#startup-funding

#startup-funding

One thing I heard from some of the top researchers and mathematicians I've recruited to Axiom is that solving for mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy,

Yoodli, an AI-powered communication training startup, has reached a valuation of more than $300 million - more than triple its level six months ago - as it builds technology meant to assist people rather than replace them with machines. The valuation increase follows Yoodli's $40 million Series B round, led by WestBridge Capital with participation from Neotribe and Madrona. It comes after a $13.7 million Series A round announced in May, bringing the startup's total funding to nearly $60 million.

sometimes feels like a toddler that you give a permanent marker to and see what it writes on the wall,

RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company. "We're in this kind of renaissance where there's a lot of renewed interest in manufacturing," Cassel told Business Insider.

This isn't about raising capital, it's about giving our community/fans a chance to invest while we're private and join us on the journey,

Smith worked alongside star designer Jonathan Anderson, who left Loewe for LVMH stablemate Dior earlier this year, and chief executive Pascale Lepoivre to steer Loewe's image during a period of rapid growth. The luxury brand steadily transitioned from an arty, niche label to one with mass-media currency and cross-generational awareness, complementing efforts like the Loewe Craft Prize with celebrity tie-ups that included Maggie Smith, Jamie Dornan and more. Smith oversaw collaborations with Studio Ghibli and On Running and developed Loewe's viral TikTok strategy.

When the model for the company was curated at a hackathon in São Paulo, Foody knew that he, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha had built something that couldn't be replicated in classrooms. Its AI-powered hiring platform automates aspects of the hiring process, such as resume screening, candidate matching and AI-powered interviews. Within nine months, he and his co-founders had turned the idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate, which they claim is one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era.

Americans can easily spend anywhere between $1,000 and $10,000 annually on tax preparation, yet still wait weeks for responses from their accountants, a system that's reaching a breaking point. With three out of four CPAs approaching retirement and accounting program enrollment declining nationwide, the traditional tax preparation industry faces a severe capacity crisis just as tax complexity continues to escalate.

Momentic makes tools for software testing and verification, a niche currently occupied by open-source frameworks like Playwright and Selenium. Those tools offer complex, fine-grained controls, but Momentic is counting on AI to make the process simple and effective. "We help our customers make sure their product works," co-founder Wei-Wei Wu said. "They can describe their critical user flows in plain English and our AI will automate it."

Jarred Kessler has spent over fifteen years at the intersection of finance, technology, and real estate. He is known for building companies that rethink traditional models and deliver new solutions for both investors and consumers. From raising $150 million in startup capital to leading innovative real estate platforms, Kessler has established himself as a strategic thinker and transformative leader. "I've always believed that the best opportunities come from understanding change before it happens," Kessler says.

Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, has raised a massive $1 billion round at a $11 billion valuation, according to a person familiar with the deal. The round comes less than two months after the seven-year-old startup announced its previous fundraise of $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. The latest round is led by the company's returning investors Sequoia and CapitalG, the person said. Other investors in Kalshi include Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Anthos Capital, and Neo.

Cybersecurity company Guardio is taking aim at a fresh market born amid this flux: finding malicious code written using AI tools. The company says it has found that with AI tools, malicious actors now find it easier than ever to build scam and phishing sites as well as the infrastructure needed to run them. Now, Guardio is leveraging its experience building browser extensions and apps that scan for malicious and phishing sites.

Contrary to popular narrative, Europe is not short of cash. In aggregate, European households save $1.4 trillion a year-substantially higher than the $800 billion figure for U.S. households. According to data platform Dealroom, European investors in 2025 were sitting on $31 billion of dry powder, waiting to be invested. But where American capital is one of the U.S. economy's great strengths, famously accelerating business growth there, Europe's capital doesn't deliver in nearly the same way.

That's a crowded market where even her previous firm, 6Sense, offers agents. "I'm not playing in outbound," Kahlow tells TechCrunch. Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales, going all the way to "closing the deal," Kahlow says. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and, Kahlow says, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also be the onboarding specialist, setting up new customers.

A Long Island widower who'd made a fortune selling his insurance firm a few years earlier, Durnan had put $250,000 into Nolan and Grace's nascent Hamptons-themed swimwear and sunglasses brand, East x East. Nolan, a 33-year-old Irish immigrant, was betting everything on this start-up and had pitched Durnan on a grand vision for the company: East x East would one day be sold on Revolve and in upscale department stores like Saks.

Michele Romanow kicked off the day by reminding the audience that entrepreneurship is messy and that all the planning can't prevent failure. Drawing on her early venture, a luxury caviar farm, she shared her journey from pitching to realizing the massive capital needed, highlighting how even a pivot taught her essential resilience. There isn't one great idea; there are hundreds of iterations from where you started. Her advice: get scrappy. That hands-on experience taught her the leadership and adaptability that fuelled her later successes.

"We're addressing a very acute problem that consumers face, which is that electricity has gotten more expensive and less reliable," Zach Dell, 29, told Fortune. "It's totally crazy if you think of all the things that have gotten better over the last decade, and our power has gotten noticeably worse. Batteries, paired with software and a unique business model, can make your power more reliable and less expensive."

The startup starts with the premise that large language models can't remember past interactions the way humans do. If two people are chatting and the connection drops, they can resume the conversation. AI models, by contrast, forget everything and start from scratch. Mem0 fixes that. Singh calls it a "memory passport," where your AI memory travels with you across apps and agents, just like email or logins do today.

"A lot of the tasks junior [associates] do are going to get automated," Weinberg says. "That doesn't mean their job's going to get automated. It's just going to be a different job." Built atop language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Harvey's platform streamlines legal workflows by helping lawyers with drafting, contract analysis, legal research, due diligence, regulatory compliance, and case law review.

India's appetite for instant convenience - once confined to food and grocery delivery - is expanding into house help. That shift has helped Snabbit, an on-demand home-help startup, secure $30 million in new funding and lift its valuation to $180 million, up from $80 million five months ago. The all-equity Series C round - Snabbit's third fundraise in nine months - was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from existing backers Lightspeed, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Cluely's AI assistant grew famous this April with a viral claim that its undetectable windows could "help you cheat on anything" - a claim that was quickly disproven when a string of proctoring services showed they could, in fact, detect use of the AI assistant. But in a matter of months, the company had raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz, becoming one of the most visible products in the crowded AI assistant space.

Elite Media transformed its commitment to community support into tangible action by launching the Keep It 100 pitch competition, distributing $100,000 among five Black-owned businesses during an event that celebrated innovation and cultural impact. The Harlem-based advertising agency drew from its own funds to create the prize pool, challenging industry peers to follow suit in supporting entrepreneurs who contribute meaningfully to their communities.

On Oct. 17, MADE, a verification system designed to safeguard Black creativity, won the inaugural "Keep It 100" Pitch Competition hosted by Elite Media. The announcement was made at The One Club's "Where Are All the Black People" Conference in New York City. Elite Media Founder and CEO Chris Crawford joined a panel of judges for the competition and took center stage to present $50,000 to Tommy Johnson, founder and CEO of MADE, along with $12,500 each to the four other finalists.

MicroFactory, a San Francisco-based robotics startup, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to expand its general-purpose robotic system for desktop manufacturing tasks. The funding round included investors such as Clement Delangue, founder of Hugging Face, and Naval Ravikant, an early investor in Uber and Twitter. With this capital, MicroFactory's post-money valuation stands at $30 million. The company aims to provide small and mid-sized businesses with access to robotic automation that is both affordable and versatile.

Over the last two years, Cursor has grown from a cult hit to one of the most popular AI code editors in software development. The tool's developer, Anysphere, has raised over $1 billion and was recently valued at $9.9 billion, per PitchBook. On Tuesday, Cursor hosted a one-day café at The Lost Draft in SoHo. It's one of several in-person events that AI companies have created to satisfy loyal customers and increase their social media hype.

The Silicon Valley startup, which builds technology to help people build apps and websites with AI, expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue by next year, its CEO and founder Amjad Masad told Business Insider. That's about four times as much as the $240 million in annual sales that Replit is now generating, Masad added. Masad disclosed the updated projections after Business Insider obtained a leaked memo for investors from this summer, showing it projected $1 billion by the end of 2027.

Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they'd be interested in using data from Medal, his popular video game clipping platform, to train their agents. Within weeks, it became clear that Medal's data was more valuable to the labs than he expected. "We received multiple acquisition offers very quickly," he told me.