Start-ups

If you’re reading this, you already know: It’s time to amplify your brand. Get in front of thousands of TechCrunch event attendees, readers, and decision-makers who can take your business further this year by exhibiting at a TechCrunch event. The perks of exhibiting: What’s in it for you Exhibiting doesn’t just elevate your brand — it gives you and your team full access to all the perks of an attendee at whichever event you exhibit:

Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that’s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag was said to be nine figures, exceeding Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded into Nvidia, where its tech will be deployed as part of the former’s suit of generative AI services for developers,

Raj Aggarwal is leaving AWS after nearly three years as the company’s GM of generative AI and revenue acceleration, according to a LinkedIn post Aggarwal published Wednesday. “I’m proud of the pioneering work our team did in generative AI from its earliest days,” Aggarwal said in his post. “We built what might be the world’s first large-scale generative AI products — launched to tens of thousands of sellers, used hundreds of thousands of times, driving

A senior research scientist at DeepMind who worked on robotics and AI has left Google to create his own robotics startup, called Generalist AI, and has already obtained investment from Nvidia, TechCrunch has learned. Pete Florence was listed as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI at a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose yesterday. The panel was for portfolio companies of Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures. NVentures has become an especially active venture capital

“The enthusiasm into AI actually carries over into everything, which effectively impacts all startups,” said AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli when asked if investors remain as excited about emerging startups outside of AI. According to Kohli, AI startups make up nearly 40% of the startups on AngelList’s platform. Today on Equity, Mary Ann Azevedo caught up with Kohli to discuss how AngelList has evolved its model — from SPVs to collaborating with larger funds, how AI

Robots are part of an exciting new frontier in tech, but here’s the challenge: Robots rely on arrays of sensors, external signals like GPS and Wi-Fi, and customized software to navigate their environments. Further, robotics often involves expensive, ready-made hardware solutions that include built-in software and sensors designed for specific tasks, like estimating relative motion. These products require complex integration and are limited to specific use cases. As a result, most robots today cannot move

Maju Kuruvilla, who left the CEO role of controversial one-click checkout startup Bolt last year, is back. He’s launching his own startup, focused on a different problem for online shoppers: what he calls “check-in.” When you click on an ad for something like a T-shirt, the experience afterward can feel a little clunky. The website you land on might not even have the product you clicked on to begin with. That causes many shoppers to

Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta exec Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures. Laude is the new fund launched in 2024 by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who also co-founded Databricks. This isn’t the only check Laude has cut. But it is the first publicly announced one, Laude co-founder and general partner Pete Sonsini told TechCrunch. Sonsini is well-known for his

AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman recently claimed that a quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. Sensing an opportunity, VCs are rushing to back startups developing AI-powered assistive programming tools. One of these startups, Graphite, on Tuesday announced that it raised $52 million in a Series

It’s time to make your voice heard. After receiving an overwhelming amount of applications for speakers at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, we have chosen six incredible finalists. TC Sessions: AI takes place on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley — and you have the power to decide who you want to take the stage to share their wisdom with 1,200 AI leaders and enthusiasts. Audience Choice voting lasts until March 21 at 11:59 p.m.