Julie Bort

Just a few weeks ago, 18-year-old best friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot graduated from high school.  While most teens their age would be living it up in their last summer before college or the adult jobs that await them, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are hunkered down in a VC office in Boulder, Colorado. They’re spending the summer working on their startup APIGen after they raised a $500,000 pre-seed investment from Varana Capital. Fitzgerald

Among all the young AI startups being ruthlessly pursued by VCs these days, GPTZero has already grown into profitability in its first year and a half of life, generating millions in revenue. Founded by 24-year-old Edward Tian and 26-year-old Alex Cui, who’ve been friends since high school, GPTZero offers a detection tool that helps identify whether a piece of content was AI generated. The founders have chosen to take a $10 million “preemptive” Series A

Investor demand has been so strong for shares of hot HR startup Rippling – over $2 billion worth of term sheets, it says – that it is allowing former employees to also participate in its giant, tender offer sale, the company told TechCrunch. But there is one big exception: it has banned former employees who work for a handful of competitors from selling their stock. A small group of ex employees has been trying to

When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many others wanted in, he could have ordered over 100 units.  “I had way too many people than I could handle,” Wang, cofounder of AI research startup Exa Labs, told TechCrunch. “I wanted to order two nap pods for ourselves, and see

It is a universal truth of human nature that the developers who build the code should not be the ones to test it. First of all, most of them pretty much detest that task. Second, like any good auditing protocol, those who do the work should not be the ones who verify it. Not surprisingly, then, code testing in all its forms — usability, language- or task-specific tests, end-to-end testing — has been a focus

Exactly how much Microsoft is paying all the investors of Inflection AI as part its oddly structured deal to abscond with the co-founders, much of the staff and the rights to use the tech hasn’t been publicly revealed. And Microsoft declined comment when asked. But unnamed sources tell The Information that it’s plunking out approximately $650 million: $620 million for non-exclusive licensing fees for the technology (meaning Inflection is free to license it elsewhere) and

While the technology world breathlessly awaits Reddit’s public debut, another company you might never have heard of is about to go public: Astera Labs. And it may be a more important test of investors’ returning appetite for tech IPOs. Astera this week announced in a public filing that its public debut would be bigger than it initially planned in every way: It will sell more shares — 19.8 million versus the previous plan of 17.8