Founders hope that their startups continually raise larger funding rounds at escalating valuations. But unexpected challenges, such as a global health crisis or a sudden surge in interest rates, can have a significant impact on a company’s ability to maintain its valuations. Some of these startups may have to resort to down rounds, which are […]
VCs on how to ‘survive and thrive’ after a down round Read More »
Brigid O’Brien has seen her share of pitches from founders, and she has a message for many of them: Not every investor will be impressed by your massive TAM, short for total addressable market. “Often people are chasing big TAMs, which makes a lot of sense, because we’re investing in venture capital, so we’re looking
Why founders shouldn’t chase massive TAMs Read More »
This year, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 showcased the incredible talent and groundbreaking ideas of our 2024 Startup Battlefield 200 cohort. Out of thousands of applications, we selected 200 of the most promising startups, each bringing unique innovations to their respective industries. The competition culminated in an electrifying event where these startups had the opportunity to pitch
Startup Battlefield 200: Celebrating outstanding achievements Read More »
By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning. AI coding may one day involve agents that can write the programs themselves based on a natural language
AI coding assistants can help startups develop products, seed VCs believe Read More »
Suno CEO Mikey Shulman found himself in an unlikely place for the founder of a generative AI music company: a songwriting class at Berklee College of Music. “It sounds like walking into the lion’s den,” Shulman said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “The approach of just walking in there and saying, ‘don’t worry, there’s no
As generative AI gets better, what will happen to artists? Read More »
Rivian’s chief software officer Wassym Bensaid opened up at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 last week about his thoughts on physical buttons (“an anomaly“) and how his company will help power VW offshoot Scout’s EVs. But there’s one other item on his to-do list that he’s “super excited” about: making Rivian’s vehicles work with third-party app developers.
Rivian’s software boss is ‘super excited’ about third-party apps Read More »
Fundraising in 2025 will continue to be a “tale of two cities,” VC Renata Quintini, co-founder of early-stage VC Renegade Partners, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “Some companies, really having the promise of going after big markets growing fast, [will be] receiving a lot of funding and momentum.” But on the other side,
AI startups will need ‘quality of revenue’ to raise in 2025, seed VCs warn Read More »
“Move cautiously and red-team things” is sadly not as catchy as “move fast and break things.” But three AI safety advocates made it clear to startup founders that going too fast can lead to ethical issues in the long run. “We are at an inflection point where there are tons of resources being moved into
AI safety advocates tell founders to slow down Read More »
At TechCrunch Disrupt, our team sits front and center, furiously typing away at our laptops to publish real-time news from impressive speakers like NFL quarterback-turned-founder Colin Kaepernick, Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas, and Ashton Kutcher. We are a well-oiled machine. Some writers have been covering Disrupt since the old days, before Meta was Meta and
The brightest bling of TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Read More »
One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better. “I think we’ve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years,” Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of
No, startups shouldn’t always take the highest valuation, seed VCs say Read More »
