TechCrunch Startup News
Listen to select TechCrunch articles on startups coverage—who's raising, who's exiting, who's changing the world.
Episodes
Phia, the shopping startup founded by Bill Gates’ daughter, Phoebe, and her friend, Sophia Kianni, is under fire for a practice known as “cookie stuffing,” which helped the product receive commissions and credit for sales it did not actually generate, per a Bloomberg investigation.
Also, Lyzr, a startup that builds AI agents for enterprises, used its own AI agent to raise a $100 million round — proof, evi...
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AI chip maker SambaNova has raised at an $11 billion valuation months after Intel was rumored to be trying to buy it for about $1.6 billion.
Plus, Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on Github by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.
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Build a new kind of rocket engine, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Also, Blue Origin is raising $10 billion at a $130 billion pre-money valuation from Coatue Asset Management, Bezos himself and other big-name investors, the New York Times reported.
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Bidbus, which lets dealerships bid on used cars, has raised $15 million in a Series A round that was led by early-stage mobility fund Ibex Investors.
Also, Savi just raised $7 million in seed funding, and is launching its app for iPhone and Android on Tuesday.
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Station F, the Paris-based startup hub founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel in 2017, is gearing up for a new edition of its selective acceleration F/ai program that will cement its role as a stepping stone for AI startups.
Also, Even Realities, an ex-Apple team building camera-free smart glasses, raised $150M from Meituan and Tencent at a $1B valuation.
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As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, Midjourney is seeking to compel those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves.
Also, Selby's VC firm Copper Sky Capital is currently raising a $300 million second fund, according to a regulatory filing.
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Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion under contract for the inference systems powered by its chip.
Also, Neo is Bhavin Turakhia’s fifth venture and his latest involving enterprise software. This time he's taking on Microsoft Office, Google Apps with AI.
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July 1, 2026 • 4 mins
The startup, which runs a popular free AI leaderboard, launched its commercial service just last September.
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Corgi became embroiled in controversy when Papermark accused it of stealing its software. Corgi says it did not, raising new questions about vibe coding.
Also, Omen AI raised a $31 million Series A to monitor chip coolant and stop bacterial outbreaks in data centers.
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Aseon Labs, which came out of Y Combinator's 2026 spring cohort, has raised $10 million from Crane Venture Partners and others.
Also, General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition.
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The Jeff Bezos-backed startup finally revealed more pricing details for its debut EV, including a $29,950 starting price for the SUV variant, and boosted the base range to 205 miles.
Plus, new details have emerged about Valor's latest fund, which last year announced it was raising an unspecified amount of capital.
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Fika Jobs announced on Tuesday a $4 million pre-seed round, which will be used to continue developing the platform, grow the team, and prepare for a wider launch later this year.
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June 23, 2026 • 3 mins
After 18 years of focusing on Europe, early-stage investor Seedcamp said that it has raised $320 million for its latest fund which will see it expanding its presence in the United States.
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June 22, 2026 • 5 mins
French serial entrepreneur and open-source legend Jean-Baptiste Kempf has been building Kyber, an infrastructure layer to control remote devices in real time.
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World models are the next big thing in AI beyond LLMs and, with this round, Odyssey has cemented itself as one of the startups to watch.
Also, General Intuition is in talks to raise around $300 million at a roughly $2 billion valuation from backers including Jeff Bezos. The startup trains AI agents on spatial-temporal reasoning.
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June 18, 2026 • 4 mins
Critical Energy is turning rocket engines into geothermal power plants, and it wants to build 300 GW per year by 2045.
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Instead of heating metals, Foundation Alloy beats them into submission. The startup has raised $22 million to scale up production of its alloys.
Also, the company Probably wants to prevent hallucinations and factual errors from reaching users, and achieve accuracy on par with deterministic systems.
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The new round values the physical AI startup that aims to automate heavy engineering and drug design at $41 billion.
Also, unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics — Theker's machines are built to be reconfigured.
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SpaceX alumni Andrew Redd is betting the ocean has vast amounts of untapped geothermal energy.
Also, the funding round was led by Norwest, with participation from S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, and Oceans Ventures. Snowflake Ventures also participated as a strategic investor.
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AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round from a who's who of angels. It's betting companies will want power over, not lock-in, with model makers.
Also, backed by Alexis Ohanian’s 776 and Kindred Ventures, Zest uses transaction data and AI to generate restaurant recommendations based on users’ real dining habits and the places they frequent.
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