Venture

Venture

Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they homed in on their startup idea. Their big takeaway: the work was often more cargo logistics than cutting-edge science. "We're Amazon warehouse workers with PhDs," one astronaut said. If an experiment takes two hours on station, the person continued, the first ninety minutes are spent just moving around cargo and preparing tools.

In 2021, global femtech investment peaked at before plunging to just €1.1bn the next year, amid a tech funding apocalypse and capital making a headlong dash towards AI. Several factors contributed to this decline - broader market conditions, withering investor risk appetite, and natural sector maturation. But the surge in AI funding coinciding with a plunge in femtech investment highlights serious issues with capital allocation.

"I'm as guilty of doomscrolling as the next person, but knowing that doomscrolling is actually costing me money makes me feel dumb," Yang told TechCrunch.

In a move that the parties said will create an industry-first space tower company model, implementing shared space and ground non-terrestrial-network (NTN) infrastructure, lowering capital costs and improving spectrum utilisation for all those involved in it, Space42 and Viasat are to launch jointly held entity Equatys Venture. The launch is aimed at enabling global direct-to-device (D2D) services, as well as evolving existing and planned mobile satellite services (MSS) to a 5G network environment.

Parento addresses this critical gap by providing the first-ever insurance product specifically designed for paid parental leave, offering companies a three-in-one solution that combines customized insurance coverage, streamlined leave management, and personalized parent coaching. The platform serves both birthing and non-birthing parents, achieving a remarkable 95% return-to-work rate compared to the industry standard of 60%. With its comprehensive approach, Parento helps employers control expenses while supporting employees through one of life's most significant transitions, targeting the $43B total addressable market for parental leave solutions.

David Fischer - Former CRO at Meta, Fischer scaled annual revenue from less than $1 billion to over $100 billion, connecting 200 million businesses with customers worldwide. Earlier, he built Google's early sales engine. Adam Bain - Former COO of Twitter, Bain built its sales, product, and ad operations from scratch, growing revenue from millions to billions in five years.

Companies are going online, e-commerce is growing, leaving a lot of data trails where you can understand whether or not a company is going to do well.

Perplexity, the AI-powered search startup that compete with Google by providing conversational answers to user queries, has secured $200 million in new capital at a $20 billion valuation, The Information reported. The fresh funding comes just two months after the company raised $100 million at an $18 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg's July report. Since its founding three years ago, the rapidly growing AI company has raised $1.5 billion in total funding, according to PitchBook data.

Klarna made its New York stock exchange debut this week, sending its market cap soaring to $15 billion-propelling around 40 staffers to millionaire status overnight, with its executive team gaining the most from the IPO. It's not the first time Klarna's success has created ultra-rich employees-at least 115 of the business' workers have hit seven-figure net worths since 2021. And staffers at other tech companies, including Nvidia, Canva, and Palantir who invested early have also made it to the exclusive wealth club.

the very best of DARPA technology gets scaled and into the market and is made available to the warfighter.

Order-to-cash workflows, the end-to-end process of managing customers from order placement to payment collection, are highly regulated, requiring strict adherence to identity verification, call recording disclosures, and other mandatory steps. While these tasks are simple for human agents, they become resource-intensive at scale. MEGA, founded by industry veterans with firsthand experience in call centers, regulatory compliance, and recovery operations, addresses this challenge by automating repetitive yet critical customer interactions with human-like dialogue. The platform ensures every conversation is logged, auditable, and ready for regulatory scrutiny.

"When Mark and I first discussed starting a brand, it wasn't about the products," Arnett tells Entrepreneur. "It was about how we could equip modern consumers with what they need to achieve their goals."

BlackRock and Goldman Sachs-backed media startup Minute Media, which owns properties like Sports Illustrated, The Players' Tribune, and 90 Minutes, announced Monday that it is acquiring VideoVerse, an Indian AI startup that lets broadcasters extract highlights and create content from sports footage. VideoVerse's clients include the Indian Premier League and Women's Premier League Cricket tournaments, FIFA+, and broadcasters Nippon TV and Cubber TV.

Cohere, the Toronto-based startup building large language models for business customers, has long had a lot in common with its hometown hockey team, the Maple Leafs. They are a solid franchise and a big deal in Canada, but they've not made a Stanley Cup Final since 1967. Similarly, Cohere has built a string of solid, if not spectacular, LLMs and has established itself as the AI national champion of Canada.

Lightpost One is developing cutting-edge "vibe coding" technology, an AI solution that repurposes and rewrites existing software code rather than building new systems from scratch. The technology targets a global market of over 200 million websites and more than 27 million active developers, within an industry valued at $70.6 billion. Vibe coding holds significant growth potential in the development of advanced software applications, as it accelerates innovation and reduces costs.

Back when Deliveroo was a tiny London-based platform, with just a few restaurants in its repertoire, there was one man who believed it'd go on to become the multi-billion-dollar brand it is today: Martin Mignot. "They had eight employees. They were in three London boroughs. Overall, they had a few 1000 users to date, so it was very, very early,"

One of Airbnb's most underappreciated competitive advantages is how it has quietly become a home for long-term travelers. In 2024, stays of 28 nights or more made up 18% of gross nights booked, according to company filings. That's not a small niche -- it's nearly one in five stays. This trend aligns with broader shifts in how people work and live.

Baseten just pulled in a massive $150 million Series D, vaulting the AI infrastructure startup to a $2.15 billion valuation and cementing its place as one of the most important players in the race to scale inference - the behind-the-scenes compute that makes AI apps actually run. If the last generation of great tech companies was built on the cloud, the next wave is being built on inference. Every time you ask a chatbot a question, generate an image, or tap into an AI-powered workflow, inference is happening under the hood.