All good things come to those who wait. The first StrictlyVC of the year is headed to San Francisco in less than a month, on April 30, at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center. And you won’t want to miss out on another lineup of stellar speakers to punctuate the night’s …

The most advanced silicon chips have accelerated the development of artificial intelligence. Now can AI return the favor? Cognichip is building a deep learning model to work alongside engineers as they design new computer chips. The problem it is trying to solve is one the industry has lived with for …

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 …

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 …

Yet another startup aiming to help enterprises build, secure, and orchestrate AI agents has raised a honking-big seed round. Sycamore on Monday announced a $65 million seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks …

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 …

SoftBank has taken on a new $40 billion loan to help it cover its $30 billion commitment to invest in OpenAI as part of the AI model maker’s record-breaking $110 billion raise last month, the Japanese conglomerate said on Friday. Most striking is that the loan is unsecured and has …

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 …