Start-ups

Just over four years ago, climate-friendly fintech startup Aspiration was on the verge of a $2 billion public listing. Now, one of the startup’s board members has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and one of the co-founders has been arrested for allegedly conspiring to defraud investors, according to a federal criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California. The fintech startup has been under federal scrutiny for years for

On June 5, TechCrunch Sessions: AI will kick off — and you can be part of the industry-changing conversations that will be taking place. We have an open invitation for members of the AI community to lead breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and AI aficionados attending our newest event, which will be held in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. There’s just one catch: You have to apply by this Friday,

Venture investment in startups run by women has always lagged the overall market, and with companies across sectors cutting back on their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, things seem grimmer than ever for female founders. But the data tells a different tale for 2024 — at least according to this one report by European venture platform Female Foundry: Venture investment to startups founded by women in Europe declined 12% in 2024 from a year earlier, but

Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists Jerry Liu and Simon Suo in 2023, LlamaIndex allows developers to build custom agents over unstructured data. “LlamaIndex started as a toy open

Sequoia-backed Mach Industries, the defense tech founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, landed a contract with the U.S. Army and has plans for its first factory, Thornton told TechCrunch. The factory will be 115,000 square feet in Huntington Beach, California, where Mach’s headquarters is located, CEO Thornton said. While that sounds like an expensive zip code for a weapons factory, Southern California — in the shadow of SpaceX — has become a hotspot for America’s burgeoning

On June 5, TechCrunch Sessions: AI will kick off — and you can be part of the industry-changing conversations that will be taking place. We have an open invitation for members of the AI community to lead breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and AI aficionados attending our newest event, which will be held in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. There’s just one catch: You have to apply by this Friday,

Fintech startup Ramp has crossed $700 million in annualized revenue as of January of this year, according to a source familiar with the company’s internal operations. The company had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue before its third birthday in March 2022, passed $300 million by August 2023, and now effectively more than doubled that in less than 18 months.  While Ramp has not formally released its revenue numbers, CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman told TechCrunch

Expense management startup Ramp has nearly doubled its valuation to $13 billion after a $150 million secondary share sale, the company announced Monday morning. New and existing backers including VC Stripes, GIC, Avenir Growth, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, 137 Ventures, and Definition Capital bought the secondaries from employees and early investors. It’s a massive bump in valuation for fintech startup, which was valued at $7.65 billion last April when it raised

AI startup Anthropic on Monday announced it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The Series E, which also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, brings the company’s total raised to $18.2 billion, according to Crunchbase. “With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand

For years, startups have tried to fill various gaps in how enterprises operate to ostensibly improve processes, eliminate grunt work, and help managers identify and address where their teams are wasting time. The latest to join this cohort is HackerPulse, which has built a platform that gives enterprises more information about what their engineering teams are doing so they can spot productivity bottlenecks and resolve inefficiencies. The San Francisco-based company offers a dashboard that integrates