Global investing in startups hit $297 billion in Q1 2026, breaking all records, according to new Crunchbase data. 5x increase over the $118 billion raised in the previous quarter. This single-quarter haul outpaces every full year of global VC activity prior to 2019. The unprecedented spike was fueled by just …

The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve has gone from bad to worse this week. Among the fresh allegations from the anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver is the claim that Delve allegedly took an open source tool and passed it off as its own work without proper license attribution to or …

To build the autonomous machines of the future, sometimes your model needs a model. Companies developing self-driving cars, robots manipulating the physical environment, or autonomous construction equipment collect thousands, if not millions, of hours of video data for evaluation and training. Organizing and cataloging that video is now a job …

Whoop, the fitness and health tracking wearable company, has closed a $575 million Series G funding round at a $10. 1 billion valuation — nearly triple its last reported valuation of $3. 6 billion — in a deal that brings together sovereign wealth funds, major health institutions, and some of …

Sometimes an apparently good idea, a big raise from a big-name VC, and a sea of well-connected angel investors is not enough. Less than a year after launching, Yupp is closing its business, co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced on Tuesday. Yupp offered a crowdsourced AI model-picking service. It …

Pete Martin remembers raising a $5 million seed round at a $25 million post-money valuation for his AI-powered cybersecurity company Realm way back in 2024, aka, like a thousand “AI years” ago. That valuation seemed high for that amount at the time, he recalled. But today, “it’s pretty typical” to …

Sometimes, Michiko Kato thinks back on the great challenges of her life. She once dropped everything in her native city of Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, she decided to leave her career in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup …

Mercor, a popular AI recruiting startup, has confirmed a security incident linked to a supply chain attack involving the open-source project LiteLLM. The AI startup told TechCrunch on Tuesday that it was “one of thousands of companies” affected by a recent compromise of LiteLLM’s project, which was linked to a …

As AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code each month, a new bottleneck is emerging: ensuring that software works as intended. Qodo, a startup building AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, is betting that verification will define the next phase of software development. The New York-headquartered …

AI may be booming, but behind the scenes, companies are wasting vast amounts of expensive compute. GPUs sit idle, workloads are over-provisioned, and cloud costs continue to climb. ScaleOps believes the problem isn’t a shortage — it’s mismanagement. The startup, which builds software that automatically manages and reallocates computing resources …