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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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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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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.
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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 blood tests from Quest Diagnostics that cover a variety of markers, from calcium to white blood cells. The platform integrates those results with the band’s continuous monitoring of activity, sleep, respiratory rate, and blood pressure to offer more personalized wellness advice.
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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 by Fidelity and Atreides Management with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital, among others.
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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 said earlier this month that its ARR soared from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year.
Also, job seekers in all fields can expect to soon be doing a lot more initial screening interviews. While that may sound like positive news, it doesn’t mean that there will suddenly be more open positions. Instead, recruiters, often bogged down with determining which applicants are qualified for the next round, will outsource the routine screening tasks — like checking backgrounds, salary needs, and availability — to (you guessed it) AI.
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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 have made clear. Some critics would argue that technology is making it worse. But one startup is hoping that AI could help bridge some differences instead of widen them.
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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 close their books and reconcile numbers while preparing them for audit. Two former Microsoft executives view it as a problem — and they have started Maximor to replace spreadsheets with AI agents for the grunt work finance teams perform.
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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 doorstep.
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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.
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Lol 😂🤣 I love this one.. RIP HQ Trivia I will miss you 😅😅