Haje Jan Kamps

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I just came off recording an episode of Equity, where I learned about the newest wave of stupidity. The tech industry’s DEI allergy has hit a new low, as Silicon Valley leaders are once again waving their “meritocracy” banners high and wide. Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Elon Musk just convinced Tesla shareholders to approve his $56 billion pay package, making him the highest-paid CEO in history — assuming he can dodge a Delaware judge’s disapproval. And where better to stage this circus than Texas, home of big everything, including egos? Shareholders erupted

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hold on to your Apple Watches, folks! At WWDC 2024, Apple finally decided to give Siri a brain transplant with something they’re calling “Apple Intelligence” (AI—get it?). Apparently, it’s so smart it’ll know more about your life than you do. Tim Cook promises it’ll be all

When Kinnect dropped a new app that’s all about preserving epic family tales and awkward holiday moments for generations to come, I knew I needed to take a closer look at its angel deck. The app is clever and can be thought of as a digital family scrapbook on steroids. This app isn’t just about stashing photos; it’s also got video and audio recording, plus a nifty timeline feature to organize your memories like a

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In a twist that shocks absolutely no one and thrills pyromaniacs who love seeing money burn, Elon Musk’s newest venture, xAI, has snagged a casual $6 billion in funding. Valor, a16z, and Sequoia are stacking the money on the xAI-shaped roulette table, with Musk spinning the

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app targets young professionals and students, particularly women aged 21 to 27, who seek genuine interactions. The company’s team claims it raised a $3 million friends and family round. I haven’t been able to independently verify that; most of the company’s media coverage appears to be

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Well, folks, it looks like Techstars’ drama just got a new plot twist. CEO Maëlle Gavet is making her exit, leaving co-founder David Cohen to swoop back in and save the day — or at least try to. Gavet’s three-and-a-half-year tenure was a roller coaster of

Terra One aims to reduce the quantity of clean energy created significantly and then lost from the German grid owing to a lack of storage capacity. Lacking storage capacity is an entirely pressing need and one desperate for solutions, so it’s great to see companies thinking up ways to fix it and going after the funding to make it happen. Fresh from its April fundraiser, where it raised $7.5 million to scale its battery storage

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. We’ve been drowning in AI news this week. Google’s I/O set the pace: At its keynote, the word “AI” came up on average once per minute throughout its two-hour keynote. Yowzers! Here’s the DL on Google’s AI plans. OpenAI just dropped GPT-4o — the AI model

Carbon credits (and the trading thereof) is big business, but it can be needlessly complicated to get those resolved. Goodcarbon just raised a €5.25 million (around $5.5 million) round to put a dent in that market. Let’s take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that sack of cash. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down: here’s how you to get involved. Read all our 90+ Pitch Deck