67 articles tagged with “startups”.
Moonshot AI, maker of the Kimi models, is aiming for $2 billion in annual revenue, with OpenRouter data showing up to 300 billion tokens generated daily by K3 models despite a slight usage decline.
Besxar is building a semiconductor manufacturing facility in orbit, using SpaceX rockets to reach space and return products to Earth.
Danijar Hafner has launched a stealth-mode San Francisco startup focused on developing AI agents that can plan ahead and handle unexpected scenarios.
Uber founder Travis Kalanick's company Atoms may be moving into the robotaxi business, which he has framed as completing 'unfinished business.'
NVIDIA announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000, aiming to scale the platform, strengthen infrastructure, and broaden AI access for developers and institutions.
Blue Voice, founded by a Harvard Law dropout, raised $6M to build an AI tool for police officers trained on department-specific laws, ordinances, and protocols.
Clipto, a three-year-old startup focused on AI-driven video search, has a newly announced valuation of $250 million following its latest round of funding.
A report notes that open-weight AI companies have become prominent acquisition targets, drawing substantial capital into the business of releasing models freely.
Sandhya Devanathan is leaving Meta for OpenAI, where she will oversee some operations across Southeast Asia and Australia.
OpenAI announced an expansion of its presence in Brazil, aiming to work more closely with developers, businesses, and local communities to advance AI adoption.
QueryStory has emerged from stealth with $6 million in seed funding and plans to apply LLMs and cybersecurity know-how to improve the coherence of AI queries.
A senior OpenAI data center executive named Malone has departed, continuing a run of high-profile exits after the company reorganized its infrastructure group.
Gamma has acquired design startup Lica, bringing its co-founders onto Gamma's research team to drive innovation in productivity tools.
Keenable has emerged from stealth with a $26 million seed round, building a web search index aimed at AI agents.
Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund that gained prominence on Wall Street before nearly imploding, is now the subject of an SEC probe involving federal subpoenas.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Replit's CEO Amjad Masad will present his insights on the evolving landscape of programming and Replit's role.
Harvard's HBS Foundry startup bootcamp, priced at $699, incorporates AI avatars of its instructors that provide feedback during practice pitches and simulated board meetings.
Inherent, a British AI lab founded by DeepMind alumni, has released Faraday, an AI agent it claims outperforms Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research papers.
Micro1, an AI data startup, has hit a $500 million gross run rate as rising demand for AI training data drives rapid growth across the sector.
Payments company Stripe acquired OpenRouter, a startup that routes prompts across different AI models, with a rationale extending beyond its public reference to 'the singularity.'
As spending on data centers and GPUs surges, a startup is tackling the lack of a standard way to price AI compute or hedge against price changes.
Relativity Networks secured $22 million to deploy hollow-core fiber, a rarely used technology it says transmits data 30% faster than conventional fiber, in data centers.
After Perplexity's free AI offer through Airtel ended for new users in India, its revenue in the country rose roughly 60% while downloads fell.
Anthropic has reported a significant increase of $18 billion in its annualized revenue within a short two-month window, reflecting robust growth.
Relay, a business workflow automation startup, will cease operations next month, while its CEO and part of its team join Google's Chrome team.
Accel has closed a $550 million India-focused fund within weeks, coming 19 months after its previous $650 million fund, which still has more than 55% available to deploy.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's special projects lead and former COO, announced his departure after eight years, saying he plans to start something new.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's longtime chief operating officer and one of its longest-serving executives, is leaving the company to start a new venture.
River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, secured $1.1 billion in a General Catalyst-led round to pursue a vision for personal agents.
Discovered Materials secured $9 million in funding to support its search for new materials intended to enable more efficient chips.
An MIT Technology Review feature in its What's Next series explores startups seeking the next breakthrough in large language models.
Roku added a 24/7 FAST channel focused entirely on AI-generated content from an AI startup, alongside three channels featuring older TV programming.
Klaviyo has acquired Agency, founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, who joins the e-commerce company as Chief Product Officer to lead its AI agents.
Jeff Dean and other outgoing Google executives are leaving to start a company aimed at using AI to accelerate scientific discovery.
Hark has previewed a browser use agent for completing tasks, saying it is faster and cheaper than competing products.
AWS is enabling the vibe-coding tool Superblocks to be embedded into the private clouds of AWS customers, described as a step toward decoupling apps from models.
June has emerged from stealth with a $20 million pre-seed round, positioning itself to make AI adoption and deployment simpler for organizations.
Smallest.ai raised $13M to build ultra-fast voice AI models designed to make AI phone calls pass the Turing test.
Situational Awareness, founded by a former OpenAI researcher, reportedly sold its public portfolio after leveraged public bets dropped, but still holds Anthropic shares.
Reddit reports positive financial results amid growing concerns about its AI-related challenges and relationship with Google.
Friend has relaunched its AI pendant, adding a speaker so the device can talk aloud rather than only messaging back, now sold at double the previous price.
Nscale, a British AI neocloud, is acquiring Anyscale, a software startup that helps companies scale AI workloads across data centers and servers.
Enterprises are competing to hire forward-deployed engineers, with a new study estimating only 2,000 U.S. engineers have the expertise to deliver meaningful AI ROI at scale.
Microsoft has pitched its homegrown AI models, harnesses, and a Mythos competitor to Wall Street, positioning itself in more direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Hint, co-founded by Martha Stewart, is a new startup offering an AI assistant for homeowners that unifies property records, maintenance schedules, and home documents in a single app.
Encore AI has raised $30 million to build AI agents that analyze calls, messages and CRM data to identify effective sales techniques and turn them into playbooks.
AI detection startup Pangram raised $9 million to expand its software, launching a new text detection model, Pangram 4, and an image detection model in research preview.
Cyera has agreed to acquire Oasis Security for $1 billion in a move focused on safeguarding proliferating AI agents. The deal marks Cyera's third acquisition this year.
Spur Intelligence secured a $200 million funding round from Insight Partners for its bot-detection technology that separates human traffic from bots.
Fish Audio raised a $52M seed round to develop AI voice models. It reports over 8 million users of its open-source or hosted models and $21M in annual recurring revenue.
Cursor is increasing its presence in India through localized pricing, citing it as its third-largest global market, with plans for local hiring and enterprise sales.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 has unveiled a first look at its Smart Systems Stage agenda, focused on energy, infrastructure, and technology, including AI's growing strain on the grid.
Safe Superintelligence, founded by Ilya Sutskever, announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia to scale its AI research as it enters a new phase after two years in stealth.
An episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast discusses why Moonshot AI's Kimi appeared to unsettle both Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Prentis, a new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is reportedly in talks to raise $100M, wagering that automating routine computer tasks will overtake coding as AI's biggest use case.
Midjourney, known for AI image generation, has acquired the personalized astrology app Co-Star. The deal reportedly closed in spring, with terms undisclosed.
Cognition has acquired AI assistant Poke in a deal valuing it in the low nine figures, bringing Poke's conversational interaction model to Cognition's coding agent Devin.
AegisAI, founded by former Google security executives, has raised $36M to fight AI-driven spear phishing with AI agents that examine each message for subtle anomalies.
Atoms, a robotics company founded by Travis Kalanick, has raised $1.7 billion led by a16z, with Uber among its investors.
Yope has raised $12.3 million in seed funding to build a private social app centered on small groups of friends and family, avoiding algorithmic feeds and ads.
Robotics startup Gritt has emerged from stealth with $34 million in funding, aiming to automate difficult construction work beginning with solar plants.
Venture capitalist Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, predicts that the significant wealth AI is creating in Silicon Valley will have to be redistributed voluntarily or involuntarily.
Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of world model startup AMI Labs, declines to describe the company's AI as 'AGI' or 'superintelligence,' pushing back against common industry framing.
Applied Computing secured a $20M Series A to develop a foundation AI model aimed at the oil, gas and petrochemical industry.
Ode has launched with backing from Anthropic and Blackstone, wagering that embedding engineers inside enterprises is central to accelerating AI adoption.
A TechCrunch piece looks at why successful, already-rich tech figures are working intensely again, motivated by AI's defining moment and the prospect of greater earnings.
Lyzr, a startup building AI agents for enterprises, said it used its own agent to conduct a $100 million fundraising round.