Startups

What failed before might succeed now — or fail again — and other startup bets

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week in startup news, we have some contrarian bets, funding rounds from all around the world, new VC funds, and a final word of warning. Most […]

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Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say

Running a startup can be expensive, requiring a multitude of different subscriptions.  Cap table management software, which helps founders organize their funding, can cost thousands of dollars a year. San Francisco-based Carta is the market leader in this industry. But some startup founders say Carta is making it too hard to cancel their subscriptions. The

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ServiceTitan’s IPO is a big winner that could inspire fintechs

ServiceTitan, which offers financial and customer management software for the trades, went public in a big way on Thursday, much to the delight of retail investors. The stock quickly popped from its opening IPO sales price of $71 million to $105 a share in modest trading volume. It is currently maintaining an above-$100 price. ServiceTitan’s

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Evinced’s $55M C round will help bring its accessibility dev tools (and AI) to Europe

Making sure your software is accessible is fast becoming a must rather than a nice-to-have, and Evinced is one of a wave of startups helping make that happen. The company is about to expand to Europe, where new accessibility regulations are about to take effect, and has raised $55 million to fuel the expansion. Evinced

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The founders of SlideShare are making sharing docs more social with their new platform, Jaunt

When SlideShare, the presentation-sharing service acquired by Scribd, launched in 2006, generative AI technology was significantly less advanced than it is today, and social networking platforms were just beginning to take off. Recognizing the evolution of AI and the increasing desire for innovative ways to share documents, the founders of SlideShare—Amit Ranjan (COO), Jonathan Boutelle

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Cartesia claims its AI is efficient enough to run pretty much anywhere

It’s becoming increasingly costly to develop and run AI. OpenAI’s AI operations costs could reach $7 billion this year, while Anthropic’s CEO recently suggested that models costing over $10 billion could arrive soon. So the hunt is on for ways to make AI cheaper. Some researchers are focusing on techniques to optimize existing model architectures — i.e.

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Microsoft’s M12 invests another $22.5M into NeuBird, months after its $22M seed round

Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks with generative AI. Having sold their previous cloud-native storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million, the pair was well-versed in the IT challenges faced by today’s enterprises. “It’s very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There’s

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Flare raises $30M to thwart info-stealers like those used on Snowflake customers

Cybercrime became easier in 2024 with the rise of info-stealer malware, or software that collects login credentials. Instead of breaking into target networks using vulnerabilities, hackers can just log in with those stolen credentials. They don’t even have to steal them themselves, but can buy them on the dark web. IBM’s 2024 X-Force Intelligence report

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