Anthropic’s Pentagon deal is a cautionary tale for startups chasing federal contracts

Admin3 months ago02 mins

The Pentagon has officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the two failed to agree on how much control the military should have over its AI models, including its use in autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. As Anthropic’s $200 million contract fell apart, the DoD turned to OpenAI instead, which accepted and then watched ChatGPT uninstalls surge 295%. As the stakes keep rising, the question remains: how much unrestricted…

Robinhood’s startup fund stumbles in NYSE debut

Admin3 months ago05 mins

Retail investors are famously locked out of the startup world. Robinhood is attempting to change that by allowing the general public to invest in a portfolio of what it calls “some of the most exciting private companies operating today.” To do this, the company that pioneered the commission-free brokerage model has secured access to eight…

Cluely CEO Roy Lee admits to publicly lying about revenue numbers last year

Admin3 months ago06 mins

The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.” Yet his post on X also misrepresents the…

DiligenceSquared uses AI, voice agents to make M&A research affordable

Admin3 months ago05 mins

A typical merger-and-acquisition process is time-consuming and expensive, even for the largest, well-staffed private equity firms. In addition to spending countless hours meeting with senior executives of potential targets and modeling financial outcomes, these groups spend millions of dollars on external advisers: accountants, lawyers, and management consultants. Since expenses for external advisers are not reimbursed…

Hardware testing startup Nominal hits B valuation, raises 5M in 10 months

Hardware testing startup Nominal hits $1B valuation, raises $155M in 10 months

Admin3 months ago02 mins

Nominal on Thursday announced a fresh $80M Series B extension round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund. This followed the company’s $75M Series B round led by Sequoia in September. Nominal offers software that helps hardware engineers test their designs and began as a picks-and-shovels type of startup for the defense industry….

How 1,000+ customer calls shaped a breakout enterprise AI startup

Admin3 months ago07 mins

This isn’t David Park’s first rodeo. The veteran founder and TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus has certainly been battle-tested in the enterprise arena. On this episode of Build Mode, Park joins Isabelle Johannessen to discuss how he and his team are intentionally iterating, fundraising, and scaling Narada. This enterprise AI solution uses large action models to automate complex, multistep workflows across enterprise systems. At face…

His house burned down. He used the insurance money to build PopSockets.

Admin3 months ago01 mins

Does a consumer hardware company need to get on the VC treadmill to succeed? Eleven years and 290 million products sold across 115 countries later, PopSockets has proven that the bootstrapped, low-dilution path more viable than the industry gives it credit for. The global consumer hardware brand was built on less than $500k, no institutional capital, and a philosophy professor’s determination. Watch as founder and former CEO…

Why AI startups are selling the same equity at two different prices

Admin3 months ago07 mins

As competition among AI startups heats up, founders and VCs are turning to novel valuation mechanisms to manufacture a perception of market dominance. Until recently, the most sought-after companies raised multiple rounds of funding in quick succession at escalating valuations. However, because constant fundraising distracts founders from building their products, lead VCs have devised a…

Stripe wants to turn your AI costs into a profit center

Admin3 months ago05 mins

Stripe on Monday released a preview of a new feature that could help AI startups (and other companies) solve the problem of passing through the underlying costs of AI model usage to their customers. Stripe’s feature, however, goes even further than just passing through the costs of the tokens. It allows startups to charge a…

Cursor has reportedly surpassed B in annualized revenue

Cursor has reportedly surpassed $2B in annualized revenue

Admin3 months ago03 mins

The AI coding assistant Cursor has surpassed $2 billion in annualized revenue, a metric calculated by multiplying the latest month’s revenue by 12, according to a Bloomberg source. This individual says the four-year-old startup saw its revenue run rate double over the past three months. The disclosure appears timed to counter a recent wave of…