TechCrunch Startups – Spoken Edition

It's no surprise that many big, left-leaning social media accounts have recently joined Bluesky — but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center attempts to quantify that shift. This comes as an update to Pew's news influencer report released in November 2024, which did not include Bluesky in its numbers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Misfits Market, the online platform that delivers imperfect groceries to help minimize waste, announced the acquisition of household restocking service The Rounds on Friday. As a result of the deal, Misfits Market plans to take on over 250 items from The Rounds' inventory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference next month, Apple on Thursday announced new figures related to the U.S. App Store's financial success. The company says its U.S. App Store ecosystem has generated $406 billion in developer billings and sales Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-powered office suite Context raises $11 million in seed funding from Lux Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and General Catalyst Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rillet directly pulls data from their customers' banks and platforms to generate financial statements, including the balance sheet and income statement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reflecting on 10 years since its launch, the honeypot maker explains why the company did not take on any VC funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All Thibault Launay and his wife Simi wanted nearly five years ago was to build a dream home in Portugal, where they both now live.  But what they encountered instead was a broken system. “Fourteen months of delays, 20% budget overruns, and endless stress managing over 10 subcontractors,” Thibault recalled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Salesforce has acquired cloud data management firm Informatica in an $8 billion equity deal, marking a major move in its push to strengthen its AI and data infrastructure capabilities. The announcement, made Tuesday, comes about a year after early rumors of the acquisition sent both companies' stock prices sliding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Outset Ventures, the Auckland-based venture firm and incubator that spun out deep tech unicorns like Rocket Lab and LanzaTech, has closed its second fund at an oversubscribed $41.5 million NZD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Key to the company's growth are the next products RevenueCat has on its roadmap, the company's founder says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The tale of how smart toilet startup Throne landed its seed round is so full of serendipities, one could almost believe it was orchestrated by the hand of Fortuna, Roman god of providence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to “scheme” and deceive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hinge Health, a digital physical therapist company, closed its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday at $37.56, up about 17% over the $32 IPO price it set the previous day. That's a good first-day result. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From a struggling family tea estate to an innovative climate venture, Alt Carbon has raised $12 million in a seed round as it plans to scale its carbon dioxide removal work in the South Asian nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is a new accounting software in town, coming in with a fresh $17.2 million raise and a desire to shake things up. The company, Field, hopes to automate the grunt work. “The tax industry is facing a genuine crisis,” Leroy Kerry, Field's co-founder CEO, told TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brex has once again made the surprising, but perhaps realistic, decision to partner with another one-time competitor. This time Zip, the CEOs of both companies told TechCrunch exclusively.  In April 2022, fintech Brex announced it was making “a big push” into both the enterprise and software. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cairo-based Sylndr has raised $15.7 million as it expands beyond online used car sales into auto financing, servicing, and tools for dealers. The round was led by Development Partners International's Nclude Fund and included follow-on investments from Algebra Ventures and Nclude. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gravitee, a platform designed to help companies manage their APIs and other digital traffic pipelines, has raised $60 million in a Series C funding round led by Sixth Street Growth with participation from Riverside Acceleration Capital and Albion VC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The global assistive technology market was valued at more than $22 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow substantially by 2030. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Roughly a month after Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based startup developing AI tools for video creation, said it secured $43 million in new funding, the company has raised more, according to a filing with the SEC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees, after a previous attempt to hire one didn't go as planned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Savings and investing startup Acorns has acquired EarlyBird, an investment gifting platform for families, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the acquisition, EarlyBird will shut down, and all customer accounts will officially close on June 23. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pronto, which provides cleaning, laundry and home services within 10 minutes, has raised $2M at a $12.5M valuation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-powered notetaking app Granola is raising $43 million in funding at a $250 million valuation. It is also launching a team sharing feature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Enterprises want access to new software and AI tools but can't risk sending their sensitive data out to a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Tensor9 looks to help software companies land more enterprise customers by helping them deploy their software directly into a customer's tech stack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI's, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund's most successful early-backed portfolio companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Realta hopes to build power plants cheaply enough to supply power as low as $40 per megawatt-hour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An analysis by Epoch AI, a nonprofit AI research institute, suggests the AI industry may not be able to eke massive performance gains out of reasoning AI models for much longer. As soon as within a year, progress from reasoning models could slow down, according to the report's findings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AllTrails, the hiking and biking companion that was named 2023's iPhone App of the Year, is launching a new premium membership called “Peak” that includes an upgraded feature set. This $80-per-year subscription will introduce AI tools to build custom routes, real-time trail condition forecasts, trail traffic heatmaps, and a feature that lets you identify trees Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

VCs are known to move in herds, which is why Eric Slesinger stands out a bit. While most American investors chase AI startups or U.S.-based defense tech startups, the former CIA officer is hunting for defense tech deals in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

U.S. authorities indicted three Russians and one Kazakhstan national for hacking and selling access to a botnet made of vulnerable internet-connected devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It took seven years of hard work for Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of sales automation startup Clay, to see the company's product finally take off in 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social media startup Fizz is suing grocery delivery giant Instacart and party planning app Partiful for trademark infringement, the company announced on Thursday. Earlier this week, Instacart launched a new drinks and snack delivery app for parties called Fizz and announced that Partiful had integrated Fizz directly into its platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Breathe has developed a suite of tools that it says helps automakers and others get the most out of their batteries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As “vibe coding” gains in popularity and tech companies push devs in their employ to embrace generative AI tools, a platform that scans for vulnerabilities in AI-generated code has raised a fresh round of funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Agree.com says its AI-powered e-signature platform is different from competitors because it includes invoicing and payment processing. That's why the company might have a shot at tackling the industry goliath, Docusign.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Individuals may work closely with AI agents as they become increasingly prevalent in the workplace. According to a report by Boston Consulting Group, the market for AI agents is expected to grow at a 45% compound annual growth rate over the next five years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's an unspoken pressure nowadays to share all your special moments online, whether it be birthdays, graduations, or engagements.  However, not everyone has the skills to take high-quality pictures, and often, people find themselves too distracted to snap the perfect shot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While many tech companies are mandating that their employees return to their offices, and putting an emphasis on building in-person teams, they are also turning in droves to Latin America to find developer talent — especially for post-training AI models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ara Partners recently raised an $800 million infrastructure fund focused on reducing carbon emissions in industrial sectors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman co-founded, plans to unveil Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent. Also, the dating app Raw claims it uses end-to-end encryption, but spilled its users' dating preferences and granular location data to the open web. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices