#startup-funding

#startup-funding

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.

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.

OpenEvidence, a tool that doctors and nurses have likened to ChatGPT for medicine, plans to announce a $200 million raise at a $6 billion valuation, The New York Times reports. The fresh funds come three months after the startup raised a $210 million round at a $3.5 billion valuation, a testament to the intense investor interest in industry-specific AI applications.

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.

Well, to me, there aren't any other options because [Wang] is brilliant,

Liberate, an AI startup automating insurance operations, has raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures as it looks to scale its agentic deployments across carriers and agencies globally. The all-equity round values the three-year-old startup at $300 million post-money, with participation from new investor Canapi Ventures and returning backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse, and Commerce Ventures. The insurance industry has been navigating a difficult stretch, with rising operational costs, legacy system constraints, and increasing customer expectations.

Reflection, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open-source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek.

Managing rental property finances remains one of the most time-consuming challenges in real estate investing, with landlords juggling spreadsheets, consumer payment apps like Venmo and Zelle, generic accounting software, and multiple banking accounts. The 14 million individual real estate investors across the United States-who own half of the country's rental supply-face fragmented workflows that drain hours each week from their businesses.

"So, wave one of vibe coding was like, 'You'll never need more software,'" said Copplestone, CEO and cofounder of Supabase, an open source application development platform. "Wave two is, 'Oh, you'll never need to write code again.'... And then wave three, which we're in now, is where these ideas converge-there's a nice happy path for anyone who's on their mobile, looking to build an app. They start on mobile, kick it across to their laptop, and then it scales out."

"I'll binge the entire series with you." "I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink." "I'll never bail on dinner plans."

Now, investors want in on that same bet: Telo announced Tuesday it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by designer Yves Béhar and Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning (who are also Telo co-founders), with additional investment from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and early stage funds like TO VC, E12 Ventures, and Neo.

With so much going on in the city's thriving ecosystem, it is easy to miss some of the happenings in the space. We keep you abreast of the things that you may have missed in NYC Tech News for the week ending 9/20 including the NYC startup fundings, NYC startup exits, and NYC startup events featuring news for eighteen companies including Chestnut Carbon, Tabs, GreenLite, and much, much more. Chestnut Carbon - $90M Series B Extension Carbon Removal Chestnut Carbon, a developer of carbon removal solutions, has raised $90M as a Series B extension led by CPP Investments.