Start-ups

Codeium, an AI-powered coding startup, is raising a new round of funding at a $2.85 billion valuation, including fresh capital, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal.  The round is being led by returning investor Kleiner Perkins, the people said. The new round comes just six months after Silicon Valley-based Codeium announced that it had closed a $150 million Series C at a $1.25 billion post-money valuation led by General Catalyst with participation

Austin-based defense startup Saronic has raised a $600 million Series C to build an autonomous ship factory called “Port Alpha,” it announced yesterday, quadrupling its valuation to $4 billion from its last round.  Investor Elad Gil led the round, with General Catalyst joining existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Caffeinated Capital, among others. That should make Saronic the second, possibly third, most valuable defense tech startup in the U.S. after Anduril’s last round valued it

For decades, couples going through in vitro fertilization have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the procedures with no guarantee of success. It’s not only an emotionally draining process, but a financially exhausting one as well. San Francisco-based startup Future Family wants to help ease some of that burden for couples with a new IVF insurance product in the United States. Built with the support of Munich Re Ventures — the venture

The demand for voice and speech recognition technologies is massive — and growing. An analysis by market research firm Markets and Markets found that the sector could be worth over $28.1 billion by 2027. There’s no shortage of vendors providing voice and speech recognition solutions, but some newer upstarts have managed to carve out niches. Sanas is a good example. Founded in 2020, the company develops software that uses AI to adjust a speaker’s accent

A couple of weeks after the initial release of Mistral’s AI assistant, Le Chat, the company told Le Parisien that it has reached one million downloads. In particular, Le Chat quickly reached the top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store in the company’s home country, France. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a

Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, could be close to raising more than $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation — a higher valuation than reported just weeks ago. Bloomberg reports that VC firm Greenoaks Capital Partners is leading the deal and pledging to invest half a billion dollars. Should the terms of the round not change, the fundraising would bring Safe Superintelligence’s total raised to roughly $2

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has announced her new startup. Unsurprisingly, it’s focused on AI. Called Thinking Machines Lab, the startup, which came out of stealth today, intends to build tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals,” and to create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than those currently available. Murati is heading up Thinking Machines Lab as CEO. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company’s

When he was a senior studying at Texas A&M University, Matthew Iommi realized that there were no good options for transporting groups of people. Fellow college students heading out for the night together didn’t have access to on-demand rides with the same convenience, accessibility, and affordability of typical ride-hail platforms, like Uber and Lyft.  “Once you hit that six to seven [person] mark, you had to split up and take multiple cars, which is inefficient

Last decade, companies like Segment rewrote the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from disparate apps to improve marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch — co-founded by a former engineering manager at Segment — is announcing $80 million in funding for the next chapter: a platform that lets sales, marketing, and customer service teams synchronize data warehouses and other locations, along with AI agents to do that work and build those

Monolinguists wanting to communicate with the global masses have never had it so easy. Trusty old Google Translate can convert the content of images, audio, and entire websites across hundreds of languages, while newer tools such as ChatGPT also serve as handy pocket translators. On the back end, DeepL and ElevenLabs have have reached lofty billion-dollar valuations for various language-related smarts that businesses can funnel into their own applications. But a new player is now