | TechCrunch
This is a good indication of the sectors that are hot among investors, from biotech and defense tech to AI, AI, and AI.

KI soll 600.000 fehlende Beamte ersetzen? Klingt wie der Plan eines Startups, das gerade seine erste Fördermillion verbrannt hat.
Problem 1: KI ist kein Zauberstab.
Problem 2: Selbst wenn – die Infrastruktur dahinter gleicht oft noch einem Flickenteppich aus den 90ern.
Problem 3: Bürger wollen keine Algorithmen. Sie wollen funktionierende Behördengänge. Wie bei Amazon. Nur ohne Prime-Mitgliedschaft.

Dealroom: 230 European defense tech startups have launched since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with VC funding reaching $1.5B this year, mostly for drone tech (Sylvia Pfeifer/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/6c247bbe-0181-472f-8369-581e2fd4f19b

Forbes: The past, present and future of brain-computer interfaces https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2025/10/05/these-are-the-startups-merging-your-brain-with-ai/ Will Part 2 address The vOICe non-invasive vision BCI for the blind? …

These Are The Startups Merging Your Brain With AI
Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) sound like science fiction to most people. But this technology is getting real, quickly.

„Resilience Factories“ https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10114

A look at social media "clippers", who are paid $0.50 to $2 per thousand views by streamers, podcasts, and startups to make buzzy moments go viral online (Ben Raab/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/meet-the-clip…

In the #coworking of my choice, there's a rare and lucky opportunity: one of BASE’s Team Offices will be available soon.
The facts:
- fully furnished Private Office for 4-5 people
- 24/7 smart lock access & high speed WiFi
- large business network
- company address at BASE
- free meeting room & phone booth usage
- coffee, tea, muesli, office mat…

Team Büro München — BASE Coworking Space München
Du suchst ein Team Büro in München? Im BASE Coworking Space gibt es 6 Private Offices für bis zu 8 Personen – Meetingräume und Telefonboxen inklusive! Unser großes Business-Netzwerk und die zentrale Lage nahe der Universitäten in Maxvorstadt machen das BASE zur idealen Büro-Location für Startups, Re

xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, who led its engineering teams, says he is leaving the company to launch a venture firm that supports AI research and startups (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/13/co-founder-of-elon-musks-xai-departs-t…

Co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI departs the company | TechCrunch
Igor Babuschkin is leaving xAI less than three years after he co-founded the startup with Elon Musk, following a series of scandals at company.

Ho un point assez intéressant sur les startups
```
J’ai fondé trois startups, la première en France. Ceux qui pensent que c’est plus facile aux US se trompent, de beaucoup.
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Jamais la France ou être français n'a été un frein. Jamais être européen n'a été autre chose qu'une chance ! J'ai créé des boîtes et des filiales de boîtes dans 12 pays incluant des puissances… | Frederic Lasnier | 56 commentaires
Jamais la France ou être français n'a été un frein. Jamais être européen n'a été autre chose qu'une chance ! J'ai créé des boîtes et des filiales de boîtes dans 12 pays incluant des puissances majeures (USA,UK, Allemagne) et des puissances émergentes (Vietnam, Mexique, Roumanie, Maroc...). J'ai dirigé, jusqu'en 2023, une boîte française qui comptait près de 1500 sublimes collaborateurs dans le monde et nous l'avons vendue à une entreprise cotée au NYSE. J'ai investi dans …

A new question for your pub quiz:
Which AI company did Nvidia not invest in?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/12/nvidias-ai-empire-a-look-at-its-top-startup-investments/

Nvidia's AI empire: A look at its top startup investments | TechCrunch
Over the last two years, Nvidia has used its ballooning fortunes to invest in over 100 AI startups. Here are the giant semiconductor's largest investments.

PitchBook: US startup funding surged 75.6% YoY in H1 2025 to $162.8B, strongest since H1 2021, driven by the AI boom and on track for the second-best year ever (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-ai-startup…

A warning: y’all know I like #startups and I like #foodscience and I’m an adventurous eater and no complainer, but Wilde Protein Chips are one of the worst products I’ve ever tried — I actually bit into the included silica gel packet and it wasn’t too different from the chips.

There may finally come a first peer-reviewed publication about Neuralink with human data, but for now still no details https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/startups-tech/startups/musks-neuralink-submits-brain-implant-patient-data-journ…

Musk’s Neuralink submits brain implant patient data to journal
The company aims to implant its chips in 20,000 people per year by 2031, and generate at least US$1 billion in annual revenue

Western pharma giants have struck multibillion-dollar deals with Chinese biotech firms using AI, signaling confidence in China's AI drug discovery research (Leslie Liang/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/ai-drug-discovery-startups-big-pharma-china/

China’s AI drug discovery companies land huge deals with Big Pharma
Multibillion-dollar partnerships show China’s rising influence in AI-driven pharmaceuticals. 

"Ernsthafte Zweifel am Überleben": Cowboy veröffentlicht Finanzbericht für 2024
Die Zukunft des belgischen E-Bike-Startups scheint alles andere als sicher. Eine neue Strategie soll das Unternehmen auf die Füße zurückbringen.

Source: Windsurf's gross margins are "very negative"; many believe the same margin pressure is impacting Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and other vibe coding tools (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-…

Exclusive: The high costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups
Coding assistant startups are highly unprofitable, says a source familiar with Windsurf financials.

just checking in on the folks that said (years ago) that we needed to sacrifice user experience for developer productivity to see how their AI startups are doing now

Sensor Tower: as of July 2025, Rapido had 50M MAUs on Android in India vs. Uber's 30M; in the four-wheeler cab segment, Rapido holds ~30% share vs. Uber's ~50% (Pranav Mukul/The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t…

ETtech in-depth: Rapido races to the top, keeping Uber on edge
Bengaluru-based mobility company Rapido now has nearly half the share of overall ride-hailing market, with monthly active users at 50 million versus Uber’s 30 million in July. Not jus tthat, Rapido has now made significant inroads in four-wheeler cab hailing as well, grabbing nearly 30% share of that segment.

I'm so glad I never took up any of those Silicon Valley companies or VC-backed startups on their offers.
Probably I'd be rich, I guess.
But I prefer to have my conscience not flushed down the toilet.

A look at social media "clippers", who are paid $0.50 to $2 per thousand views by streamers, podcasts, and startups to make buzzy moments go viral online (Ben Raab/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/meet-the-clip…

Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce company Flipkart acquires a majority stake in digital content platform Pinkvilla; source: the deal values Pinkvilla at ~$15M (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/te…

Flipkart acquires majority stake in content platform Pinkvilla to tap Gen Z shoppers
While Flipkart did not disclose details of the deal, a person close to the matter said the online retailer is likely to have picked up more than 75% in Pinkvilla valuing it at around $15 million.

Sources: Polymarket considers an offer valuing it at ~$9B, up from $1B in the summer; Kalshi is close to raising money at a $5B valuation, up from $2B in June (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/pr

Prediction Startup Polymarket Fields Offer for $9 Billion Valuation; Kalshi Nears $5 Billion Financing
Startups that enable people to bet on events such as the New York mayoral race, NFL games and the Federal Reserve rate decisions are in talks to raise more money at multi-billion-dollar valuations, as trading volume and rivalry between the two apps intensifies. Polymarket has considered an offer ...

Here’s what the “just let tech bros run everything” crowd fundamentally misunderstands about how innovation actually works: It requires exactly the kind of chaotic, unpredictable, open ecosystem that authoritarianism systematically destroys.
Real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit, not on who can kiss the leader’s ass most effectively. In a functioning democracy with actual rule of law, the best products have the opportunity to win. In an authoritari…

Fascism For First Time Founders
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…

a16z releases a report, with Mercury data, on the top 50 AI companies startups pay for; OpenAI leads, followed by Anthropic, Replit, Freepik, and ElevenLabs (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-ne

A new a16z report looks at which AI companies startups are actually paying for | TechCrunch
a16z releases its first AI spending report that shows which AI-native application layer companies startups are actually spending money on .

Apple prüft, mit KI-Startups wie Mistral und Perplexity frischen Wind ins Siri-System zu holen. Nach Jahren im Funktions-Mittelmaß setzt Cupertino auf Zukäufe statt Zauberei – KI made by „ausgelagert“.
#FocusPlus: Apple-Gewinn wächst: Konzern bereit für KI-Zukäufe jeder Größe #KI

Apple-Gewinn wächst: Konzern bereit für KI-Zukäufe jeder Größe
Apple kündigte groß eine neue Siri-Sprachassistentin mit Künstlicher Intelligenz an - und musste sie dann ins nächste Jahr verschieben. Greift der Konzern zu einer Übernahme als Befreiungsschlag?

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers,
increasingly using artificial intelligence,
are entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org,
a labor rights nonprofit based in New York. 
Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed
workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.
While lar…

VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
A funding surge has given rise to technologies to track, analyze and manage workers — often in countries with little regulation.

Someone posted recently that it may be inappropriate to tell someone to 'man up' and while I agreed with their sentiment, I do feel there is an important exception. Working as I did with many startups who wisely chose to base their business on Linux, many still feared the command line, especially when I had to guide them by phone. Many were the times I told them bluntly to "man up" and they understood 🤣
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/man.1.html

Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China's Controversial '996' Work Schedule (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-china-996-work-schedule/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250723/p24#a250723p24

Yeah, I knew some lovely people who worked at Twitter too. And did you know they once had unfettered API access and anyone could create their own client? Some of us loved that so much we built things that helped legitimise them as an open platform. And then one day they just switched that off.
Legitimacy is gold to venture-capital-funded startups. They need people with it to convince everyday folks that this latest iteration of the same old rug pull is different. Until they’ve grown s…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
Attached: 1 image I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: h…

Some 20-somethings flocking to SF to build trillion-dollar AI startups say no to booze, sleep, and fun as they strive to be, or appear to be, the most obsessed (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurs

So, deciding on a possible domain for my new home for my articles and blogging.
My main site is https://www.davidaugust.com/
And I own davidaugust.net
But maybe that gets confusing, so not great.
Maybe a subdomain?
I think ghost.davidaugust.com would be highlighting the tech runnin…

Bridging the Trust Gap in Crowdfunding: A Novel Expert-Based Evaluation Mechanism
Issam Hosni, Omar Talbi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23378 https://arxiv.or…

Bridging the Trust Gap in Crowdfunding: A Novel Expert-Based Evaluation Mechanism
Crowdfunding has emerged as a vital alternative funding source, transforming how creative projects and startups secure financing by directly connecting creators to backers. However, persistent trust issues and information asymmetry between creators and backers significantly hinder its growth and development. Existing trust-enhancement mechanisms, such as third-party endorsements and basic expert validation often lack objectivity and robustness, leaving backers vulnerable to biased signals and p…

The Sandbox Configurator: A Framework to Support Technical Assessment in AI Regulatory Sandboxes
Alessio Buscemi, Thibault Simonetto, Daniele Pagani, German Castignani, Maxime Cordy, Jordi Cabot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25256

The Sandbox Configurator: A Framework to Support Technical Assessment in AI Regulatory Sandboxes
The systematic assessment of AI systems is increasingly vital as these technologies enter high-stakes domains. To address this, the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act introduces AI Regulatory Sandboxes (AIRS): supervised environments where AI systems can be tested under the oversight of Competent Authorities (CAs), balancing innovation with compliance, particularly for startups and SMEs. Yet significant challenges remain: assessment methods are fragmented, tests lack standardisation, and feedback…

"25 Jahre united-domains: Die 25 beliebtesten Top und die exotischsten #TLDs" https://www.united-domains.de/blog/25-jahre-united-domains-25-top-und-flop-tlds/…

Jeff Dean, who co-founded Google Brain and leads Google's AI research, has emerged as a prolific angel investor, backing 37 AI startups over the past two years (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/07/22/jeff-de

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, is quietly betting on the next wave of AI startups
Google’s longtime AI guru has quietly backed more than 30 startups in the past two years—offering founders early credibility and cachet.

DealStreetAsia: VC funding in Indonesian startups fell to just $80M in H1 2025 from $200M a year earlier, as startups face fallout from corruption scandals (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/asean-money/indonesian-s…

Indonesian startups face funding fallout from corruption scandals
Experts urge better governance and more hands-on investor oversight to revive ecosystem

VCs say some AI startups, under pressure to show rapid ARR growth, are using questionable accounting practices like counting one-time deals as recurring revenue (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/how-is-arr-calculated-startups-venture/

‘There’s so much pressure to be the company that went from zero to $100 million in X days’: Inside the sketchy world of ARR and inflated AI startup accounting
Annual recurring revenue is the metric VCs and founders love to tout. But skeptics think these overblown numbers are helping fuel a bubble.

How VCs are changing the way people learn about the tech industry, through a sprawling media ecosystem consisting of podcasts, newsletters, and streaming shows (Anne VanderMey/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Venture Capital’s Podcast Obsession Has Transformed Tech Media
Podcasts hosted by venture capitalists set the narrative in tech, changing the way that insiders—and everyone else—learn about the world of startups.

Bloomberg, September 18, 2025: China's brain implant startups take on Musk's Neuralink in new tech race https://archive.ph/wsvBh "America’s leadership in the cutting-edge field of brain technology is being challenged as Chinese startups rise with the support of a full-throttle policy drive."

CB Insights: the number of AI unicorns reached 498 with a combined value of $2.7T, 100 founded since 2023, and over 1,300 AI startups valued above $100M (Robert Frank/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/10/ai-artificial-intelligence-billionaires-wealth.html…

AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace
With time, and IPOs, many of today's private AI fortunes will eventually become more liquid, providing a historic opportunity for wealth management firms

AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI are ramping up efforts to recruit quant researchers from Wall Street firms, offering competitive pay and benefits (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-08/open-ai-…

Die Drohnenkrise (II) https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10137

PitchBook: US VCs have invested ~$14.2B in European AI startups so far in 2025, with founders saying US investors better fit the sector's high upfront costs (Anvee Bhutani/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/te…

Apple denkt laut #ManagerMagazin darüber nach, die KI-Startups #Mistral und #Perplexity zu kaufen. Beide Unternehmen werden prominent von Tech-Größen wie Nvidia und Jeff Bezos gestützt. Noch g…

Russia's Ukraine war spurred a new generation of defense tech investors and startups like Helsing, applying a profit-driven model to Europe's military buildup (Patricia Cohen/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/business/economy/defens…

A.I. Fighter Jets and Cockroach Spies: Inside the Changing Business of War
Russia’s war on Ukraine changed the course of a generation of start-ups and investors that have applied a new business model to Europe’s military buildup.

Google Cloud says it now works with nine of the 10 leading AI labs, including OpenAI, and with 60% of the world's generative AI startups, fueling its growth (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/how-ai-startups-are-fueli…

How AI startups are fueling Google's booming cloud business | TechCrunch
Google Cloud is one of the company's fastest-growing business lines, and continues to rack up new customers.

How AlphaFold2 and the rise of generative AI kickstarted a new AI drug discovery boom after a spate of startups from the mid-2010s failed to live up to the hype (Financial Times)

a16z hires ex-VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram as general partner overseeing AI infrastructure and growth investments and as a managing partner, replacing Scott Kupor (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ben-horow…

Ben Horowitz Hires His ‘Jensen’; Vercel Starts a Venture Fund
Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz says only a small subset of AI companies, such as portfolio companies Safe Superintelligence Inc. and Thinking Machines Labs, need massive compute contracts. But many AI startups still need help getting access to bottlenecked resources, like chips to ...

PitchBook: in H1, AI startups raised $104.3B in the US, or about 66% of all US VC funding, up from 49% last year; there were 281 VC-backed exits totaling $36B (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/22/ai-startups-raised-1…

AI startups raised $104 billion in first half of year, but exits tell a different story
AI accounted for nearly two-thirds of all fundraising deal value in the first half of 2025, with the bulk of those dollars concentrated in a few companies.

Reliance Retail launches Ajio Rush, a four-hour fashion delivery service live in six Indian cities, to take on Myntra and other fashion quick commerce startups (The Economic Times)
https://ec…

Reliance rolls out Ajio Rush to take on Myntra, Newme, Slikk and other fashion quick commerce startups
Reliance Retail has launched Ajio Rush, a four-hour fashion delivery service now live in six cities. It follows Myntra and others exploring ultra-fast delivery. While some startups like Blip have shut down, investor interest remains strong. Experts say the future lies in hybrid models combining online ease with offline trust.

New York-based Crosby, a law firm that uses AI to help speed up the contracts process, raised a $20M Series A co-led by Index Ventures, BCV, and Elad Gil (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/crosby-ai-law-firm-raises-20-million

Crosby, 'AI Law Firm' Working With Startups Like Cursor, Raises $20 Million
The Series A from Index Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures will help lawyer turned founder Ryan Daniels expand how his year-old startup can use AI to speed up contract reviews.

Robinhood has filed an application with the SEC to launch a new publicly traded fund called "Robinhood Ventures Fund I" that will hold shares of startups (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/15/robinhood-pl…

Robinhood plans to launch a startups fund open to all retail investors  | TechCrunch
The “Robinhood Ventures Fund I” is intended to allow any retail investor to make money on startups, but the details are scant.

Relace, which makes tools and specialized language models to help AI agents code faster for customers like Lovable and Figma, raised a $23M Series A led by a16z (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/an

Andreessen Backs a Startup Developing Tools That Coding Agents Use
Countless startups sell tools to software engineers, such as version control systems to track who’s making changes to a codebase, and sandboxes where code can be safely run and tested without affecting the main system.Now, a startup is building such tools for artificial intelligence agents that ...

Lina Khan cites Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny, saying letting startups grow independently, rather than be acquired, can generate "enormous value" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/02/lina-khan-point…

Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny | TechCrunch
A surprising figure is celebrating Figma’s successful IPO: Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who said the offering demonstrates the value of "letting startups grow into independently successful businesses."

PitchBook: European defense tech startups have raised €2.4B since 2022, including €1.4B in the first 7 months of 2025, up from €30M in 2020 and €150M in 2021 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/a194942b-93ff-49a0-8aa9-02460055748e

Europe’s defence tech start-ups attract investment surge
Russia’s war in Ukraine and fears over US security relationship drive wave of VC funding

Germany-based Makersite, which helps clients like Microsoft improve product sustainability during the design process, raised a €60M Series B (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)
https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/07/german

Foxmont and BCG report: Philippine startups raised a record $1.12B in 2024, up 16.7% YoY, with foreign investment rising to 52.5%, but regulatory hurdles remain (Ramon Royandoyan/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/asean…

Philippine startups ride funding boom, but growing pains remain
Red tape and lack of big-ticket exits put brake on ecosystem momentum

Modular, which lets developers build AI apps that run across multiple GPU and CPU vendors, raised $250M led by US Innovative Technology at a $1.6B valuation (Lauren Goode/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/semiconductor-software-startups-chips/

A Former Apple Luminary Sets Out to Create the Ultimate GPU Software
Demand for AI chips is booming—and so is the need for software to run them. Chris Lattner’s startup Modular just raised $250 million to build the best developer tools for AI hardware.

Indian AI app development platform Rocket.new raised a $15M seed led by Salesforce Ventures; it has 400K users, including 10K paid subscribers (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/22/rocket…

Rocket.new, one of India's first vibe-coding startups, snags $15M from Accel, Salesforce Ventures | TechCrunch
Rocket.new has surged to 400,000 users and $4.5M ARR in three months.

PitchBook: VCs have invested $5B in humanoid robotics startups since the beginning of 2024, as years of steady progress and GenAI triggers an investment frenzy (Washington Post)

Humanoid robots were a sci-fi dream. Suddenly they’re everywhere.
A frenzy of investment from Amazon, Meta and other companies has created a crowd of new humanoid robots.

Fable, a startup offering AI-generated security training for employees, comes out of stealth having raised $31M, a source says at a $120M valuation (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

This $120 Million Startup’s AI Will Teach You How To Suck Less At Security
With a $31 million raise, Fable is aiming to take on multi-billion companies with its AI-generated security training targeted at employees who need it.

Sources: AI video startup Runway is looking to raise ~$500M at a $5B pre-money valuation; rival Luma AI aims to raise $1.1B at a $3.2B pre-money valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/runway-luma-talks-mul…

Runway, Luma in Talks for Multibillion-Dollar Fundraises as Revenue Picks Up
Startups that use artificial intelligence to make videos for Hollywood studios and amateur filmmakers are getting thirsty for more capital. Runway, a startup that has cut deals with Lionsgate and AMC Networks, is in talks with investors to raise around $500 million at a valuation of at least $5 ...

VCs court top AI startups with preempted rounds and perks like private jets; PitchBook: US AI startups raised $200B in 2025, with 41% going to just 10 companies (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Indian digital payments giant PhonePe confidentially files for an IPO in India, seeking to raise $1.5B, sources say at a valuation of $15B (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/startup…

PhonePe files draft prospectus for $1.5 billion IPO with Sebi through confidential route
PhonePe, supported by Walmart, has confidentially filed its DRHP with SEBI. The digital payments platform reduced its net loss by 13.4% to Rs 1,727.4 crore in 2024-25, driven by a 40.4% surge in operating revenue to Rs 7,114.8 crore. Despite diversification into financial services, payments remain PhonePe's core business.

PitchBook: VCs have invested $192.7B in AI startups so far this year, putting 2025 on track to be the first year when 50% of VC funding goes to the AI industry (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Tracxn: funding for Indian digital lending startups fell to $462M between January and August 2025 from $1.1B a year earlier, after RBI tightened lending norms (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t

Clock’s ticking for digital lenders as VC funding plunges 50% in 2025
Funding into digital lending startups slumped to $462 million between January and August 2025 from $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn. Only around 50 of the 154 fintech deals reported this year involved digital lenders, the data showed.

Source: AI contractor marketplace Mercor has received investment offers valuing it as high as $10B, just six months after raising $100M at a $2B valuation (Katie Roof/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mercor-field…

Mercor Fields $10 Billion-Valuation Offers in ‘Pre-emptive’ Onslaught
The frothiness of the artificial intelligence boom is starting to look like 1999…or 2021. Startups are again receiving unsolicited investment interest months or even weeks after announcing a fundraising, sometimes at prices that would more than double their valuation. The latest is Mercor, a ...

Silicon Valley has shifted from Web 2.0 to a new "hard tech", AI-dominated era with fewer perks and a more serious mood, as startups use San Francisco as a base (Mike Isaac/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/ai-silicon-valle…

A.I. Has Ushered in Silicon Valley’s ‘Hard Tech’ Era
Goodbye to the age of consumer websites and mobile apps. Artificial intelligence has ushered in an era of what insiders in the nation’s innovation capital call “hard tech.”

A look at a growing number of medical startups that are using robots and AI to fertilize embryos through IVF, helping bring at least 20 babies to term (Washington Post)

Robots are learning to make human babies. Twenty have already been born.
One in six people of reproductive age suffer from infertility. Start-ups are using AI-powered robots to increase IVF success rates and lower costs.

An interview with CEO Amjad Masad on Replit's slow growth, leaving the professional developer market to focus on non-technical white-collar workers, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/after-…

After nine years of grinding, Replit finally found its market. Can it keep it? | TechCrunch
While AI coding startups like Cursor raise brow-raising rounds on barely three years of existence, Replit's path to a $3 billion valuation has been anything but swift.

Swedish AI startups Lovable, Legora, and Sana, set to be acquired by Workday, highlight a key dilemma in Europe's tech scene: sell out or bet on becoming huge (Richard Milne/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8585026e-5609-4417-b540-03b2f85d8652

A look at China's brain-computer interface industry as startups like BrainCo grow with state support; CCID says the sector is worth $450M, growing 20% annually (Bloomberg)

Nvidia acquires Solver, a three-year-old AI coding agent startup formerly known as Laredo Labs, which had raised $8M from Radical Ventures and other investors (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/nvidia-acquires-coding-startup-solver

Nvidia Acquires Coding Startup Solver
Nvidia has acquired Solver, a three-year-old software development startup, The Information reported Tuesday . The startup, formerly known as Laredo Labs, had developed an AI coding agent and raised $8 million in financing from investors including Radical Ventures and Horizons Ventures. Nvidia regularly buys small startups, including several whose technology can lower the cost of using its

Remagine Ventures: 342 Israeli startups are focused on generative AI in 2025, up by 198 since May 2024, and they have collectively raised $20B to date (Elihay Vidal/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/s1yl6mlulx

Mapping Israel’s $20B GenAI boom: 342 startups and counting
New Remagine Ventures report charts explosive growth and the rise of agentic AI systems.

The price per token for AI models has fallen, but costs for developers are rising as newer reasoning models require more tokens to complete tasks (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-costs-expen…

Experts warn that Nvidia's large investments in data centers and startups, almost like a stimulus program, could be artificially inflating demand for its GPUs (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/jensen-huang-using-nvidia-cash-r…

How Jensen Huang is Using Nvidia Cash to Rule the AI Economy
Even by the standards of one of the most prodigious dealmakers in tech, the past month or so has been a head-spinning one for Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. Just in September, Nvidia agreed to buy any unused Nvidia graphics processing units that cloud provider CoreWeave doesn’t sell to other customers ...

A look at efforts by startups, such as Positron and Groq, to develop inference-focused chips that aim to be more energy efficient and performant than Nvidia's (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-n…

Sources: Pinecone, which provides an AI-compatible vector database, is exploring a sale after receiving takeover interest; Pinecone was valued at $750M in 2023 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/top-funded-ai-database-star…

Top-Funded AI Database Startup Pinecone Considers a Sale
When the artificial intelligence boom began a few years ago, investors flocked to startups that helped businesses transform and store proprietary data in a format AI could understand, known as a vector database. The technology allowed businesses to use a customized AI chatbot to search or ...

Inside Pangyo Techno Valley, South Korea's "Silicon Valley" that is home to 1,800 startups, R&D centers, and global tech firms, as it strives for global impact (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/24/sout

South Korea's 'Silicon Valley' struggles to live up to its global ambitions | TechCrunch
South Korea’s Pangyo continues to anchor the nation’s tech economy, though accessibility and competition test its edge.

Factory, which makes AI agents called "droids" to assist in coding, raised $50M at a $300M valuation; AI coding startups raised $7.5B in the past three months (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/b73ea5a0-4bfe-498f-9d61-514d75941638

Rain, a stablecoin-backed Visa card issuer, raised a $58M Series B led by Sapphire Ventures, after raising a $24.5M Series A led by Norwest in March (Yueqi Yang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/stablecoin-…

Stablecoin Card Startup Rain Raises $58 Million Led By Sapphire Ventures
Rain, a stablecoin-backed card issuer that works with Visa, said it raised $58 million in Series B round led by Sapphire Ventures, just months after its last fundraising round, demonstrating once again investor enthusiasm for crypto startups flowing from congressional passage of stablecoin legislation in July. With the deal, Rain’s valuation increased nearly six times from its $24.5 million

Sources: HongShan, formerly Sequoia China, has invested only a quarter of the ~$9B it raised in 2022 and has been increasingly looking beyond China for deals (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/neil-she…

Neil Shen’s HongShan Is Slow to Deploy Its $9 Billion Capital, Looks for Deals Outside China
When venture capital giant Sequoia decided to carve off Sequoia China two years ago in response to growing tensions between the U.S. and China, the newly independent China firm was expected to continue pouring its huge funds into Chinese startups. Renamed HongShan (Mandarin for Sequoia), the ...

Distyl AI, which provides AI tools to automate business processes like HR management, raised $175M led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures at a $1.8B valuation (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/st

AI Consulting Startup Founded by Ex-Palantir Employees Raises at $1.8 Billion Valuation
A raft of venture-backed startups are emerging to offer high-tech consultants for businesses needing help with artificial intelligence, posing competition for companies like Palantir and McKinsey & Co. that specialize in high-priced consulting services. One is Distyl AI. The three-year-old ...

VCs and founders warn that the $100K fee will make H-1B sponsorship prohibitively expensive for startups, not Big Tech, and drive talent outside the US (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/startup-leade…

Sources: Nvidia is in advanced talks to invest $500M in UK self-driving car startup Wayve, as part of a broader £2B funding pledge in UK startups (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/cec76ea1-2cc1-4da3-a9e9-1d76aaa50afc

Big Tech acquihiring AI startups, like Meta's Scale AI deal, gives VCs only modest returns compared to traditional exits and may entrench Big Tech's dominance (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles

Meta, Google AI Talent Grab May Spur a Silicon Valley Rethink
Meta and Google’s AI talent grab may lead to more sustainable tech companies.

Jack Altman's Alt Capital raised $275M for a new fund to lead more Series A rounds at AI startups, a jump from the $150M fund it closed in February 2024 (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jack…

Sources: at least six of China's biggest VC firms are targeting a combined $2B in new USD-denominated funds to allow overseas investment in Chinese startups (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-18/chi…

Big Tech's reverse acquihires for AI talent are hollowing out startups and eroding the culture that has made Silicon Valley an unparalleled source of innovation (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-researchers

Nvidia plans to invest £2B to support the UK's AI industry in partnership with Accel, Air Street Capital, Balderton Capital, Hoxton Ventures, and Phoenix Court (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09…

China, which pledged $8.5B for young AI startups in April, is taking an industrial policy approach to help its AI companies close the gap with those in the US (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/technol

China Is Spending Billions to Become an A.I. Superpower
Beijing is taking an industrial policy approach to help its A.I. companies close the gap with those in the United States.

Source: Pylon, which uses AI to automate B2B customer service, raised $31M led by a16z and Bain Capital at a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/andreessen-…

Why Andreessen and Bain Backed a Self-Described ‘Zendesk Killer’
Automating customer service has been among the most popular applications of artificial intelligence models, and investors have pumped about $1 billion into six key startups developing them. Now, a seventh is throwing its hat into the ring.San Francisco-based startup Pylon has raised $31 million ...

Sources: Cursor maker Anysphere acquired Koala, an AI-powered CRM startup that raised a $15M Series A five months ago; Koala plans to shut down in September (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/cursor-snaps-up-…

Cursor snaps up enterprise startup Koala in challenge to GitHub Copilot | TechCrunch
Cursor-maker Anysphere is snapping up top talent from AI enterprise startups in an effort to compete with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.

PitchBook: 15.9% of VC-backed deals in 2025 so far have been down rounds, a 10-year high, with AI and ML startups accounting for 29.3% of the down rounds (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/startup-down-rounds-are-at…

Startup down rounds are at a 10 year high, according to PitchBook data
PitchBook data revealed that 15.9% of venture-backed deals in 2025 to date have been down rounds, marking a decade high.

A profile of UCB CS professor Ion Stoica, a billionaire who has helped launch four startups out of his privately-funded research lab, including Databricks (Martina Di Licosa/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinadilico

How A Berkeley Professor Built Billion-Dollar Companies In His Lab
Tech giants including Google fund Ion Stoica's lab, from which he launched companies like $62 billion Databricks. Now he's helping fellow profs find private funding.

A look at the "Palantir Mafia", a group of Palantir alumni who have started or are leading 350 tech companies, including at least a dozen valued at $1B (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/the-…