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 …

OpenAI has closed a deal to raise $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, its largest funding round to date as the company is expected to hit the public markets this year. The round will add to OpenAI’s war chest as it spends enormous amounts of money on AI chips, …

In February, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) sent letters to seven U. companies working on autonomous vehicle technology with a list of questions. He especially wanted to know how often these companies’ vehicles — operated by Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox — rely on input from remote …

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been remaking its business around AI, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a plethora of new AI features. The most significant …

Anthropic has built its public identity around the winning idea that it’s the careful AI company. It publishes detailed work on AI risk, employs some of the best researchers in the field, and has been vocal about the responsibilities that come with building such powerful technology — so vocal, of …

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 …

Starcloud’s latest funding round values the space compute company at $1. 1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator. The company’s Series A, which closed 17 months after its demo day presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s …

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 …