Startups

This app just raised $14M to take on the loneliness epidemic

One Friday evening, Alyx van der Vorm couldn’t stop thinking, “I should do something with someone.” But she found herself alone once again on a Friday night, thinking about just heading to the gym. That was when she realized that trying to make plans with people these days is incredibly hard.  “Figuring out who’s around, […]

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Lovable’s CEO isn’t too worried about the vibe-coding competition

Every seat in Copenhagen’s Bella Center was full as Anton Osika, the co-founder of the vibe coding app Lovable, took the stage at this year’s TechBBQ conference. Lovable specializes in helping people build apps and websites, especially people with no coding experience. It’s one of the standouts in the popular AI category known as vibe-coding,

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FieldAI raises $405M to build universal robot brains

FieldAI, an Irvine, California-based, has raised $405 million across multiple previously undisclosed rounds to develop what it calls “foundational embodied AI models” — essentially robot brains designed to help everything from humanoids to quadrupeds to self-driving cars adapt to new environments. The company announced the funding Wednesday; the most recent round raised $314 million in

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Billing platform Lava raises $5.8M to build digital wallets for the ‘agent-native economy’

A new startup, Lava Payments, aims to take on payment giants by building a solution for the modern web where AI agents now handle transactions for their customers. The idea came to founder Mitchell Jones after he left his earlier Y Combinator-backed fintech startup, Lendtable, as he began to experiment with AI. He saw the

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A top designer was banned from Dribbble. Now he’s building his own competitor.

Dribbble has permanently banned dozens of designers from its platform following a new effort to pivot to a marketplace and chase monetization. This includes one of the platform’s most well-known designers, Gleb Kuznetsov, founder of the San Francisco-based design studio Milkinside. Dribbble deleted his account with its over 210 million followers because he shared his contact information with prospective clients through

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OpenMind wants to be the Android operating system of humanoid robots

Many companies are focused on building robots, or the hardware components to help them move, grip objects, or interact with the world around them, Silicon Valley-based OpenMind is focused under the hood. OpenMind is building a software layer, OM1, for humanoid robots that acts as an operating system. The company compares itself to being the

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What founders should think about if looking to raise a Series C

Startup founders face a perplexing and even contradictory capital market in 2025, according to Sapphire Ventures partner Cathy Gao. “Capital isn’t scarce. But access to that capital is harder than ever,” she said. Gao, who spoke at TechCrunch’s All Stage conference in July, said it’s possible for startup founders, especially those in later Series C

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Why Dispo’s co-founder made the leap from social media to steelmaking

Daniel Liss, co-founder of the social network Dispo and the dating app Teaser AI, is convinced he’s onto the next big thing: steelmaking.  It all started, incongruously, with a few op-eds he wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement in social media. The commentaries apparently caught the attention of some folks in Washington D.C., Liss told

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

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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