What's Trending in Startups

AethexAI, a voice AI startup focused on underserved markets in Africa and the Middle East, has closed a $3 million pre-seed round led by 4DX Ventures, with Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures,

Microsoft has unveiled Scout, a new AI personal assistant built on the OpenClaw framework, designed to bring autonomous agent capabilities to the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Announced on June 2, 2026, th

Legendary director Martin Scorsese has joined forces with Black Forest Labs, the German AI image-generation startup, as both a partner and adviser. The 82-year-old filmmaker confirmed to The New York

Cyera, the AI-focused data security startup founded in 2021, is closing a funding round of at least $300 million led by Evolution Equity Partners that would value the company at $12 billion, according

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a first-of-its-kind state lawsuit on Monday against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of rushing ChatGPT to market while ignoring safety

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, has taken the first formal step toward going public. The company announced in a Monday blog post that it submitted a draft reg

WindBorne Systems, a startup founded by Stanford students in 2019, released its WeatherMesh 6 AI weather forecasting model on June 1, 2026, claiming it outperforms the systems developed by the Europea

Box founder Aaron Levie sparked widespread discussion this week with a social media post describing tech CEOs as "uniquely prone to AI psychosis." The comment was examined on TechCrunch's Equity podca

In 2022, Craig Campbell turned down investor funding to start a website instead of chasing the AI boom that was swallowing up the tech industry. Campbell, a former Meta engineer and serial entrepreneu

Meta is working on an AI-powered wearable device that users can wear as a pendant, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Information. The company plans to begin testing the device within the n

Cognition has secured $1 billion in funding at a $26 billion valuation, making the two-year-old startup one of the most valuable AI companies in the industry. The company created Devin, one of the fir

A startup called Shift is offering to clean New Yorkers' homes for free — with one condition. The company wants to record everything its cleaners do: scrubbing dishes, wiping counters, dusting furnitu

Groq, the AI chip startup, is seeking to raise $650 million in fresh capital from its existing investors as it pushes deeper into the inference neocloud market, according to sources cited by Axios. Th

Box founder Aaron Levie has coined the term "AI psychosis" to describe a troubling pattern in corporate America: the executives making decisions about replacing workers with AI are often the least qua

AI chip startup Groq is seeking to raise $650 million in fresh capital from its existing investor base, according to sources cited by Axios. The San Jose-based company is positioning this funding roun

AI training startup Shift is offering free home cleaning services, but customers will have to accept a small trade-off: cameras mounted on cleaners' heads recording every swipe of the sponge and vacuu

Glean, the enterprise AI search platform sometimes called "the Google for work," has hit $300 million in annual recurring revenue, tripling its $100 million revenue mark from just 15 months prior. The

Anthropic has closed a massive $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, positioning the AI company for what could be its final private fundraising before going public. The Ser

Asana has purchased StackAI, a no-code agent-building platform, for $75 million as part of its push to become an AI-first workplace platform. The acquisition, announced Thursday alongside Asana's earn

Anthropic has launched Opus 4.8, the latest iteration of its flagship AI model, marking the fastest upgrade cycle in the company's recent history. The new model arrived just 41 days after Opus 4.7 hit

Google's annual developer conference I/O made it clear that AI-generated responses have taken over the front page of search results, and most companies have no idea what AI systems are saying about th

Remote, a seven-year-old payroll company headquartered in Amsterdam, announced it has crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and achieved cash-flow positive status. But the metric the compan

Cognition, the startup behind the autonomous AI software engineer Devin, has secured over $1 billion in new funding at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, the company revealed Wednesday. This marks a d

The countdown is on for startup founders and tech professionals looking to attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Early Bird ticket pricing, which offers savings of up to $410, expires on May 29, 2026 at 11:

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical may have been partially written by artificial intelligence. A detailed analysis by researcher Linch Zhang, shared on the LessWrong forum, used the AI detection tool Pan

OpenRouter, an AI gateway startup founded in 2023, has secured $113 million in Series B funding led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth venture fund. The company now commands a valuation of approximately $

Human Archive, a Silicon Valley-based startup, has raised $8.2 million in seed funding to pursue an unconventional strategy: using workers from India's gig economy to collect first-person video data t

Pope Leo XIV issued his first major papal encyclical on Monday, titled "Magnifica Humanitas," which calls on world leaders to establish new legal and ethical frameworks to govern artificial intelligen

The application window for TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200 closes Friday, May 27, giving early-stage founders one final opportunity to gain access to venture capital, international media exposure

ClickUp, the collaboration software startup once valued at $4 billion, laid off 22% of its workforce last Thursday, but CEO Zeb Evans insists this isn't about trimming costs. In a post on X, Evans fra

Pope Leo XIV released his inaugural encyclical on Monday, titled "Magnifica Humanitas," focused on protecting human dignity amid artificial intelligence. However, the 200-page document ventures far be

Google has launched Omni, a new family of generative AI models that can supposedly convert any input—photos, videos, text—into any other format. The first model in the lineup, Omni Flash, is now live

IBM has entered into a partnership with Formula One and Scuderia Ferrari HP, marking the tech giant's first major motorsport sponsorship. The move comes as F1 has surged in popularity globally, partic

SpaceX's recent IPO filing reveals a significant shift in Elon Musk's energy strategy. While Musk built Tesla on the promise of electrifying the economy and moving away from fossil fuels, his AI ventu

Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of legal AI startup Spellbook, sparked a heated debate in the tech community last month by publicly calling out what he described as a "huge scam" among AI startups

Google gave attendees at this week's I/O developer conference a chance to test its upcoming AI-powered glasses with visual displays, offering a glimpse beyond the audio-only version scheduled to launc

Nvidia reported another quarter of record-breaking financial results, with $81.6 billion in revenue for the period ending April 26, representing a 20% increase from the previous quarter. The company's

Anthropic is on track to report its first profitable quarter, with the AI startup telling investors it expects to more than double its revenue to approximately $10.9 billion in Q2, according to the Wa

Clouted, a startup that participated in a16z's Speedrun accelerator program in 2024, has secured $7 million in seed funding to solve a major pain point in social media marketing. The round was led by

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence venture xAI reported operating losses of $6.4 billion against just $3.2 billion in revenue for 2025, according to SpaceX's recently filed IPO documents. The company

A day after Elon Musk's legal challenge against OpenAI fell apart in court, the artificial intelligence company is pushing ahead with plans to go public, according to people familiar with the matter w

Google's announcement that it plans to overhaul its traditional search product with AI features grabbed headlines this week, but the tech giant isn't the only one gunning for the next generation of in

A jury rejected Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI's founders and Microsoft, delivering a swift verdict that legal observers saw as validation of what unfolded in court. Musk's case was considered wea

Shay Shwartz spent his teenage years as a hacker earning money from illicit activities, but after getting caught at 16, he decided to redirect his skills toward preventing cyberattacks rather than lau

SandboxAQ has announced a partnership with Anthropic to embed its scientific AI models directly into Claude, aiming to make drug discovery tools accessible to researchers without requiring specialized

Anthropic has completed the acquisition of Stainless, a New York-based startup founded in 2022 by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray. The deal, valued at over $300 million according to The Informatio

South Korean startup LetinAR is positioning itself as a key supplier of optical technology for the AI smart glasses boom, having just closed an $18.5 million funding round led by Korea Development Ban

General Motors has eliminated approximately 600 salaried positions from its information technology division, representing more than 10% of that department, as part of what the automaker describes as a

McDonald's kicked off the AI drive-thru trend in 2021, becoming one of the first major fast-food chains to deploy voice-ordering chatbots at its locations. The company started small, testing the techn

Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das is raising alarms about what he calls a stark wealth divide in the AI industry. In a lengthy social media post, Das described the current atmosphere in San Francisco a