Fundraise

Runware raises $50M Series A to help make image, video generation easier for developers

Venture /

Flaviu Radulesc started Runware in 2023 when he was testing a text-to-image company and realized that, though genAI tech was powerful, it was slow in generating images. So Radulesc teamed up with Ioana Hreninciuc and launched Runware as a dev tool platform that specializes in generating images, videos, and audio in real time. The company has seen much […]

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Slow Ventures cuts first check from $60M creator fund into woodworking founder

Venture /

Slow Ventures’ Creator Fund has invested $2 million into Jonthan Katz-Moses, a popular woodworking content creator with around 600,000 followers, nearly 75 million video views, and his own line of woodworking tools.  This marks the first investment for Slow’s $60 million Creator Fund since its launch in February. The fund looks to help creators launch

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How a Y Combinator food delivery app used TikTok to soar in the App Store

Startups /

The internet trend is simple: A friend or family member looks into the camera and tells viewers, in a slightly aggressive tone, that they are about to witness a presentation and that they had better be nice.  That’s what Kendall, the sister of Lucious McDaniel IV, did, and after she stepped aside, her brother pitched

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Betaworks’ third fund closes at $66M to invest in early-stage AI startups

Venture /

New York City-based Betaworks has closed its $66 million Fund III, which will focus on investing in early-stage AI companies.  Betaworks has been investing in AI since at least 2016 and, through its investment program Camp, has backed companies such as Huggingface and Granola. Jordan Crook, a partner at the firm (and former TechCrunch employee),

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Valla raises $2.7M to make legal recourse more accessible to employees

Startups /

After a while, Danae Shell got tired of hearing the same story over and over again.  “Something bad would happen to someone at work, and the story always ended the same way,” she told TechCrunch. “They just left, because doing anything else was incredibly complex and expensive.”  One doesn’t need to look far to notice

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This startup is making manure out of other biogas power plants and now has $62M to play with

Climate /

Working away on his PhD in Munich only a few years ago, Stephan Herrmann (now a doctor) couldn’t have conceived of a time when his idea for a carbon-negative power plant would attract millions in funding. But now, together with Reverion co-founder Felix Fischer, he has a $100 million backlog of orders for his invention

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Forestay, Europe’s newest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will focus on AI

Venture /

Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland, has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The VC wasn’t well known in Europe until it started to lead rounds in enterprise startups a couple of years ago, notably scanning software startup Scandit

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Kleiner Perkins leads $14.4M seed round into Fizz, a credit-building debit card aimed at Gen Z college students

Venture /

Carlo Kobe and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Zers that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornell at ages 19 and 21, respectively, in 2021 to build a startup called Fizz. The pair wanted to go beyond creating a debit card for the

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Norwest Venture Partners raises $3B for 17th vehicle, maintaining fund size despite market downturn

Fundraising /

Norwest Venture Partners, a 65-year-old firm backed solely by Wells Fargo, has raised its 17th fund at $3 billion. That’s a noteworthy number, given that NVP last raised the same amount in December 2021. That was the peak of the venture boom, and at that time, the firm said it increased its capital pool by

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