TechCrunch Startup News

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Ex-Meta engineer raises $14M for Lace AI, a revenue generation software startup Apr 28, 2025

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As an AI engineer at Meta, Boris Valkov helped build PyTorch, one of the world’s largest machine learning libraries. During his time there, Valkov realized that artificial intelligence “was about to unlock capabilities…in the application layer in the software stack.”

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British startup Isembard lands $9M to reshore manufacturing for critical industries Apr 25, 2025

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Geopolitical pressures are accelerating a demand in many countries and regions to reshore — that is, to redevelop critical industry infrastructure, and to bring back businesses, which had moved or outsourced some or all of their industrial operations to cheaper countries further away. But that is easier said than done.

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Endor Labs, which builds tools to scan AI-generated code for vulnerabilities, lands $93M Apr 25, 2025

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AI-generated code is no doubt changing how software is built, but it’s also introducing new security challenges. More than 50% of organizations encounter security issues with AI-produced code sometimes or frequently, according to a late 2023 survey by developer security platform Synk.

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Fluent Ventures backs replicated startup models in emerging markets Apr 24, 2025

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A new venture firm aims to prove that the most successful startup ideas don’t have to be born or scaled in Silicon Valley. Fluent Ventures, a global early-stage fund, is backing founders replicating proven business models from Western markets in fintech, digital health, and commerce across emerging markets.

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Vibe coding helps Supabase nab $200M at $2B valuation just seven months after its last raise Apr 24, 2025

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In 2020, when open source database Supabase was founded, its New Zealand-based CEO, Paul Copplestone, couldn’t have imagined it would be sitting in the sweet spot for 2025’s biggest trend: vibe coding.

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Manychat taps $140M to boost its business messaging platform with AI Apr 23, 2025

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Chatbots and other kinds of AI agents — and the companies that build them — may feel like a dime a dozen these days. But the truth is that, for both businesses and consumers, some may be infinitely more useful (and perhaps less dystopian) than others.

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Superpower wants to help people detect and address health issues before symptoms appear Apr 23, 2025

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A startup called Superpower is publicly launching what it calls the world’s first super-app that is designed to help people better understand and take care of their health. For $499, the startup offers biannual lab testing that analyzes over 100 blood biomarkers across 21 categories

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Famed AI researcher launches controversial startup to replace all human workers everywhere Apr 22, 2025

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Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch

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OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models hallucinate more Apr 22, 2025

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OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI

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Deck raises $12M to ‘Plaid-ify” any website using AI Apr 21, 2025

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Deck, a startup that claims to be building “the Plaid for the rest of the internet,” has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round — about nine months after closing its seed financing, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. The new raise, led by Infinity Ventures, brings Montreal-based Deck’s total raised

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