Investors have flocked to Y Combinator’s Demo Days for years to get their hands on promising startups building cool tech. After all, the accelerator has produced some of the biggest tech companies in the world, from Airbnb and Reddit to Dropbox, Zapier and Stripe. That’s why we make it a …

Earlier this month, it looked like all but two of Elon Musk’s 11 co-founders at his AI startup xAI had departed the company. Now, according to Business Insider, the remaining two co-founders, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, have left as well. BI said on Wednesday that Kroiss had told people …

When an 82-year-old Kentucky woman was offered $26 million from an AI company that wanted to build a data center on her land, she said no. Sure, that same company can try to rezone 2,000 acres nearby anyway, but as AI infrastructure stretches further into the real world, the real …

Aetherflux, the space solar power startup launched by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, is in talks to raise $250 million to $350 million for a Series B round that would value the company at $2 billion. The fundraising was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said that Index Ventures …

The surveillance tech industry today is in the spotlight, but not for the best reasons. With controversy around the U. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tapping into Flock’s camera network to surveil people, and home camera maker Ring drawing criticism for building new features that would enable law enforcement to ask …

When you’re building at breakneck speed, hiring a trusted team is crucial for an early-stage startup. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Isaiah Granet, the CEO and co-founder of Bland, a voice AI company that has grown from pre-seed to Series B in just 10 …

This is one of those Silicon Valley real-life episodes that seem pulled from the HBO satire show. This week, some really atrocious malware was discovered in an open source project developed by Y Combinator graduate LiteLLM. LiteLLM gives developers easy access to hundreds of AI models and provides features like …

Autonomous military aircraft maker Shield AI has raised $1. 5 billion in Series G funding at a $12. 7 billion post-money valuation, the company announced on Tuesday. The deal was led by PE firm Advent (which has a $1 billion budget to invest in defense tech, it says) and a …

AI was once again the buzzword for this latest batch of YC Demo Day companies. Nearly 190 companies participated in Y Combinator’s Winter ’26 cohort and presented their startups in a Demo Day on Tuesday. These companies are working on products across industries such as law, transportation, and healthcare. I …

One of the blockbuster hits of the AI age is, without a doubt, legal tech startup Harvey. On Wednesday, the company confirmed that it had closed a new raise at an $11 billion valuation, after reports circulated last month that it was working on another monster round. The company confirmed …