Industry News

Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup, launches with a massive $1B, says it’s ‘ready’ to start developing drugs

Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery. On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors […]

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Seed-stage firm Eniac Ventures raises $220M across two funds

Eniac has raised $60 million for Select 1, the firm’s vehicle for follow-on later-stage investments, and $160 million for Eniac VI.

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Stainless is helping OpenAI, Anthropic and others build SDKs for their APIs

Stainless, a startup building a platform to generate SDKs from APIs, has raised a seed round of funding from Sequoia.

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The TikTok ban clears key hurdle while Perplexity AI continues to shake up search

Well, if you are a big TikTok fan and live in the United States, I have some bad news for you: A bill that would force a sale of TikTok or ban it in the United States passed the Senate. And the president is expected to sign it. Given that China has made noise that […]

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Parloa, a conversational AI platform for customer service, raises $66M

Conversational AI platform Parloa has nabbed $66 million in a Series B round, a year after it raised $21 million from a swathe of European investors to propel its international growth. The German company is focusing on the U.S. in particular, and last year opened an office in New York, too. It says this hub […]

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Madica, a program by Flourish Ventures, steps up pre-seed investing in Africa

Madica, an investment program launched by U.S.-based investor Flourish Ventures to back pre-seed startups in Africa, plans to invest in up to 10 ventures by the end of the year, ramping up its funding efforts after closing three initial deals. Madica disclosed the plans to TechCrunch, indicating accelerated investing in the coming year as it […]

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French startup FlexAI exits stealth with $30M to ease access to AI compute

With the current iteration of its product going through its paces with a handful of beta customers, FlexAI will launch its first commercial product later this year.

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TechCrunch Minute: How HeadSpin’s founder fraudster almost got away with lying to investors

News that the former founder of HeadSpin is headed to prison for fraud was further evidence that the last boom in the paired worlds of startup and venture capital led to more than just a little bit of fraud. Manish Lachwani, founder in question, is getting prison time and a massive fine for lying to […]

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Campus, a community college startup, receives $23M Series A extension led by Founders Fund

Although many students in the United States enter community colleges intending to transfer to four-year universities, only 16% of those students receive bachelor’s degrees within six years. But Campus, an online alternative to traditional community colleges, has an approach that aims to change that.  Many adjunct professors at the nation’s top universities, including UCLA, Princeton […]

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Fintech Fundid was shut down over interest rates and a strained cap table

To keep going, Fundid “needed to put up a lot more collateral because of the changing environment,” Stefanie Sample said.

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