Startups

Generative AI funding reached new heights in 2024

If there was any doubt, the generative AI bubble didn’t burst in 2024. Investments in generative AI, which encompasses a range of AI-powered apps, tools, and services to generate text, images, videos, speech, music, and more, reached new heights last year. According to data from financial tracker PitchBook compiled for TechCrunch, generative AI companies worldwide […]

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Peter Thiel-backed venture debt firm Tacora raises $268.7M for new fund

Tacora Capital, a Texas firm that specializes in venture debt, has raised $268.7 million for its second fund, according to a new SEC filing. Tacora’s inaugural fund in 2022 raised about $350 million, including $250 million from Peter Thiel — the prominent Republican billionaire and investor — in what was considered an “unusually large investment”

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A look back on my favorite episodes of TechCrunch’s Found podcast

TechCrunch’s Found podcast, which has brought listeners the stories behind the startups since April 2022, released its final episode today. I’ve been one of the hosts of Found since November 2022 and in that time have spoken to more than 75 founders about the startups they are building. These founders hail from many different backgrounds

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New Year’s cybersecurity resolutions that every startup should keep

As regular readers of TechCrunch will know, 2024 was — much like the years before it — full of data breaches, ransomware attacks, and mass-hacks exploiting some of the most trivial software vulnerabilities. Even the most well-resourced organizations failed to keep hackers out of their systems over the past twelve months. AT&T experienced its second

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From AI agents to enterprise budgets, 20 VCs share their predictions on enterprise tech in 2025

While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as

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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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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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Trump’s proposed university endowment tax could hurt funding, VC warns

Some VCs are looking at the Trump administration’s proposed massive tax increase on university endowments with alarm, warns Ann Miura-Ko, co-founder at Floodgate Partners. “There is a proposal right now to take the endowment tax from 1.4 percent to 35 percent and most people would say, well endowments are super rich, why do we care?  Well, they

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200 VCs wanted to get into Lumen Orbit’s $11M seed round

Lumen Orbit, a startup looking to build data centers in space, was able to close its recent seed round in mere days amid intense investor interest. The Redmond, Washington-based company closed on a $11 million seed round at a $40 million valuation, confirming prior TechCrunch reporting that the company had raised a competitive double-digit round

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