Even before he'd graduated from the University of Bath in 2024, Arnau Ayerbe landed a highly coveted role as an AI engineer with JP Morgan - yet he felt limited and uninspired. "I realised very quickly that the person to my right and to my left were going to be me in 20 years, and I didn't want to become that," recalls London-based Ayerbe.
Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. "When we were applying for Y-Combinator, the feedback we got was, 'great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,'" Wagh told TechCrunch.
Specifically, the technology that helped retail brands sell unsold or excess products (off-channel inventory) wasn't as sophisticated as it could have been. Brands sell their excess inventory at discount retailers like Nordstrom Rack, but often lose money because managing unsold inventory is difficult. Products are spread across warehouses, and teams are left guessing the value of an item and when the best time to sell it is.
Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from December 2025. I have included some additional information such as industry, company description, round type, founders, and total equity funding raised to further the analysis. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Learn More →
Aikido's core proposition is rooted in the conviction that traditional application security tools have not kept pace with the rapid evolution of software development. Modern engineering teams ship code more frequently, and the widespread adoption of AI tools for coding has heightened both velocity and risk. Legacy scanners and point solutions can generate noise and distract developers, rather than offering actionable insights at the right moment.
Mark Zuckerberg has struck again. Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral. The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research.
In 2024, they launched Sauron - named after the sinister, all-seeing eye from "The Lord of the Rings" - to build what they envisioned as a military-grade home security system for tech elites. The concept resonated in Bay Area circles, where crime had become a constant topic during and after the pandemic, despite San Francisco Police Department statistics showing property crime and homicide rates declining last year.
ScrubMarine is developing autonomous hull-cleaning and inspection robots that target biofouling - the build-up of algae, barnacles and slime on ships' hulls. This growth increases drag, driving up fuel consumption and emissions. Devanathan estimates biofouling adds more than $100 billion a year to global shipping costs. "Biofouling is a hidden problem, but it's a massive one," he said. "It increases drag on the vessel, which increases fuel burn. That's a huge cost for operators, and it's also bad for the environment."
In a civil complaint, the SEC has charged Luckey with violating securities laws for using millions of dollars of company funds to pay for her home, Super Bowl tickets, and a destination wedding in the Caribbean. The SEC alleges she painted a rosy picture of the company's booming revenue when ComplYant never brought in more than $620 in monthly revenue.
Stroma, which made headlines in 2011 for a still-not-released device that the company said could safely turn brown eyes blue, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday. That's the variety that allows a business to reorganize and pause litigation in hopes of staying alive. The once-buzzy California tech company has raised $70 million since its 2009 founding and is still hoping to run a clinical study in Germany this coming year, according to its chairman.
Helsingborg-based proptech AI startup Proplab continues to build momentum. After opening up their platform for residential real estate this fall, the company has seen rapid growth, now with 100+ broker offices connected across Sweden, on top of their existing commercial property clients. Over the past months, Proplab has established a collaboration with a major brokerage chain and another one is now on the way in. Their traction is clear, revenues more than doubled from October to November this year.
Ryan Li has long been steeped in the worlds of both AI and crypto. He started working with AI about ten years ago as an undergrad at UC Berkeley and has since built two crypto startups. That experience has led him to conclude that popular AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity give rise to far too many hallucinations about crypto-and that those errors can cost traders millions, if not billions, of dollars.
Naveen Rao, the former head of AI at Databricks, has raised $475 million in seed capital at a $4.5 billion valuation for his new startup, Unconventional AI. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC. The funding is a first installment towards the goal of up to $1 billion for the round, Rao told Bloomberg.
Intel has signed a term sheet to acquire the AI chip startup SambaNova Systems, two sources with direct knowledge of the agreement tell WIRED. The details of the term sheet are unknown. The agreement is non-binding, meaning the deal is not yet finalized and could be dissolved without penalty. It could take weeks or even months before regulatory approval, liability scrutiny, and financial due diligence are complete.
With initial seed rounds totalling around £10 million, these companies focused on creating real-time interactive experiences that blended television polish with social media immediacy. Fast forward to late 2025, and those early investments have ballooned into a collective valuation exceeding £2 billion, according to recent filings with Companies House and market analysts like PwC. This remarkable trajectory underscores Britain's role as a global leader in entertainment tech, where startups have harnessed 5G rollout and AI-driven production to redefine how audiences connect with content.
When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn't pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn't mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building.
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,
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.
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.
