The Silicon Valley dream is to build a tech startup that is such a unique idea it alters the commercial universe and turns its founders into billionaires. Participating in the Valley’s most famed startup factory, Y Combinator, is often part of that dream. Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe all got started there. Yet, a deep dive […]
Medical and administrative staff are increasingly overwhelmed with piles of paperwork they have to fill out every day. Dozens, if not hundreds, of startups, are seeing opportunities to make those bureaucratic processes less burdensome with the help of generative AI. These companies are building AI medical scribes, platforms for pre-authorizing health insurance payments, and products
Lumen Orbit has closed an oversubscribed, eight-figure seed round of more than $10 million, a source familiar with the details told TechCrunch. That would make it one of the hottest deals, if not the hottest deal, of the most recent Y Combinator batch. The Redmond, Washington-based startup is pursuing a moonshot idea to build a
Lumen Orbit closed one of the biggest rounds from Y Combinator’s last cohort Read More »
Earlier this year, Abel founder Daniel Francis was going 135 miles per hour down a highway in Oakland, California. The driver, a police officer, had a gun in his lap. Francis has made a habit of riding shotgun with policemen in the name of research for his company, which creates AI to fill out police
From Elon Musk to cop car chases, how a software engineer launched a police AI startup Read More »
Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re diving into OpenAI’s $6.6 billion fundraising round, the fifth Cybertruck recall in less than a year, and a neat project that’s Shazam-ing songs heard on a San Francisco street. Let’s get into it. OpenAI closed the largest VC round of all time this week. The startup
OpenAI closes the largest VC round of all time Read More »
Kirsten Korosec, Devin Coldewey, and Margaux MacColl are unpacking another busy week in the tech world, kicking things off with Governor Newsom’s veto of SB 1047, the controversial AI bill aimed at stopping real-world disasters caused by AI systems before they happen. This may not be the last we’ll see of the bill, however, as
YC takes a bite out of PearAI, and French startups have a new home Read More »
Ali Rowghani, a former Y Combinator managing director and former Twitter executive, is launching a venture firm called Maxq. Maxq is targeting $250 million for its debut fund, Maxq Fund I, according to an SEC filing. The firm will focus on seed-stage investments, Axios reported on Wednesday. Rowghani’s former YC colleagues Mia Mabanta, Simon Lu,
Former head of YC’s Continuity Fund Ali Rowghani launches new seed firm Read More »
The lawmaker behind California’s recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, is going down swinging. For months, Silicon Valley debated whether SB 1047 would have a chilling effect on California’s AI boom or would protect against catastrophic harms from advanced AI systems. The answer never became clear, since California governor Gavin Newsom decided it was the
A Y Combinator startup named PearAI launched with an X post thread and YouTube video on Saturday and created immediate controversy. And some of that is splashing onto YC itself. PearAI offers an AI coding editor. The startup’s founder Duke Pan has openly said that it’s a cloned copy of another AI editor called Continue,
This episode of Equity had so many themes: VC karaoke, the SpaceX economy, no moats for AI, OpenAI versus open source. You know it’s going to be good when the conversation between host Kirsten Korosec and fellow TCers Devin Coldewey and Margaux MacColl starts with the evergreen question: is it ever OK to use shirtless
Green flags for defense tech and Silicon Valley’s longevity obsession Read More »
