From Keith Rabois to Matt Miller, a lot of VCs have switched firms or spun out of storied VC institutions this year. These employment changes are surprising because unlike in many other fields, venture capitalists don’t traditionally move around very much — especially those who reach the partner or general partner level. VC funds have […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chip company Nvidia gets the green light from the European Union to complete its acquisition of Run:ai. The EU came to a unanimous decision today that Nvidia could go ahead with its acquisition of Israeli GPU orchestration platform Run:ai, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The European Commission determined that if the merger went through, other […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year than any of its biggest rivals. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips across 2024 according to reporting from the Financial Times, which cited data from tech consultancy Omdia. To compare, Meta bought 224,000 of the same flagship Nvidia chip this year. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley’s brother-in-law and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste-management space at the time. Sikma discovered how […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cloud software giant Salesforce is looking to hire thousands of new salespeople to sell its AI tools to customers. The company plans to hire 2,000 new sales representatives, according to CNBC, which cited remarks from CEO Marc Benioff at a company event Tuesday. This doubles the hiring plans that Benioff shared with Bloomberg last month. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Jon Morehouse launched PowerTools in 2019 to help companies ship static sites and serverless apps to their cloud accounts on providers like AWS and Azure. When a customer asked him if they could use PowerTools to deploy their software into one of their customer’s cloud accounts, Morehouse was skeptical. Morehouse told TechCrunch that after that […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cybersecurity practitioners take a community-driven approach to solving problems. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they find with the broader cybersecurity community, which allows companies to patch up their security holes before something catastrophic happens. Prequel is looking to bring that same approach to software. The startup is building a database of software failure patterns or […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

These startups have fascinating new technologies, business models, founder stories or are pushing an industry forward in exciting ways.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tom Gardiner and Harry Marshall founded Trevor.io in 2016 as a no-code business intelligence platform to help non-data people run analysis on their internal data. That business was solid, but customers increasingly started asking the company for access to the same tools for their customer-facing data. Gardiner told TechCrunch that the company initially resisted the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lumen Orbit, a startup looking to build data centers in space, was able to close its recent seed round in mere days amid intense investor interest. The Redmond, Washington-based company closed on a $11 million seed round at a $40 million valuation, confirming prior TechCrunch reporting that the company had raised a competitive double-digit round […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In the U.S. it’s common for companies that have both physical branches and online services to use customer relationship management (CRM) software that tracks all of their interactions with customers in one place. In LatAm that isn’t the case, though, as many enterprises and banks keep the data from physical locations siloed from its digital […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Data protection startup Cohesity completed its merger with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business, creating one entity with 12,000 customers that is valued at $7 billion. The deal was originally announced in February 2024. Cohesity valued Carlyle-owned Veritas’ data protection business at $3 billion at the time, according to CRN reporting. Cohesity declined to comment on […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Notable Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator held a Demo Day for its inaugural Fall cohort this week. The 95 startups in this latest batch looked quite similar to recent YC cohorts in the sense that it includes many AI startups. If I did my math right, 87% of the startups in this batch are […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After Vambe pivoted to building conversational AI agents for small and medium-sized businesses, its ARR increased five-fold to $1 million.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Veeam, which helps its users secure and recover their data, has seen its valuation spike in a recent secondary sale that was aimed at bolstering the company’s cap table before an eventual IPO. The Insight Partners-backed company said on Tuesday it had raised $2 billion in a secondary share sale that valued it at $15 […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Clarifai, once known as the young computer vision startup working with the Pentagon on its controversial Project Maven, has distanced itself from its early years of espousing questionable ideas on AI ethics, its interest in building autonomous weapons — years before Silicon Valley warmed up to defense tech — and its potential cyberbreach from Russia. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI hardware startup Tenstorrent raised nearly $700 million in new funding. Tenstorrent raised a $693 million Series D round that values the company at more than $2.6 billion, Bloomberg first reported. The round was led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners. Other investors include Hyundai and Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, among others. The Toronto-based company […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

President-elect Donald Trump made no secret during his campaigning that he doesn’t think the U.S. should take an aggressive stance on climate change. From leading chants of “drill, baby, drill” to frequently criticizing everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles, he appears poised to cast a shadow over the climate tech sector for the next […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Uber is expanding its fleet of gig workers and creating a new category: AI annotation and data labeling. The ride-hailing company has started hiring contractors for a new AI and data labeling division called Scaled Solutions. These workers complete projects for Uber’s internal business units but are also serving outside customers including self-driving vehicle company […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.