Julie Bort

Tiny Michigan biotech startup CircNova has raised a $3.3 million seed round for its technology that uses AI to target “circular RNA.” The development holds promise as a new method to quickly develop therapies for conditions that currently have no drug treatments. The new funding is also a victory lap for co-founder and CEO Crystal Brown, who took an unconventional path to becoming a biotech founder. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a key molecule that

SailPoint’s IPO on Thursday was a disappointment for anyone hoping it would indicate that tech IPOs are hot again. The first day’s trading ended below the $23 initial price. The stock fared a tad better Friday, closing at over $24. But that’s nothing close to the big bang companies and VCs hope for. For instance, ServiceTitan, the last tech IPO in December, was wildly successful. Share price popped from $71 to as high as $105

The Army plans to grant upstart weapons maker Anduril control of one of its highest-profile and long-troubled projects known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) pending final Department of Defense (DoD) approval, founder Palmer Luckey announced in a blog post Tuesday. IVAS was initially awarded to Microsoft in 2018 to develop augmented reality headsets for soldiers based on a ruggedized version of HoloLens. The initial budget for IVAS was set at $21.9 billion. Anduril

Just six months after defense tech Anduril raised a massive $1.5 billion round that valued the company at $14 billion, it’s in talks to raise another $2.5 billion, at a valuation of up to $28 billion, sources told CNBC. The deal would, not surprisingly, be led by Founders Fund, which is reportedly writing a $1 billion check that represents its largest check ever. While Anduril founder Palmer Luckey is the face of the company, it

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