Kate Park / TechCrunch: Tailor, which offers a headless ERP system for retail businesses that separates the frontend and backend, raised a $22M Series A from ANRI, NEA, YC, and others — Tailor, a San Francisco- and Tokyo-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round.
Anna Heim / TechCrunch: Tel Aviv-based Qedma, which is developing an error mitigation software called QESEM for quantum computers, raised a $26M Series A led by Glilot Capital Partners — Despite their imposing presence, quantum computers are delicate beasts, and their errors are among the main bottlenecks …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Similarweb: since Google launched AI Overviews, the number of news searches that result in no click-throughs has grown from 56% in May 2024 to 69% in May 2025 — Referrals from ChatGPT to news publishers are growing, but not enough to counter the decline in clicks resulting …
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Genesis AI, which generates synthetic data for training an AI model meant to power robots, emerges from stealth with a $105M seed co-led by Eclipse and Khosla — Genesis AI, a startup that aims to build a foundational model for powering all kinds of robots, has emerged from stealth …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Cloudflare debuts “Pay per Crawl”, a marketplace that lets sites charge AI crawlers per crawl; new sites using Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default — Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace …
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Levelpath, which offers AI-powered procurement software for enterprises, raised a $55M Series B led by Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $100M — Levelpath, a procurement software startup founded by the duo behind Scout RFP, has raised $55 million in Series B funding led …
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Spotify updates its Discover Weekly playlist after ten years, adding new genre filters for Premium users, and says users streamed 100B+ tracks via the playlist — Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, which shares new listening recommendations every Monday, is getting an update.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: On the a16z podcast, Bryan Kim said a16z backed Cluely because speed in marketing and building beats crafting a perfect “artisan” product due to AI competition — When Cluely, a startup claiming to be building a product that helps people “cheat” on everything …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: OpenAI hires the team behind Crossing Minds, which raised $13.5M and works with e-commerce companies to improve their personalization and recommendation systems — Crossing Minds, a startup that provides AI recommendation systems to e-commerce businesses, said on Thursday that its team is joining OpenAI.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Google launches Gemini CLI, an agentic AI tool that lets developers make natural language requests in terminals by connecting Gemini models to local codebases — Google is launching a new agentic AI tool that will put its Gemini AI models closer to where developers are already coding.
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch: Eventual, which develops Daft, a Python-native open-source data processing engine, raised a $7.5M seed led by CRV and a $20M Series A led by Felicis — When Eventual founders Sammy Sidhu and Jay Chia were working as software engineers at Lyft's autonomous vehicle program …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Google rolls out historical Street View imagery on Google Earth as the service turns 20, and says pro US users can access AI insights, like tree canopy coverage — Google announced on Tuesday that you can now access historical Street View imagery on Google Earth.
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: A profile of Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor turned a16z partner who later founded Haun Ventures and believes the GENIUS Act will make stablecoins safer — In 2018, when Bitcoin was trading around $4,000 and most Americans, at least, thought cryptocurrency was a fad …
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup Sword Health raised $40M led by General Catalyst at a $4B valuation, up from its $3B valuation from June 2024 — Sword Health, an AI-powered digital health startup, has raised $40 million at a $4 billion valuation, a 33% jump from the $3 billion price tag it earned just a year ago.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: Israeli observability startup Coralogix raised a $115M Series E led by NewView Capital at a $1B+ valuation, and plans to invest ~$100M in India over five years — Coralogix, an Israeli startup offering a full-stack observability and security platform, has raised $115 million at a pre-money valuation …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Aspora, which makes financial tools like remittance services for the Indian diaspora, raised a $50M Series B co-led by Sequoia and Greylock at a $500M valuation — India has been one of the top recipients of remittances in the world for more than a decade.
Tim De Chant / TechCrunch: Bedrock Ocean, which has developed an autonomous underwater vehicle to map the ocean floor using sonar and magnetic sensors, raised a $25M Series A-2 — Oceans may cover more than 70% of the Earth's surface, but we have better maps of the moon than we do the seabed.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: New York State passes a bill mandating safety and transparency requirements for frontier AI models; it awaits Governor Hochul's signature — New York state lawmakers passed a bill on Thursday that aims to prevent frontier AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic from contributing to disaster scenarios …
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch: Canary, which offers hotel guest management tools, raised an $80M Series D led by Brighton Park Capital, valuing the company at about $600M — Canary, the hotel guest management platform, announced Thursday the raise of an $80 million Series D in a round led by Brighton Park Capital.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Landbase, whose GPT-4o-based AI tool automates outreach marketing, raised a $30M Series A co-led by Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures and Picus Capital — When Daniel Saks was working as a co-CEO of the previous startup he co-founded, AppDirect, billionaire Michael Dell sent him a LinkedIn message asking for a meeting.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Spain-based Multiverse Computing, which makes tools to compress LLMs by up to 95% using “quantum-inspired” networks, raised a €189M Series B and has 100 clients — Spanish startup Multiverse Computing on Thursday said it has raised an enormous Series B round of €189 million …
Anna Heim / TechCrunch: Amsterdam-based Tebi, which offers a SaaS operations platform to hospitality companies, raised €30M led by CapitalG, after a €20M Series A in October 2024 — Dutch payments firm Adyen now has a market cap of over $61 billion, but that didn't stop its co-founder Arnout Schuijff …
Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: Obvio, which uses AI-powered stop sign cameras to detect infractions, raised a $22M Series A led by Bain to expand beyond its first five cities in Maryland — American streets are incredibly dangerous for pedestrians. A San Carlos, California-based startup called Obvio thinks it can change …
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Enterprise vibe coding startup Superblocks raised a $23M Series A, bringing its total funding to $60M, and launched an enterprise coding AI agent called Clark — Brad Menezes, CEO of enterprise vibe coding startup Superblocks, believes the next crop of billion-dollar startup ideas are hiding …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: AI research nonprofit EleutherAI releases the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of licensed and open-domain text for AI models that it says is one of the largest — EleutherAI, an AI research organization, has released what it claims is one of the largest collections of licensed and open-domain text for training AI models.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan says Anthropic cut Windsurf's direct access to Claude models largely because of reports that OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf — Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf's direct access to Anthropic's Claude AI models largely …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Anthropic unveils a new set of Claude Gov models tailored for US national security customers and designed to be applied to planning, analysis, and more — Anthropic says that it has released a new set of AI models tailored for U.S. national security customers.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Mistral releases Mistral Code, a “vibe coding” client forked from open source project Continue, in private beta on JetBrains platforms and VS Code — French AI startup Mistral is releasing its own “vibe coding” client, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere's Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Reddit now lets users hide posting and commenting history on their profiles via a “Content and Activity” setting, as part of a new “Curate your profile” section — Reddit on Tuesday announced a new feature that will offer its users more privacy when it comes to what's shared on their user profiles.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Adobe launches Photoshop for Android in beta for devices running Android 11 or later with 6GB+ of RAM, offering tools like layers, masks, and Generative Fill — Android users can now download Photoshop for mobile. Adobe announced on Tuesday that it's releasing the beta version …
Kate Park / TechCrunch: Dublin-based cross-border payment startup NomuPay raised a $40M Series C at a $290M valuation, following a $37M Series B at a $200M valuation in January 2025 — As global trade evolves, there's an increasing demand for diverse cross-border payment options.
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: Elad Gil, backer of Perplexity, Character.AI, Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe, invested in Enam Co., which aims to use AI to reinvent businesses via PE roll-ups — Elad Gil started betting on AI before most of the world took notice. By the time investors began grasping the implications of ChatGPT …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Google quietly released an Android app called Google AI Edge Gallery on GitHub, letting users run some AI models from Hugging Face locally on their phones — Last week, Google quietly released an app that lets users run a range of openly available AI models from the AI dev platform Hugging Face on their phones.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: The US Treasury sanctions Philippines-based Funnull Technology for allegedly facilitating “pig butchering” crypto scams that stole over $200M from US victims — The U.S. government imposed sanctions on FUNNULL, a company accused of providing infrastructure for cybercriminals running so-called …
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch: Hugging Face unveils two open-source humanoid robots, the $3,000 full-sized HopeJR and a $250-$300 Reachy Mini desktop unit, expected to ship by the end of 2025 — AI dev platform Hugging Face continued its push into robotics on Thursday with the release of two new humanoid robots.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Black Forest Labs releases Flux.1 Kontext, a suite of AI models that let users generate and edit images using both text and images as inputs — Black Forest Labs, the AI startup whose models once powered the image generation features of X's Grok chatbot, on Thursday released a new suite …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Instacart appoints Chief Business Officer Chris Rogers as its new CEO, effect August 15, replacing Fidji Simo, who left to become OpenAI's CEO of Applications — Instacart announced on Wednesday that its chief business officer, Chris Rogers, has been appointed as the company's new CEO.
Anna Heim / TechCrunch: SpAItial, which is building text-to-3D environment generation tools, raised a $13M seed led by Earlybird and plans to license its foundation model to developers — From OpenAI's 4o to Stable Diffusion, AI foundation models that create realistic images from a text prompt are now plentiful.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Some VCs, such as Khosla Ventures, are considering acquiring mature businesses, like call center operators, and optimizing them with AI to serve more customers — Venture capitalists have always focused on investing in companies that leverage technology to either disrupt established industries …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: RevenueCat, which offers tools for devs to add subscriptions to their apps, raised a $50M Series C led by Bain Capital Ventures, valuing the company at $500M — RevenueCat, a company so tied to the mobile economy that now one-in-three new subscription apps launch with its software under the hood, is preparing to expand its business.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan used an AI avatar for initial comments during a quarterly call; Klarna CEO used an AI avatar to deliver earnings earlier this week — CEOs are now so immersed in AI, they're sending their avatars to address quarterly earnings calls instead of themselves, at least partially.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Bluesky lets “notable and authentic” accounts apply for blue check verification and enables select organizations to become Trusted Verifiers to verify others — Bluesky on Thursday quietly opened the doors to those who want to become verified on its social networking service.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Gravitee, which offers self-hosted and SaaS API management tools, raised a $60M Series C led by Sixth Street, taking its total funding to $125M+ — Gravitee, a platform designed to help companies manage their APIs and other digital traffic pipelines, has raised $60 million in a Series C funding round led …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: London-based Granola, which provides an AI-based notetaking app, raised a $43M Series B led by NFDG at a $250M valuation, taking its total funding to $67M — AI-powered notetaking tool Granola has been on a roll. The startup's seen a steep uptick in usage since it launched a year ago …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: After Grok's “white genocide in South Africa” X replies, xAI says “an unauthorized modification was made to Grok response bot's prompt” at 3:15 AM PST on May 14 — xAI blamed an “unauthorized modification” for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Hedra, which offers a web-based video generation and editing suite powered by its Character-3 model, raised a $32M Series A led by a16z, following a $10M seed — People are using AI video generation tools to contribute to an unexpected new viral trend: podcasts featuring AI-generated talking babies.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Las Vegas-based TensorWave, which offers AMD-powered cloud infrastructure, raised $100M led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, taking its total funding to $146.7M — TensorWave, a data center provider building facilities primarily with AMD hardware, has raised $100 million as it seeks to further build out its data center infrastructure.
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Dallas-based Bestow, which offers software and services to life insurance companies, raised a $120M Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Smith Point Capital — Melbourne O'Banion co-founded insurtech Bestow with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 after struggling to secure his own life insurance policy.
Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Cairo-based Nawy, Africa's largest proptech platform, which combines property listings with brokerage services, raised a $52M Series A led by Partech Africa — For decades, buying property in Egypt meant navigating a fragmented real estate market, relying on personal networks …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: A study finds that asking LLMs to be concise in their answers, particularly on ambiguous topics, can negatively affect factuality and worsen hallucinations — Turns out, telling an AI chatbot to be concise could make it hallucinate more than it otherwise would have.