Startups

Character AI, a startup that lets users chat with different AI-powered characters, is now testing games on its desktop and mobile web apps to increase engagement on its platform. The games are available to Character AI’s paid subscribers and a limited set of users on the free plan. For this initial release, the company developed

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week’s newsletter is about startups, but it is also about Big Tech companies expanding their reach, both through acquisitions and through investments. Most interesting startup stories

The clock is set to run out on TikTok over the weekend, following the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the ban. So, what’s next for the video-sharing app’s 170 million U.S. users? On today’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Margaux MacColl, and Anthony Ha dive into the week’s biggest stories, including where

After two years of relatively muted investment activity, it seems that VCs are starting to pour capital into startups at pandemic-era levels once again. But a closer look shows that they aren’t really. In the fourth quarter of last year, investors funneled $74.6 billion into U.S. startups, a substantial increase from the average of $42

Bench, the accounting startup that imploded over the holidays, filed for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7 revealing massive debts, documents seen by TechCrunch show.  The filings — one for Bench and another for 10Sheet, Bench’s original name — show that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand by the end of its life

Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest investment banker “book runners” for IPOs – where banks are paid many millions of dollars for each listing they underwrite. Yet CEO David Solomon told attendees of the Cisco AI Summit in Palo Alto that startups should reconsider the idea of going public, reports the Financial Times.  Solomon

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).

Y Combinator alum Stoke Space just raised a $260 million Series C, bringing its total raised to $480 million. This follows $100 million raised in October 2023, and $75 million in December 2021. The company was founded in 2019 by Blue Origin veterans Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, who launched his career as a SpaceX

“Social media should be built on protocols, not platforms,” Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko said in an interview for TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. “And people should be able to choose freely between different platforms and also be able to move between them.”   Rochko is advocating here for a more decentralized approach to social media, one that allows

Nelly wants to become the biggest fintech startup in the healthcare industry. The Berlin-based startup is already working with more than 1,200 medical practices in a handful of European countries. But there are thousands more that could benefit from an upgrade for their administrative workflows. That’s why Nelly recently raised €50 million in funding (around

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. Taiwan’s MetAI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have said that “very useful quantum computers” are probably still 20 years away, but his company is also hedging its bets beyond classical chips with investments and partnerships in that very space. Now one of the companies that Nvidia partners with in quantum development is announcing funding. SEEQC, a quantum

The rise of NVIDIA has spurred renewed investor interest in AI chip startups. One of them, Blaize, founded by former Intel engineers, is set to go public on the NASDAQ in a SPAC deal on Tuesday, it announced on Monday. Launched in 2011, Blaize has raised $335 million from investors like Samsung and Mercedes-Benz. Headquartered

The world of fashion is moving at a faster pace each year. Most retailers introduce new styles each season, and fast-fashion companies like Shein, H&M and Zara update their collections continuously.  To keep pace with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers have been turning to tech to accelerate their design process. Raspberry

Financial services firm Moody’s announced on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Cape Analytics, a geospatial AI startup, for an undisclosed sum. The deal, which is expected to close in Q1, subject to customary closing conditions, will give Moody’s access to Cape’s geospatial AI analytics technology for insurance underwriting. With the tech, Moody’s plans

Fire-tracking app Watch Duty has become a crucial source of information for Los Angeles residents threatened by the ongoing wildfires.  As TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff explained, the app relies on a network of active and retired firefighters, first responders, official government reports, and volunteer reporters who monitor radio scanners to offer real-time updates on active wildfires.

After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as a host of TechCrunch’s recently ended Found podcast, I have learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups. I’ve heard stories about how founders know when it is the right time to expand from their core product, to how startups approach

No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT a little over two years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared more than eightfold.  During that period, the

The white cane for the 21st century. While many tech companies have increasingly worked to make technology more accessible for the blind and visually impaired, canes haven’t benefited much from these advances. London-born WeWalk takes a more traditional approach to the white cane. Beyond the bulkier handle, not much sets the company’s product apart visually

After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire-sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t easily just take their financial data and leave.  And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. To recap: When Bench, a startup based in Canada that raised

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. The second week of the year is usually a busy one for startup news, and 2025 is no exception. From CES product launches to M&As and funding

Businesses dependent on the physical supply chain — the network of facilities and transportation systems used to move materials from one location to another — face a number of challenges, from staff shortages to increasing customer expectations. The pressures aren’t easing up. According to a survey from Prologis, a real estate investment trust, two-thirds of

“We put AI in this thing. Does it work? We’ll see.” That seemed to be the theme for some companies attending CES 2025, but looking beyond the experimental hype, there were also some significant (we think) developments and cool new products. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Margaux MacColl, Anthony Ha, and Max

Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think that AI has the potential to automate lots of business-relevant tasks, but that many of the AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and costly. Part of the problem is that users expect too much of AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch — for instance, they assume that

Hippocratic AI, a startup building AI solutions that can handle non-diagnostic patient-facing tasks, secured a massive $141 million Series B at a valuation of $1.64 billion led by Kleiner Perkins, the company announced Thursday. The funding comes nine months after Hippocratic AI raised a $53 million round from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz and five

Scale AI relies on an army of workers it categorizes as contractors to do essential AI work like labeling images or rating LLM responses for Big Tech and others. But the AI startup, most recently valued at $13.8 billion, is facing mounting legal challenges over its labor practices. On January 3, 2025, former Scale AI

French startup Rounded believes AI voice agents are going to become the default way customers interact with companies, so instead of building AI voice agents that are ready to use, the company is building an orchestration platform that lets companies build their own voice agent. Rounded started off working on a web3 product before shifting

Astrohaus has cornered a very specific niche. The Michigan-based startup builds hardware for writers looking to eliminate distractions. It’s really tough finishing up that novel when Instagram exists, after all. While the company has made its name bucking most tech trends, however, its latest offering has found a bandwagon to jump onto. Announced at CES

Last year, police surveillance startup Flock Safety hired the mayor of a California city with over 200,000 residents to promote its products. But the mayor, Ulises Cabrera of Moreno Valley, now claims Flock wrongfully terminated him, partly because he refused to use his position as mayor to benefit Flock, according to a lawsuit Cabrera filed

In the U.S., it’s accepted that most startups fail — and when that happens, VCs (generally) accept their losses and move on. But that’s not the case in China, where VCs are trying to claw back their investments in failed startups by pursuing the personal assets of their founders in court, The Financial Times reports.