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Listen to select TechCrunch articles on startups coverage—who's raising, who's exiting, who's changing the world.
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After struggling to retain customers at his e-commerce site Headphones.com, founder Andrew Lissimore built his own loyalty solution — and it’s now a startup called Lantern. The Shopify-native platform helps brands boost retention through customizable loyalty, referrals, and account management tools.
Also, Deel says it's been profitable for three years and surpassed $1 billion in ARR, including having a month.
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Late last year, OpenAI reportedly tried to buy Medal and its vast trove of video game data for $500M. Today, the company spun out a frontier research lab that's using that data to build AI agents that understand how they move through space and time, a concept called spatial-temporal reasoning.
Also, electric aviation startup Beta Technologies has priced shares for its initial public offering between $27 and $33, in hopes of raising as much as $825 million, according to a regulatory document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If the company attracts investors at the top of that range it will debut with a valuation of about $7.2 billion.
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Liberate’s AI agents automate tasks for P&C insurers, working across sales, service, and claims.
Viven's seed funding was led by Khosla Ventures and Foundation Capital.
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Sonic Fire Tech has developed a device that can extinguish flames using acoustic energy below the range of human hearing. The startup is building a demo capable of protecting a home.
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Co-founded by a former Uber Freight product manager, and backed by Uber's lead seed investor, FleetWorks is quickly scooping up customers in the trucking world.
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Flint raised a $5 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from Sheryl Sandberg’s fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, and prior investor Neo.
Also, Coco Robotics is working toward automating its fleet of delivery robots using its millions of miles of collected data.
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An Indian drone startup called Airbound raised nearly $9 million in seed funding as it begins a drone-delivery pilot with a private hospital and works toward one-cent delivery using its ultra-light, blended-wing-body aircraft.
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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 of its co-founders to Meta.
The Wall Street Journal reports that AI researcher Andrew Tulloch announced his departure to employees in a message on Friday. A Thinking Machine Labs spokesperson confirmed Tulloch’s departure to the WSJ, saying he “has decided to pursue a different path for personal reasons.”
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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.
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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.
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Base Power's Series C will help the company expand beyond Texas, its beachhead market, and build batteries in the United States.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 wanted to go next: the desert.
The Mojave desert, to be specific. A company called Scaled Composites had spent years developing experimental aircraft out on that arid land, and Gull wanted in.
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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 studied AI at university and then turned that hacking hobby into a profession. Onel told TechCrunch, “I spent a decade performing penetration tests for over 150 companies across all sectors.” He added that he kept easily breaking into companies that had passed their security checks.
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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.
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Lol 😂🤣 I love this one.. RIP HQ Trivia I will miss you 😅😅