Startup companies

Startup companies

"This is a deeply emotional decision. I love this business, I hold this team dear, and my conviction in our mission has never been higher,"

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.

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.

Disappointing doesn't come close to describing how we feel about this moment,

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!

Over 13,000 brands including Net-a-Porter, Vice, Facebook and the BBC have signed up to a new creative networking platform which is being positioned as the 'LinkedIn for creatives'. The Dots, which launched in the UK today, will aim to help creative individuals and companies showcase their work, network, collaborate and connect with commercial opportunities. The platform is set to launch in the UK first, before branching out to the rest of Europe, as well as the US, in the near future.

You know that sinking feeling when you realize you've been using a phrase that makes you sound less intelligent than you actually are? I had one of those moments a few years back during a pitch meeting for my startup. I was presenting to potential investors, and I kept saying "I think" before every point I made. "I think our user acquisition strategy will work."

A colleague and I launched a new company after our previous employer closed. We divided responsibilities so she handled manufacturing and distribution while I managed digital content and marketing. My side of the business grew steadily. But within six months, her operational area began to falter. I began to step in to keep physical projects moving, and key infrastructure on her side wasn't maintained. Despite having access to shared digital project management tools, she frequently framed it as a communication problem.

Fintechs are increasingly adopting stablecoins-a non-volatile type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the US dollar. When it comes to payments and money transfers, stablecoins offer clear advantages but developing the infrastructure to support them can be slow and costly. This is where Levl wants to fill the gap. The startup aims to build a platform where digital wallets and other fintechs can seamlessly send money around the world using stablecoins.

I've spent my career straddling the structured discipline of Fortune 500 companies and the entrepreneurial scrappiness of startups. Each side has its strengths. Startups move fast, fueled by creativity and urgency. Corporations scale big, built on systems and predictability. But the future of leadership belongs to those who can bridge the two; leaders who think like founders and lead like CEOs.

Big ideas do not always arrive with attention or applause. Often, they are shaped quietly through experience, discipline, and persistence. That is how Thirukumaran Sivasubramaniam approaches his career. As Co-Founder and COO of Fintex Inc. in Toronto, he is known for turning complex ideas into working systems. His leadership style is practical, steady, and grounded in lived experience. It is a style shaped long before his professional career began.

Entire's tech has three components. One is a git-compatible database to unify the AI-produced code. Git is a distributed version control system popular with enterprises and used by open source sites like GitHub and GitLab. Another component is what it calls "a universal semantic reasoning layer" intended to allow multiple AI agents to work together. The final piece is an AI-native user interface designed with agent-to-human collaboration in mind.

From the outside, many entrepreneurs appear to be thriving. The business is stable or growing. Experience has replaced early uncertainty. Decisions are sharper than they used to be. By most traditional measures, things are working. Yet internally, something feels off. Energy feels flatter. Wins don't land the way they once did. The work feels heavier, even when results are strong.

Benjamin Nasberg is a Canadian entrepreneur and the CEO of Carbone Restaurant Group. He is known for building scalable hospitality businesses while staying closely connected to the people and communities behind them. His career reflects a steady focus on growth, culture, and practical leadership. Nasberg began working in restaurants at the age of 16. Those early roles gave him a ground-level understanding of operations, teamwork, and customer experience.

Kalshi said that some transfers on its prediction markets app are delayed because of the high volume of traffic during the Super Bowl. "Some deposits are delayed because of the amount of traffic and deposits we're getting," Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara wrote on X on Sunday evening. "Your money is safe and on the way, it will just take longer to land." On X, some Kalshi users said that they felt relieved to receive an explanation for why their deposits did not go through.

Apply to lead a roundtable session Roundtables at TC Founder Summit are built for depth, not decks. Each session is a 30-minute, informal discussion led by up to two speakers, with no slides or video - just meaningful dialogue and practical insight. These intimate conversations create space for founders to ask real questions and connect directly with experts who've been there before.

You can have all the markers of success-the steady job, the decent apartment, friends who think you're crushing it-and still feel like you're playing life on easy mode when you know you could handle expert level. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after a conversation with someone who, from the outside, looked like they had everything figured out. Good career, great relationship, traveled regularly. But over drinks, they admitted they felt like they were sleepwalking through their own life.

If you want to become a solopreneur or enhance your current offerings, look for a need in New York or come up with an innovative idea. Maybe it's a service that can help others or a product that could enhance or simplify their lives. Once you have your big idea, careful planning and preparation can give your startup its best shot at becoming a success. That can include researching your industry's trends to see if you're