Browsing: Startups

Year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has wowed Silicon Valley with an impressive founding team and a mission to find ways to train large models with less data. On Wednesday, the company announced it had raised a $1 billion Series A round, co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly at a $6 billion valuation.

Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies more efficiently build and test software, including code written by AI, announced Wednesday a $66 million Series Cfunding round led by Sequoia that values the company at $1 billion. 

Last month, advertising company Infillion acquired location-data platform Foursquare, a once popular social network, at an undisclosed value. Now, in a new blog post, Foursquare co-founder and former CEO Dennis Crowley said that investors didn’t see any returns from the sale.

When Alex Baikovitz co-founded Mach9 Robotics in 2021, his goal was to build a better, faster, and cheaper way for civil engineers to do visual inspections. The company aimed to cut through red tape and modernize the slow, outdated processes that bog down construction in the United States.

Eric Schmidt’s fortune is about to get even bigger. The former Google CEO is reported to own about 1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions of dollars in the leading AI lab’s Series A round in 2021, per Bloomberg. The startup was valued at $461 million at the time

Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuyda stood up onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt and presented a conversational chatbot called IO that acted as a lifestyle concierge to help people book restaurants and vacations along with other tasks. 

On Monday, Amazon Web Services released a tool called TorchNeuron that lets AI startups easily move their AI apps onto Amazon’s AI chip, Trainium. In doing so, Amazon is also taking a direct stab at the the software advantage that has helped Nvidia become the default hardware choice for AI apps, and spurred its rise…

Town, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup developing AI assistants, nabbed a unicorn valuation on Monday, announcing a $108 million Series B funding round co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The company launched publicly just four months ago and said it reached millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue in a matter of weeks. It…

Even Healthcare has raised $50 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, as the Indian startup seeks to change how hospitals in the world’s most populous country make money and how doctors are rewarded.

After chatbot startup Character.AI filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, many of its employees will have the opportunity to take jobs at Disney.