According to Dealroom's 2024 European Tech report, mentions of "AI" in European startup pitch decks increased by over 200% between 2022 and 2024. VC funding for AI-adjacent startups surged, even as overall funding in Europe contracted. The signal was unmistakable: if you want capital, you need to speak the language of artificial intelligence.
GameSquare, TubeBuddy's sellers and related entities signed an asset purchase agreement effective Feb. 20, 2026, and the company issued the 5,000,000 Series A-2 Convertible Preferred shares as consideration. The filing states that GameSquare must file a preliminary proxy by April 30 and hold a shareholder meeting within 120 days to authorize enough common stock to allow conversion.
Creators truly are creatives, but they're also entrepreneurs. They're also technology-savvy and they understand audiences. And I don't think there's ever been a generation of creatives who've been able to do all four of those things. The Lighthouse CEO Jon Goss highlights the unique skill set of modern creators who must balance artistic vision with business acumen, technical proficiency, and audience engagement.
My website was not what potential customers would be looking for. Although what the site did was useful, no one in the age of agentic coding was going to use it. Instead, they would want some way to have their coding agent, or their build process, or some other automated thing, use my system.
That spectacular failure forced me to do something I'd been avoiding: Separate my identity from my work. It was the hardest growth experience of my life, but looking back, it was also the most necessary. This failure taught me infinitely more than my first company ever did when I sold it successfully.
We're fortunate to stand on the work of giants. Every time we cross a suspension bridge or hear a brilliant piece of music, we experience the spark of someone else's genius. We don't need to understand every theory to benefit from it - and the same is true in building a business. You don't need a computer science degree to think like an engineer - but doing so can help you build smarter, faster and with fewer mistakes.
A year ago, Redwood Materials didn't have an energy storage business. Now, it is the fastest-growing unit within the battery recycling and materials startup - a reflection of an AI data center building boom. The evidence of that growth, the company says, can be found at its R&D lab in San Francisco, which has expanded four-fold into a 55,000-square-foot facility and now employs nearly 100 people.
He took a few stabs at starting new AI businesses, but nothing really stuck until he got a call from a friend who wanted help filling out customs paperwork. Basu got "very curious" and started cold-calling customs brokers in the Los Angeles area. He learned that many are mom-and-pop affairs still deeply reliant on fax machines and paper. When his first customer showed him stacks of manila folders during a FaceTime tour of her office, everything clicked, Basu told TechCrunch.
I used to think I was over my startup failure. That was three years ago, ancient history, right? Yet every time I pitched a new idea to someone, my hands would shake. Every investor meeting felt like walking into that same room where I had to tell my team we were shutting down. My body remembered what my mind tried to forget. That's when Bruce Springsteen's words hit me like a freight train: "The past is never the past. It is always present. And you'd better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad."
I remember standing in a boutique in San Francisco, sliding my credit card across the counter for a pair of $400 sneakers I absolutely could not afford. My second startup had just folded-eighteen months of burning through investor money, eighteen months of watching something I built crumble in slow motion-and I was drowning in debt. But there I was, walking out with a shopping bag and a receipt that made my stomach turn, telling myself this was an investment in how people perceived me.
As the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket dominate the attention of investors and regulators, a sports-focused challenger called Novig is announcing $75 million in fresh funding to compete with the twin giants. Led by the blockchain venture firm Pantera Capital, Novig's Series B round values the startup at $500 million. Once a highly restricted pastime, sports betting has in recent years seeped into every corner of the U.S. economy.
Data centers face a conundrum: how to power increasingly dense server racks using equipment that relies on century-old technology. Traditional transformers are bulky and hot, but a new generation of solid-state transformers promises to address both problems while making power management more flexible. One solid-state transformer startup, DG Matrix, has raised $60 million in a Series A round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Engine Ventures led the round with ABB, Cerberus Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures.
I grew up in a small town in Indiana, but my interest in Japan started early. I still remember watching a "Sesame Street" episode where Big Bird visits Japan. That image stuck with me. In college, that curiosity took shape: I studied Japanese at the University of Chicago and spent a summer in Hokkaido. After graduating, I moved to Japan in 2008 to teach English, though a career in teaching was never my goal.
Power, rather than compute, is fast becoming the limiting factor in scaling AI data centers. That shift has prompted Peak XV Partners to back C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup building plug-and-play, system-level power solutions designed to cut energy losses and improve the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure. C2i (which stands for control conversion and intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the two-year-old startup's total funding to $19 million.
The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders. Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who "got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us," Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn't take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic.
Just one month after raising $11.75 million in a round led by Joe Lonsdale's 8VC, African defensetech Terra Industries announced that it's raised an additional $22 million in funding, led by Lux Capital. Nathan Nwachuku, 22, and Maxwell Maduka, 24, launched Terra Industries in 2024 to design infrastructure and autonomous systems to help African nations monitor and respond to threats.
"So my strategy was, I'm going to put a Gong Cha - the first five stores - next to Starbucks," Berry told CNBC. "And if I can get one in a hundred people who are going into Starbucks to come and try a Gong Cha, then I've got a business."
Two years ago, Luke Bailey had what became a controversial app idea - a dating app called Score for people with good to excellent credit. Launched just days before Valentine's Day, the app required users to have a credit score of at least 675 to register. At the time, Bailey said he created the app to encourage partners to talk more about personal finance since doing so is often uncomfortable for many people.
But if you're innovating within your industry, it's a problem you should expect and prepare for because it means having to operate in two realities-the internal reality where you know the challenges in your industry and how you're going to solve them, and the external reality where nobody else has recognized the problem that needs to be solved. In a highly regulated industry like healthcare, safety, and stability create an inertia that often works against innovation.
As Valentine's Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be gearing up for first dates - not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop pairs students with potential dates once per week based on their responses to a questionnaire. A Stanford whiz kid is trying to disrupt an established industry from his Palo Alto dorm? Stop me if you've heard this one before!
The quantum computing stocks boomed for most of 2025, only to go bust in the last quarter. In 2026, it's been mostly looking lower for many of the top quantum plays, including some of the more speculative plays. That said, the technology is still worth keeping tabs on, even as the quantum pure-play stocks continue to take more backward steps. Of course, investors have taken on more of a risk-off approach in the past couple of quarters.
