All Episodes

AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation; plus, Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI

Plants can speak using electricity, so this startup built an AI model to decipher their language

Amazon is taking its biggest shot at Nvidia yet; plus, Town nabbed unicorn valuation, and Tolan snags $30M for its AI companion

Veritas expands its anti-counterfeit chip to jewelry, trophies, and fragrance bottles; plus, Elorian’s first AI model wants to reason with images

Ricursive Intelligence is betting on AI-designed chips to help solve the compute crisis; plus, Gudea leverages AI to help organizations prevent social media crises before they erupt

Apate sends AI agents undercover to get scammed so they can gather fraud intelligence

Niobia takes the guesswork out of some of tech’s most expensive mistakes; Giraffe Bio aims its bespoke biomolecules at the looming copper shortage

Honeyjar offers AI tools to improve PR and comms at every company; plus, WindBorne wins a hefty US Air Force contract

Efferon wants to eradicate the devastating toll of pediatric sepsis; plus, Petra Power looks to modernize energy for data centers

A startup founder who served time in prison is looking to court an untapped market: ex-cons

Greenairy is building smart plant towers to clean the air in your office; plus, Robot data startup Mecka AI nabs $60M from Sequoia

Silicon Valley’s AI wunderkind launches Underdog, the most private Instinct/Muse competitor yet; plus, name Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius

Hot Girl Hotline is like ‘Dear Abby’ for the AI era; plus, after Factory’s public spat with Khosla, Menlo proudly invests

Photon held a funeral for mobile apps; plus, Kevin Mandia’s new ‘agent swarm’ security startup

World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months; plus, turning idle car inventory into rental revenue

Factory CEO just accused his VC board adviser of spying for Cognition

Ex-Tesla team raises $12.5M to put supply chains on autopilot; plus, EliseAI raises $350M, doubles valuation to $4B

AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion; Physical AI chip developer SiMa AI hits $1.45B valuation

Ocean surveillance startup Quartermaster raises another $140M

Nexterity wants to automate the hard, dangerous part of pipefitting; plus, Feather is building the ‘Android of robotics’ for developers

Modal Motors is trying to cut China out of electric motors entirely; plus, PitPro’s first tire-changing robot goes live in Canada

a16z is challenging Silicon Valley’s love for drop-outs by launching a school; plus, AstroForge is putting AI in command of its next spacecraft

A small but growing number of founders are betting on bringing people together offline

Comp AI sets eyes on a continuously agentic future for security and compliance

Clean tech startup Fluxnium found a way to tap 50,000 years’ worth of nuclear fuel; plus, Hang Ten Systems nabbed another $53m

Early Anthropic hire, former METR COO have found a way to rein in rogue AI agents; plus, health benefits platform Thatch reaches $1B valuation

Superhuman acquired notetaker Fathom; plus, OpenAI bought smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging, and AI infrastructure company Cornelis raised $205M

Fusion power startups find new partners in the defense world; plus, Mecka AI nears $500M valuation amid rush for robot training data

Defense tech Mach Industries doubled its valuation in 3 months; plus, Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal

CloudNC raises $20M to automate manufacturing’s most pressing bottlenecks; plus, Sequoia doubles down on Cymphony

Nuclear startup Bluecore Energy raises $50M seed round, just two months after launch; plus, Poseidon Aerospace eyes first pilotless test flight, and Stoke Space raises another billion

Travis Kalanick’s Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business; plus, Krafton doubles down on India

Ollie is betting its focus on privacy can help it win the AI assistant race; plus, Qualcomm backs Ultrahuman

Volunteer at TechCrunch Founder Summit in Boston

Volunteer at TechCrunch Founder Summit in Boston

Wonderful more than doubles its valuation to $5B in under 6 months;plus, Volunteer at TechCrunch Founder Summit in Boston

HiddenLayer nabs $100M as enterprises rush to secure their AI deployments; plus, AfterQuery reportedly becomes Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn

Fambot introduces an ‘AI chief of staff’ for families; plus, Newlight is fuel-injecting hydrogen to make cargo ships more efficient

Harvard Law dropout raises $6M for Blue Voice to build a ‘Harvey for police officers’; plus, Clipto uses AI to search terabytes of video

Belgian electric motorcycle startup 'Any' bets on cargo space; plus, Liux’s Big microcar bets on sustainability

This former PG&E engineer is building a ‘Google Maps for the underground; plus, Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation

Radar makes podcasts searchable — and usable by AI agents

Pacific Fusion’s next fusion machine could clear a key hurdle to commercial power; plus, Stability AI raises $76 million in fresh funding

AI data startup Micro1 reaches $500M gross run rate amid AI training boom; plus, Japanese space tech startup Letara expands beyond satellite thrusters

Apollo Atomics wants to make nuclear power cheaper by shrinking an overlooked part; plus, Detroit startup Grounded raises $5M to customize electric and gas-powered vans

AI isn’t close to curing cancer. Vivodyne says it knows what it will take; plus, TerraPower’s nuclear reactor has a secret weapon for powering AI data centers

DOJ’s probe into Andreessen Horowitz over board seats baffles VCs; plus, Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month

Sound-powered fire protection startup gets $15M to snuff out fires before they turn catastrophic; plus, Wispr looks beyond dictation

SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition; plus, Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+

How a $250 million acquisition collapsed into allegations of fraud and forged signatures

Reservoir raises $8M to make water heaters that people and the grid will actually want; plus, AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x

Tech industry is buzzing after a Claude agent hacked into a gym; plus, Kyoto Fusioneering starts work on key fusion power plant device

Discovered Materials is playing AI whack-a-mole to hunt cooler chips

This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs

Naïve automates the grunt work of setting up and running a company, plus, Defense tech Hadrian raises $1.37B, and Omilia raises $67M to scale its customer support platform

Can WindBorne make AI weather prediction lucrative? Plus, Hark previews its browser use agent for completing tasks

Texas halts new data centers as governor calls for audits; also, is the future of data centers portable?

June thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem; plus, Base Power raises another $1B to save the grid using backyard batteries

When will fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems go public?; plus, Okta buys AI security startup Permiso

Dili raises $21.7M to bring AI compliance to the infrastructure boom; plus Fusion power darling Commonwealth Fusion Systems raises another $1B

As AI content floods the internet, Pangram raises $9M to detect it

MCP startup Runlayer accuses Rippling of stealing its product idea; plus, Ozlo’s Sleepbuds 2 build on Bose’s sleep earbud legacy

Antares raises $470M to build nuclear reactors for the US military; plus, Thea Energy lands $20M federal grant to build its magnets for fusion reactors

AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics; plus, Imagi raises $4.5M to help teach students how to vibe code

Colossal Biosciences reportedly in talks to raise new capital at $20B–$30B valuation; plus, Passionfroot raises $15M to expand its B2B creator marketplace to the US

Gritt exits stealth with $34 million for robots to build solar plants; Bluecore Energy raises $10M to build portable nuclear reactors

Nuclear startup Valar Atomics in talks to raise new funding at $6B valuation; plus, Databricks hits $188B valuation, extending its run as AI’s favorite second act

Applied Computing wants to give oil and gas operators an AI model for the entire plant, plus, AI-powered travel agency Fora hits unicorn status

Why AMI Labs’ Alexandre LeBrun won’t call his AI ‘AGI’ or ‘superintelligence’; plus, Lululemon backs nylon recycling startup Syntetica

Rime picks up $24M Series A to help enterprises field customer calls; plus, the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not models

Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation; plus, Pinwheel launches a retro-inspired landline phone for kids

Phia accused of ‘cookie stuffing,’ an AI agent startup just let its agent run its $100 million fundraise, plus, Oratomic to build a viable quantum computer that needs only 20K qubits

AI chip maker SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, 5 months after last mega round; plus, popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M

Venus Aerospace raises $90M Series B to build a new kind of rocket engine; plus, Blue Origin reportedly raising $10B at $130B valuation

Bidbus pits dealerships against each other to bid on your used car; Savi’s app aims to protect consumers from realistic AI scams like kidnappers demanding ransom

Station F ramps up as a launchpad for Europe’s hottest AI startups; plus, Smart glasses maker Even Realities hits $1B valuation

Midjourney wants Hollywood studios to reveal the details of their AI usage; plus, Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby nabs stakes in hot startups

Nvidia competitor Etched hits $5B valuation, $1B in sales for AI chip; plus, Indian tech tycoon bets $30M of his own money to build AI alternative to Microsoft Office

Arena, the AI leaderboard everyone uses, is now a $100M business

Corgi says it didn’t steal an open source product; plus, Omen AI’s plan to optimize data centers is all wet

Robotaxis drive miles just to get cleaned and charged; Aseon Labs wants to fix that; plus, General Intuition bets that video games can train AI agents for the real world

Slate Auto’s radically simple electric truck starts at $24,950; also, Valor Equity Partners looks to raise a $2.5B Fund VII

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

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

He made your free video player run smoothly. Now he’s doing that for robots.

World model maker Odyssey nabs $1.45B valuation backed by Amazon and other big names; plus, General Intuition in talks to raise $300M at around $2B valuation

SpaceX alum nabs $22M to turn rocket engines into geothermal power plants

Startup Foundation Alloy developed a new alloying technique; plus, Probably raises $9M to build a more reliable kind of AI

Jeff Bezos’s Prometheus raises $12B to build an ‘artificial general engineer’ for the physical world; plus, Theker building a factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything

Endurance Energy raises $54M to harness a massive untapped energy source; Jedify raises $24M to help companies arm AI agents with context on their businessplus,

Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in; plus, Zest launches a restaurant discovery app

Evotrex raises $30M to build the RV that doesn’t need a charging station; plus, so long FAANG and hello to MANGOS

Helion, the Sam Altman-backed fusion startup, raises $465M to build a power plant for Microsoft

Is Silicon Valley ready to put robots in people’s homes? Hello Robot is.

Brynn Putnam's Board raised $20M; plus, ZeroDrift raises $10M to protect AI models from themselves

Pacific Fusion’s latest prototype packs 440 gigawatts into an 80-nanosecond burst; plus, Rocket engine startup Impulse raises $500 million to hire people, not AI

Snap alums unveil Ghost Angels fund; Defense tech darling Mach Industries hits $1.8B valuation

This chip startup just raised $135M on a bet that AI’s biggest bottleneck isn’t compute — it’s memory; plus, Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget-cutting becomes its major selling point

Corgi doubled in value in 3 weeks; plus, Anthropic raises $65 Billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO

SOND, a sleep tech startup, exits stealth with $7M; plus, Airbnb-backed WeRoad raises $58M