StartUp

Join us for an unforgettable opportunity at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, happening at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on June 5! We’re on the lookout for enthusiastic volunteers to be part of this exciting event. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into the making of tech gatherings, now’s your chance to find out firsthand. Apply here by May 22.

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Doing laundry can be a chore. It takes time and is tedious. Few people like to do it.

So it’s no surprise that startups have emerged to take that load off your back — literally. And investors are lining up to fund new and older players alike. 

Eleven-month-old NoScrubs has just raised $2 million in a pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital for its...

You voted. They rose to the top!

Meet the two Audience Choice winners who’ll take the breakout stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley to share their insights with 1,200 AI leaders and enthusiasts. 

We sifted through hundreds of Call for Content submissions and narrowed them down to six standout finalists. Your...

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 23-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan.

Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as...

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisers: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations.

Thinking Machines Lab’s website was quietly updated with McGrew and Radford’s n...

After months of hearty marketing efforts and large-scaletechnology demos across the U.S., Nuro has secured $106 million in fresh funding to help scale its autonomous driving technology and advance commercial partnerships. 

The Series E round brings Nuro’s total funding raised to $2.2 billion and its valuation to $6 billion. That’s a drop from the $8...

A founder who has carved out a name for himself building products to help restaurants connect better with would-be diners has raised $50 million for his latest startup: a new take on the idea of customer loyalty. 

Blackbird Labs has built a payments-meets-loyalty-meets-blockchain platform for restaurants to grow repeat business while reducing some...

If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick, who dropped out of college to run the company.

Brinc, which was founded in 2017 and...

Dark kitchens — also referred to as ghost kitchens, cloud kitchens, or virtual kitchens — often receive criticism for their food quality. Sizl, a cook-to-order delivery service based in Chicago, seeks to change this perception by delivering meals made with fresh ingredients in around 30 minutes flat.

The company announced its recent $3.5 million...

A new company, Deep Cogito, has emerged from stealth with a family of openly available AI models that can be switched between “reasoning” and non-reasoning modes.

Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 have shown great promise in domains like math and physics, thanks to their ability to effectively fact-check themselves by working through complex...

Plenty of materials — from sulfur and sodium to manganese and organic molecules — have tried to topple the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery. And, so far, they’ve all failed.

Organic batteries, which are built from some of the most abundant chemicals here on Earth, including carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, has been perhaps the most frustrating failure....

While some U.S. investors might have taken comfort from China’s rebound, we still find ourselves in the early innings of this period of uncertainty.

Some epidemiologists

Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit, is deploying a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles on the streets of Los Angeles starting Tuesday — a modest, yet meaningful step as the company inches toward offering public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year. 

The data-collection effort marks Zoox’s entrance into its sixth city and l...

Since first uploading a YouTube teaser video of its tech five years ago, Magic Leap’s presence in the augmented reality industry has been controversial.

Some have lauded the team’s ambitions, while others I’ve talked to say the company’s posturing has dissuaded investors from taking chances on other AR hardware startups, which has hampered the indus

As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup.

But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia in the summer...

Founders, the battlefield is calling!

Startup Battlefield 200applications are now live — and the race has begun. If you’ve got a groundbreaking idea and the guts to pitch it to the world, TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is your arena.

You’ll face elite VC judges. You’ll compete against 199 of the world’s most promising startups. And you’ll fight for $100,000...

Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription, as well as priority access to the company’s newest AI models and features.

A bit...

The tech industry (and the world at large) is not experiencing temporary anxiety — the uncertainty we’re all coping with is the new normal.

Sudden shifts in behavior have made some startups targeting slow-moving, old-school industries more relevant than they could have imagined, such as those in telehealth, distance learning and remote work. Most,