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Enterprises lost Claude Fable 5 for a few weeks. New data shows two-thirds had already built their hedge

Two-thirds of enterprises have hedged their AI model strategy, and the past few weeks of controversy around Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model showed why that posture has gone mainstream. On June 12, a U.S. export-control order pulled Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 — the most capable m…

Omen AI’s plan to optimize data centers is all wet

Omen AI raised a $31 million Series A to monitor chip coolant and stop bacterial outbreaks in data centers.

Chamath Palihapitiya raises $135M Series A for his AI coding startup, takes CEO role

VCs remain thirsty to fund AI coding startups. This one, founded by investor Chamath Palihapitiya, is no exception.

Humble Robotics’ CEO says the tech finally caught up to the vision for autonomous vehicles

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. Th…

Autonomous vehicle hype is back, and Humble Robotics is bringing it to freight

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people wh…

IQM, Europe’s first public quantum company, admits the future of the tech is uncertain

IQM, a full-stack quantum company out of Finland, went public on the Nasdaq today at a valuation of about $1.9 billion.

Chi-Hua Chien saw Facebook coming — now he says the real AI winners won’t be selling AI

Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist.

The 11 standout startups from YC’s Demo Day, according to VCs

TechCrunch spoke to investors to find the hottest startups in the Spring 2026 YC batch. Some of them commanded valuations of over $175 million, VCs said.

Seedcamp raises $320M for its new fund to expand its US footprint

After 18 years of focusing on Europe, early-stage investor Seedcamp said that it has raised $320 million for its latest fund, which will see it expanding its presence in the United States.

After betting the firm on Anthropic, Menlo Ventures raises victorious $3B fund

Menlo has created a solid rep for itself as an AI investor, all based on one gutsy $750 million move in 2024.

Is there an AI bubble? VCs on valuations and ARR inflation

This episode features a conversation recorded live at StrictlyVC LA in El Segundo between Connie Loizos; Chang Xu, partner at Basis Set Ventures; and Carter Reum, founder of M13. Together, they discuss whether today’s AI boom represents a bubble, how investors are thinking about…

Valor Equity Partners looks to raise a $2.5B Fund VII, per Bloomberg

New details have emerged about Valor's latest fund, which last year announced it was raising an unspecified amount of capital.

After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

The co-founders of Bending Spoons, the Italian company quietly buying beloved, ailing Internet brands, learned big lessons from their own startup's failure.

Melinda Gates’ venture firm backs Magnify Ventures’ $46.6M Fund II

Early-stage firm Magnify Ventures has raised a $46.6 million Fund II from LPs, including Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.

Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby nabs stakes in hot startups like Etched through Arizona connections

Selby's VC firm, Copper Sky Capital, is currently raising a $300 million second fund, according to a regulatory filing.

Alibaba, Tencent join US$2 billion funding for Kuaishou’s Kling AI - The Business Times

Alibaba, Tencent join US$2 billion funding for Kuaishou’s Kling AI The Business Times

AI data center startup Crusoe in talks to raise $3 billion funding: report - The Economic Times

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 at a steep discount to its top model as the company races toward a blockbuster IPO

Anthropic today released Claude Sonnet 5 , a new AI model that the company says delivers near-flagship performance at mid-tier prices — a move designed to give cost-conscious enterprise developers access to powerful agentic capabilities just as the San Francisco-based AI lab barr…

Robotaxis drive miles just to get cleaned and charged; this new startup wants to fix that

Aseon Labs, which came out of Y Combinator's 2026 spring cohort, has raised $10 million from Crane Venture Partners and others.

Autonomous vehicle hype is back, and Humble Robotics is bringing it to freights

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people wh…

Google's Gemini Omni Flash hits the API, turning enterprise video production into a conversation

For most enterprises, a 90-second training video or a product explainer has never been an easy ask. It means a well planned brief, an internal film crew or an outside vendor, a shoot, an edit, and a round of revisions. Change one line of on-screen text due to a legal review and t…

AI agents need context everywhere they run, even where the cloud can't follow

The competitive edge in enterprise AI is shifting to context: which platform can give an agent the right memory, the right retrieval and the right data at the moment of decision. Couchbase on Tuesday announced its AI Data Plane, combining persistent agent memory, real-time contex…

DeepSeek open sources DSpark, a new framework to speed up LLM inference by up to 85%

Even as the geopolitical conversation around AI continues to grow more fraught following the U.S. government's actions to limit the new models from Anthropic and O

Prompt injection is exploiting enterprise AI's biggest design flaws by targeting agents, RAG pipelines and model routers

In the past two years, businesses have been trying to fit large language models (LLMs) into support, analytics, development, and internal automation like never before. Along with the increasing adoption of AI technology , another trend is gaining momentum — cybercriminals are tak…

Claude Code turned every engineer into three. Now companies need more product thinkers

Anthropic recently told its growth team to hire more product managers, not fewer. The reason, as reported in industry coverage, was that Claude Code had quietly turned its engineering org into a team that ships at roughly three times its actual headcount, and the bottleneck moved…

Autonomous security agents need complete data. Here's how to check if yours is ready.

An endpoint agent cannot report its own absence. The 2026 Axonius Actionability Report , conducted with the Ponemon Institute and surveying 662 IT and security professionals, put a number on a gap SOC teams have worked around for years. Across the Axonius customer base , 12.7% of…

Alibaba's model never trained as an agent — and improved agent performance across seven benchmarks

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-AgentWorld on Tuesday — two models trained not to act inside agent environments, but to predict what those environments return. The release covers seven domains under a single architecture: MCP, Search, Terminal, Software Engineering, Android, We…

Liquid AI's smallest model yet LFM2.5-230M beats models 4X its size at data extraction, can run 'anywhere'

Liquid AI, founded by former MIT computer scientists, today released its smallest AI language model yet, LFM2.5-230M , and enterprises would do well to consider it for their uses in data extraction and local deployment on smartphones, laptops and robotics. This is a 230-million-p…

AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire deal

What does an AI company do after one of those not-acqui-hire deals? Groq raised money, is leaning into its neocloud business, and is hiring new execs.

Fika Jobs raises $4M to build a video-first hiring platform where AI agents interview candidates

Stockholm-based startup Fika Jobs is building a video-first hiring platform that combines AI interview agents with short-form video profiles, creating something that feels like a cross between LinkedIn and TikTok.

HaloBraid raises $7M from Seven Seven Six to end the six-hour hair salon appointment

HaloBraid aims to help salons speed up braiding with its first device, slated to launch later this year, that acts as a braiding assistant for professional stylists.

Superhuman acquires AI detection startup GPTZero

Superhuman, which also has an AI detection tool as part of Grammarly, has snapped up GPTZero.

Slate Auto’s radically simple electric truck starts at $24,950

The Jeff Bezos-backed startup finally revealed more pricing details for its debut EV, including a $29,950 starting price for the SUV variant, and boosted the base range to 205 miles.

How Justin Ernest invested nearly $500M into hot startups without a traditional VC fund

Instead of spending a year raising a formal venture fund, the Sabertooth VC founder used a captive network of LPs to invest in startups like Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX.

Orbio raises $21 million to automate hiring and onboarding for frontline workers

Orbio announces $21 million Series A in round led by Dawn Capital.