Fundraising

Bolt’s wild ultimatum to its VCs will only succeed if they agree, expert says

Bolt’s aggressive ultimatum to its existing shareholders – in which it told them to buy many more shares at higher prices or it would take back their shares for payment of 1 cent a share – will be an expensive uphill battle, an expert familiar with Bolt’s corporate charter tells TechCrunch. To recap: On Tuesday, when […]

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Sarah Buchner started as a carpenter when she was 12 — now her AI construction startup has raised $20 million

Construction companies deal with a lot of documents — so many that it can be difficult to process and manage them all. According to one recent survey, a third of construction professionals found accessing documents to be a challenge in completing a project, while a fourth said that inaccurate project paperwork has contributed to a

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Reliant’s paper-scouring AI takes on science’s data drudgery

AI models have proven capable of many things, but what tasks do we actually want them doing? Preferably drudgery — and there’s plenty of that in research and academia. Reliant hopes to specialize in the kind of time-consuming data extraction work that’s currently a specialty of tired grad students and interns. “The best thing you

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Jeff Bezos’ brother’s firm has launched a debut $100M VC fund called HIPstr

HighPost Capital, a private equity firm run by Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos’ younger brother, and PE veteran David Moross, has launched a new venture capital arm called HIPstr. And with it, fresh capital to invest in startups. The new entity just announced its first VC fund of $100 million. HighPost Capital focuses on consumer companies and

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NEA led a $100M round into Fei-Fei Li’s new AI startup, now valued at over $1B

World Labs, a stealthy startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei Fei Li, has raised two rounds of financing  two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest financing was led by NEA and valued the company at over $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned from several people with knowledge of the investments. This

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She grew up a gearhead — now her startup has raised $4.3M to cut CO2 from trucking

The irony was not lost on her. Growing up the daughter of a racing car enthusiast father, Danielle Walsh had become — in her late 20s — the head of HSBC’s ‘Future Cities’ project, the global banking giant’s effort to serve clients’ climate change mandates. It was 2018, and she was reporting both into the banks’

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Antler doubles down on Southeast Asia with $72M second startup fund

Antler, the Singapore VC that focuses on early-stage investments, just closed its second Southeast Asia fund. It’s raised $72 million to double down on startups in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. This should be welcome news for startups. Like other regions, Southeast Asia has faced a persistent funding slump. Between January and July 2024, tech

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Anysphere, a GitHub Copilot rival, has raised $60M Series A at  $400M valuation from a16z, Thrive, sources say

Anysphere, a two-year-old startup that’s developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor, has raised over $60 million in a Series A financing at a $400 million post-money valuation, two sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch.  The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, also participated

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CloudPay, a payroll services provider, lands $120M in new funding

In 1996, two companies, Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions, formed a venture called CloudPay to provide payroll and payments services to enterprise clients. CloudPay grew quietly over the next several decades, adding workflow automation features to maintain pace with upstart rivals. It’s still growing, CFO Andy Thomson assures TechCrunch. Thomson claims that CloudPay is handling

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