News without the noise
Startup news: funding rounds, launches, acquisitions and shutdowns, with the founders and investors behind them.
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AI infrastructure startup Runware is building a factory in Romania to assemble modular data center pods on an assembly line. CEO Flaviu Fadulescu told TechCrunch the company plans to scale production to 30 megawatts of capacity per day by 2028, nearly a gigawatt per month. Runware says it has received $1 billion in committed interest for its Sonic pods since offering them to outside customers a month ago.
On Thursday, Wabi, the AI startup founded by Replika creator Eugenia Kuyda, said it has raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation after announcing a pivot of sorts from prompt-based app-building to an AI messenger that now describes itself as a personal agent.
Upwind, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to secure cloud infrastructure, has raised a $400 million Series C at a $3.8 billion valuation, a round that nearly fell apart after publicly traded observability company Datadog attempted to buy the startup, according to a person familiar with Upwind. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers including Greylock Partners and Craft Ventures.
A new NASA feature details how the agency's University Student Research Challenge helped launch AG3 Labs, a startup now manufacturing thousands of military training drones per month. Co-founder Gavin Gardner, a former Michigan State student who participated in the NASA program, said the experience was a critical booster for the company.
Re:Build, the Massachusetts-based manufacturing accelerator that spun out electric vehicle startup Slate Auto, has raised $2.1 billion to expand its capacity to manufacture hard-tech products and launch new industrial startups, the company announced Tuesday.
Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive has raised a $10 billion fund to back at least 10 late-stage companies, with individual investments of up to $1 billion, it announced Tuesday. The fund, one of the biggest raised so far this year, is aimed at the capital-intensive fields of artificial intelligence and defense.
Rohit Patel, a director at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, has left the company after eight years to found Ndoc, an AI-native productivity suite he hopes will unseat Microsoft Office and Google Workspace by offering a transparent, all-in-one alternative.
Global venture funding to robotics startups reached $9.9 billion in the third quarter of 2026, more than double the $4.3 billion invested in the same period a year earlier, according to Crunchbase data. The sector has seen a year-over-year increase of approximately 185% for the first three quarters of 2026, with China and the United States leading the investment.
Anduril now says its BlueChip laptop, built with Qualcomm, will meet Buy American standards when it launches, and the defense contractor has opened orders for the first machines.
Billy Evans, the longtime partner of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is facing growing scrutiny over his Austin-based startup Haemanthus, which claims to use laser technology to detect disease from blood, saliva, and urine. Interest in the company has surged since the release of the documentary "You Can See Everything" on Oct. 16, but Haemanthus has yet to launch a commercial product or publish independent data validating its technology. The company has reportedly raised up to $20 million and holds at least one patent, but its chief technology officer resigned in March, and questions remain about what the startup has actually built.
Equity platform Carta and secondary-investment firm NewView have formed a partnership aimed at making it easier for private startups to offer employees early liquidity through tender offers, transactions in which workers sell a portion of their shares at a predetermined price to an approved investor.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has been awarded $85 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce under the CHIPS Act to develop advanced semiconductors and power electronics tailored for the fusion energy industry. The grant, announced Thursday, also gives the government a stake in the startup, which expects to turn on its Sparc demonstration reactor next year.
Daytona Platforms, a three-year-old startup building a cloud infrastructure specifically designed for long-running AI agents, announced on Friday that it had raised a $60 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by FirstMark Growth, which also led the company's $24 million Series A in February, and includes a roster of high-profile angel investors.
Robinhood Ventures has invested $10 million in Cognition, the developer of the AI coding tool Devin, the company exclusively told Fortune. The investment, made as part of Cognition’s $2 billion Series E round in September, comes months after Robinhood put $75 million into OpenAI, signaling a bet that the market for AI coding tools will support multiple winners.
Virginia Murdoch, who co-founded ebook startup Booki.sh before AI coding tools existed, told founders at Google Ascend in Sydney last week that the AI era has made building software almost free and that customer trust, not technical speed, now decides which startups win.
Warhound, a defense startup based on a concept developed by Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey, emerged from stealth on Thursday with $200 million in seed funding to clone and genetically engineer military working dogs, aiming to address supply chain vulnerabilities and improve canine performance for the U.S. military and law enforcement.
Andreessen Horowitz announced Thursday it is rebranding its a16z Crypto investment unit to a16z Frontier, expanding its mandate beyond digital assets to invest in artificial intelligence, autonomous machines, and other emerging technologies. The $2.2 billion fund, launched with a crypto-only focus in May, will continue backing blockchain companies, but the name change marks a significant shift for the firm.
Fusion startup Helion has secured a letter of intent from the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $175 million in CHIPS Act funding to support advanced semiconductor research and manufacturing, the company announced. The three-year initiative, which Helion is matching with $50 million in private investment, will focus on high-voltage semiconductors for commercial fusion energy systems and domestic supply chain development.
Kevin Weil, formerly OpenAI's science lead, has launched Warp Sciences, an AI startup that trains robots to automate wet-lab tasks for drug discovery. The company has raised $215 million at an $865 million valuation, with Lightspeed leading the round alongside IVP, Premji Invest, and Lux Capital.
Flapping Airplanes, a year-old artificial intelligence laboratory founded by three Stanford-linked entrepreneurs, has raised $1 billion in a Series A round led by Index and Lux, reportedly valuing the company at $6 billion. The raise comes nine months after the startup launched with a $180 million seed round that valued it at $1.5 billion.
Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies build and test software more efficiently, has achieved unicorn status with a $66 million Series C funding round led by Sequoia, the company announced on Wednesday. The round values the company at $1 billion, up from $550 million in its Series B just two months ago and $60 million a year ago.
Legora, a startup that automates workflow tasks for legal professionals, announced Wednesday that it has raised $550 million in Series E funding, bringing its valuation to $8.8 billion. The company said its annual recurring revenue has more than doubled since April to over $200 million, and it plans to use the new capital to expand across North America.
AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI is in early talks to raise new funding at a valuation between $30 billion and $40 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, a jump that would roughly double its July valuation of $17.5 billion and underscore investor appetite for companies powering the AI boom.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of leading AI lab Anthropic, roughly half the stake held by CEO Dario Amodei, according to a Bloomberg report cited by TechCrunch. With Anthropic expected to go public before the end of the year at a valuation that could reach $2 trillion, Schmidt’s position could add as much as $20 billion to his net worth.
Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former research chief, has revealed Arda, a stealth startup that has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation to build AI software aimed at returning manufacturing to the United States. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures, and the company says its models are already deployed with military technology company Anduril.
Reliable Robotics, a Mountain View-based startup developing autonomous flight technology for existing aircraft, has raised $115 million in an extension of its Series D round, pushing its valuation past $1 billion. The company, founded by former SpaceX and Tesla engineers, said it is making steady progress toward Federal Aviation Administration certification for a suite of systems that could eventually enable cargo planes to fly without pilots on board.
Otter.AI, the AI meeting note-taking startup, has raised $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund in a non-dilutive deal aimed at accelerating enterprise growth, international expansion and product innovation. The company, which crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year, says 40 million people have now used its product, up from 25 million a year earlier.
Town, a two-year-old San Francisco startup building AI assistants for businesses, has secured a $108 million Series B funding round that pushes its valuation past the $1 billion unicorn threshold, just four months after its public launch. The round was co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Serena Ventures, and First Round Capital.
Character.AI has filed for bankruptcy, with Disney set to hire the majority of its workforce and acquire some assets in a stalking horse bid structured to separate the chatbot startup's legal liabilities from the entertainment giant, court filings show.
Aisata Diallo, a 24-year-old lifelong braider, has started Tressfecta, a company building tools for textured hair. Its first product, Plait Pilot, automates the time-consuming job of separating braiding hair into pieces before styling, a step that can take hours on its own. Diallo, who says she stopped braiding because of the physical toll the work takes on the body, hopes the device will make the profession less arduous for hairstylists.
Intero Biosystems, a Denver-based startup growing miniature human intestines for drug testing, has won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. The company beat out 19 other competitors, with Australian anti-scam startup Apate finishing as runner-up.
Ramp, the expense management and financial operations platform, announced on Thursday that it has raised $1.85 billion in new funding, valuing the company at $60 billion just four months after a $44 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, and Avenir Growth, with participation from a lengthy list of other investors including Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Coatue, and General Catalyst.
TechCrunch has named the five finalists who will compete in the Startup Battlefield finals at Disrupt 2026, following two days of pitches from 20 startups. The finalists span space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security, working on everything from miniature human organs to fighting scams to computing in space. The winner, chosen by a new panel of expert judges on Thursday, will receive the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000, equity-free.
CedarDB, a Munich-based database engine spun out of the Technical University of Munich, has announced limited availability of its cloud offering, CedarDB Cloud, at the TechCrunch Disrupt startup competition. The database, built on the research project Umbra, is designed to handle both transactional and analytical workloads, a capability cofounder and CEO Moritz Sichert said has gained new relevance with the rise of agentic AI.
Ambrosia Energy, a startup founded by two former SpaceX satellite executives, has begun work on a 10 gigawatt-hour battery factory near Austin, Texas, as it pushes a solar-plus-storage model for powering AI data centers around the clock.
Prismm, a startup founded by sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla, is helping banks keep families' money in house after an account holder dies by building beneficiary and estate planning into accounts from day one. The company presented its mission on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, aiming to digitize what the founders describe as a largely manual process.
Scimplify, an Indian startup using artificial intelligence to accelerate the production of specialty chemicals and critical materials, has raised $25 million in an all-equity strategic funding round led by Hitachi Ventures. The company aims to help manufacturers across semiconductors, defense and energy reduce their reliance on Chinese suppliers.
Longshot Space Technology, a startup based in Alameda, California, is working on a very old idea getting a new look: using a giant gun to fire cargo into space. The company has raised about $20 million from venture investors and is testing scaled-down versions of the system at a site near Barstow, California, with plans to build what it says would be the largest gun on the planet.
Flox Intelligence, a startup spun out of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is developing AI-powered edge devices to deter wildlife from train tracks, airports, and roads. The company, a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition, aims to reduce the billions in damages and delays caused by animal strikes.
Brendan Wallace, co-founder of Fifth Wall, one of the largest real estate technology investment firms, says artificial intelligence is changing which startups are worth backing and expanding the definition of proptech itself, with a growing focus on companies that use technology to own and operate real estate directly.
Honeyjar, an AI-powered platform designed to make public relations expertise accessible to everyone, is launching this week as part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. Founded by PR veterans Michelle Masek and Nadia Jamshidi, the startup automates tasks such as writing announcements, building media lists, and identifying speaking opportunities, with the broader goal of bringing the entire communications workflow into one AI-driven system.
Ultrahuman, the Bengaluru-based health tech startup best known for its smart rings, has signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) to develop and validate a biological-age model. The model, which combines clinical biomarkers with wearable device data, will eventually be available to people across the United Arab Emirates through government digital health platforms, the company announced Monday.
Sepsis kills roughly 3 million children under five every year, and a startup that emerged at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 says its child-specific blood purification device is already in intensive care units across 30 countries. Efferon's Efferon NEO, which received a CE mark in April, is the first multimodal blood purification device engineered specifically for pediatric sepsis.
Dawn Myers, founder of Richualist, has launched Mint, a hair tool that combines detangling, conditioning, gelling and styling into one step using refillable product pods and gentle warming technology. Myers says the tool reduces styling time for textured hair from around 80 minutes to seven to 10 minutes, and can cut shedding and breakage by up to 70%.
Petra Power, a startup founded in 2017, is developing solid oxide fuel cells that convert natural gas into electricity without combustion, aiming to provide efficient and lower-emission power for AI data centers and military vehicles. Founder Aaron Goodman said the technology offers significant fuel cost savings and a smaller physical footprint. The company is working with neoclouds and other infrastructure providers, with a target for first deployment in 2028 and full-scale production planned for 2029.
Bermuda-based bitcoin life insurer Meanwhile has raised $37.5 million from existing investors in a round led by Bain Capital Crypto, bringing its total funding past $180 million as it expands beyond the US with products aimed at wealthy families in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Mecka AI, a startup that collects and analyzes human motion data to train humanoid and other robots, has raised a $60 million Series B round led by Sequoia, with participation from Nvidia, Microsoft's venture fund M12, and others. The company, founded in 2024, was previously reported by TechCrunch to be nearing a $500 million valuation.
Bloom, a Detroit-based startup founded in 2023, has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to build an AI-powered marketplace that connects buyers and suppliers in American manufacturing. The round was led by SNAK Venture Partners, with participation from Flyover Capital, Mana Ventures, and local backers including Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund.