Browsing: Startups

Bedrock Robotics has raised $600 million in a funding round that values the autonomous vehicle technology startup at $4.1 billion, marking a speedy ascent for the two-year-old company.

Getting initial customers as a startup can be one of the most grueling challenges in business. Even when companies manage to snag some early interest, there’s no guarantee those customers will stick around.

Product-market fit — when a startup’s product sells well — has become even harder to find in this AI era. Despite startups achieving record-fast growth, not all customers are sticky, and products can be replicated more easily than ever. 

TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 is coming to SoWa Power Station in Boston on November 4, bringing founders, investors, and operators together for a full day of candid conversations, practical sessions, live pitching, networking, and smaller roundtables built for deeper discussion. 

Startups are staying private longer leaving employees, who typically take a portion of their compensation as stock they can’t sell, with little hope of early liquidity.

When should you scale? How do you know you really have product-market fit? What does it take to land enterprise customers? How do you build the right team? And when you finally get in front of an investor, how do you make sure your pitch earns another conversation? 

Daytona Platforms announced on Friday that it had raised a $60 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation led by FirstMark Growth. The company says it has now raised a total of $91 million.

The AI era has changed how fast startups can grow. Startups can grow so fast that they hit high annual recurring revenue (ARR) numbers, only to crash and burn a few months later. At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt, Lovable go-to-market lead Luke Arno, Ben Broca of the AI platform Polsia, and Theory Ventures’ Tomasz Tunguz…

OpenAI is reportedly close to securing another mega round of private funding, rather than plowing ahead with an IPO. The AI lab is working on raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation in a round led by Coatue and investors in UAE, sources told CNBC.

Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Andruil’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. That idea, on Thursday, announced its emergence from stealth as Warhound, armed with $200 million in funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, Sequoia, and 8VC. The round values the…