Plaid, a company that connects financial applications to users’ bank accounts, enabling payments and data verification, has allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8 billion valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The valuation represents a 31% increase from the $6. 1 billion valuation the …

Weeks after stepping down as CEO from food delivery service Zomato and its parent Eternal, Indian entrepreneur Deepinder Goyal is back with a $54 million raise for wearable startup Temple, part of what the 43-year-old earlier described as a shift toward “higher-risk exploration and experimentation. ” On Friday, Goyal said …

A group of notable open source programmers are joining with a VC investor to launch a nonprofit called the Open Source Endowment in hopes of permanently solving the perennial issue with developing open source software: funding. Backers of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke (the former GitHub CEO who …

If you’ve built, backed, or operated inside high-growth startups, your experience could shape how the next wave of founders scales. On June 9 in Boston, TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 will bring together 1,000+ founders and investors for a focused day on the realities of growth. We’re inviting seasoned founders, VCs, …

Crypto is creeping back into the startup conversation, but at ETHDenver last week, the buzz was as much about Washington as it was about tokens. Policy shifts are rippling through the market as Tether and stablecoins face scrutiny, players like Stripe re-enter the conversation, and startups either find traction or …

Anthropic on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Vercept, an AI startup with deep roots to some of the biggest names in Seattle’s tech scene. The acquisition marks the latest after Anthropic acquired coding agent engine Bun in December to help scale Claude Code. Vercept had created tools for more …

AI has brought the startup world the rise of a new phenomenon: startups that almost instantly hit multimillion-dollar ARR (annual recurring revenue). Stories abound of founders going from zero to $10 million, or as much as $100 million, in annual recurring revenue in a matter of months. To be fair, …

With OpenAI on the verge of finalizing a new $100 billion round, and Anthropic just closing its own monster $30 billion raise, one thing is clear: The concept of investor “loyalty” is only hanging on by a thread. At least a dozen direct investors in OpenAI were announced as backers …

Quantum computing will not be replacing supercomputers in 2026, let alone reaching industrial scale. And yet, investor appetite for companies pursuing the elusive quantum advantage hasn’t dwindled — it has increased. Quantonation Ventures, a venture firm investing in quantum and physics-based startups, has closed its oversubscribed second fund at €220 …

For nearly three decades, Bill Gurley has been among of the most influential voices in Silicon Valley — a general partner at Benchmark whose early bets on companies like Uber, Zillow, and Stitch Fix helped define what modern venture capital looks like. Now, having moved to Austin and stepped back …