Research Startups

Cofertility’s radical model for women: Freeze your eggs for free by donating half of them

In recent years, focus on career and delayed marriage age is driving some women to consider preserving their fertility through egg freezing. But the steep cost of the procedure, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, means many women can’t afford it during their most fertile years: 20s and early 30s. Cofertility, a startup founded by former Uber executive Lauren Makler and health tech angel investor Halle Tecco, offers women no-cost egg freezing in exchange for donating half the retrieved

Apr 12, 2025

Forerunner’s long game: As startups stall before IPO, all options are on the table

Thirteen years ago, Forerunner Ventures began helping to usher in a new era of consumer startups, including Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Glossier. None has gone through a traditional IPO process. Warby Parker was taken public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Bonobos was acquired by Walmart. Glossier is still privately held, along with many other design-forward brands in Forerunner’s portfolio. That’s not a failure, according to Forerunner founder Kirsten Green. In today’s landscape

Apr 12, 2025

The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next

Google held its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas this week, where it announced dozens of new features, like its next generation AI processing chip, called Ironwood, and its latest AI model, Gemini 2.5 Flash. It also announced a long list of AI startups that have signed to use its cloud. Among them are some of the most watched startups in the world. As we previously reported, this list includes Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the startup founded by OpenAI co-founder and former chief scien

Apr 11, 2025

38 consumer startup founders lobby over Trump tariffs: One faces a surprise $200K bill

Small businesses could be crushed under President Trump’s increased tariffs, according to an open letter by 38 female consumer product founders. While Trump paused his tariff increases for 90 days for various countries — setting the rate at 10% for now — China’s was raised to 145%, which includes the previous 20% levy. In the letter, published Thursday, these founders urged Trump and Congress to back off the tariff increases, at least until small businesses can find affordable supply chain alte

Apr 11, 2025

Blue Water Autonomy comes out of stealth promising autonomous naval ships

A new shipbuilding startup called Blue Water Autonomy has emerged from stealth with the promise of developing captain-less naval ships. The Boston, Massachusetts-based company has raised a $14 million seed round from Eclipse, Riot, and Impatient Ventures. The startup was founded in 2024 by former members of the U.S. Navy, leaders of Amazon Robotics, and iRobot. Blue Water Autonomy joins an ever-growing list of startups that are taking advantage of a splurge in defense investment. Defense tech f

Apr 11, 2025

Stripe CEO says company management regularly asks customers for ‘candid feedback’

Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is attended by about 40 leaders “from across Stripe.” “Even though we already have a lot of customer feedback mechanisms, it somehow always spurs new thoughts and investigations,” he

Apr 11, 2025

Meta’s Llama drama and how Trump’s tariffs could hit moonshot projects

Meta dropped three new AI models over the weekend: Scout, Maverick, and the still-training Behemoth, billed as the next evolution of “open-ish” AI. But instead of excitement, the response was mostly shrugs. Critics called the release underwhelming, saying it lacked the edge expected in today’s breakneck AI race. Meta’s clear attempt to claw back some attention quickly turned messy. Accusations began circulating on X and Reddit around benchmark tampering, a mystery ex-employee, and large gaps be

Apr 11, 2025

Parallel Systems is building autonomous electric rail for short-distance freight

The business of moving goods in the United States is dominated by trucks, which handle about two-thirds of the 20.2 billion tons of freight that’s transported annually. Parallel Systems founder and CEO, Matt Soule, wants to change that by putting a modern autonomous and electric twist on the centuries-old railroad system. The Los Angeles-based company is building battery-powered autonomous freight technology that works with existing freight cars and integrates with existing train control softw

Apr 11, 2025

Why Nest co-founder Matt Rogers is still bullish on HVAC

Back in 2010, when Matt Rogers founded Nest with Tony Fadell, home heating and cooling wasn’t exactly an area you’d think two ex-Apple engineers would be obsessing about. That fixation defined a new category of product, the smart thermostat, which is now serving as a beachhead for other companies’ smart home ambitions, even as Google lets Nest whither on the vine, killing products that were once core to the company. “Nest is not necessarily doing everything that I set them out to do years ago,

Apr 11, 2025

A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone. We’re tracking layoffs in the tech industry in 2025 so you can see the trajectory of the cutbacks and understand the impact on innovation across all types of companies.

Apr 11, 2025

Less than a month to get your exhibit table for TechCrunch Sessions: AI

TechCrunch Sessions: AI is fast approaching. So, what does that mean for you? It means exhibit tables are nearly gone — and now’s your chance to grab one before they’re all sold out. If you’ve got a game-changing product to showcase to the AI world, don’t keep it quiet. Exhibit your brand in front of the leaders and visionaries of the AI community. On June 5, 1,200 AI leaders, investors, and visionaries will gather at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall — and they’re hungry for what’s next. They’re l

Apr 11, 2025

Startups Weekly: Enjoying the reprieve

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Startups aren’t isolated from the world. But this week, funding news felt positively uncorrelated from the overall news cycle, offering somewhat of a reprieve — or perhaps just more time to prepare to invest in “planetary and societal health,” as one new fund plans to. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:Getty Images T

Apr 11, 2025

Leaders from Accel and Paladin Capital Group join the stage at StrictlyVC London in May

Mark your calendar — StrictlyVC London is just around the corner on 13 May. Designed for founders, entrepreneurs, and investors, this exclusive gathering promises deep VC insight and high-value connections. We’re thrilled to welcome our first pair of confirmed speakers: Nazo Moosa, managing director of Paladin Capital Group, and Sonali De Rycker, partner of Accel — two standout voices in venture capital with sharp views to share. Meet our speakers More speakers are on the way, but for now, take

Apr 11, 2025

Stripe CEO says he ensures his top leaders interview a customer twice a month

Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is attended by about 40 leaders “from across Stripe.” “Even though we already have a lot of customer feedback mechanisms, it somehow always spurs new thoughts and investigations,” he

Apr 10, 2025

How Chef Robotics found success by turning away its original customers

A few years ago, Chef Robotics was facing potential death. “There were a lot of dark periods where I was thinking of giving up,” founder Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch of his six-year-old company. But friends and investors encouraged him, so he persevered. Today, Chef Robotics has not only survived, it’s one of the few food tech robotic companies that is thriving. The startup, which recently raised a $23 million Series A, has 40 employees and marquee customers like Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bomb

Apr 10, 2025

Fintech founder charged with fraud after ‘AI’ shopping app found to be powered by humans in the Philippines

Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a “universal” checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners. Nate said its app’s users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, th

Apr 10, 2025

Cofertility’s radical model for women: Freeze your eggs for free by donating half of them

In recent years, focus on career and delayed marriage age is driving some women to consider preserving their fertility through egg freezing. But the steep cost of the procedure, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, means many women can’t afford it during their most fertile years: 20s and early 30s. Cofertility, a startup founded by former Uber executive Lauren Makler and health tech angel investor Halle Tecco, offers women no-cost egg freezing in exchange for donating half the retrieved

Apr 10, 2025

Cofertility raises a $7M Series A to make egg freezing free

In recent years, focus on career and delayed marriage age is driving some women to consider preserving their fertility through egg freezing. But the steep cost of the procedure, estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 per attempt, means many women can’t afford it during their most fertile years: 20s and early 30s. Cofertility, a startup founded by former Uber executive Lauren Makler and health tech angel investor Halle Tecco, offers women no-cost egg freezing in exchange for donating half the retrieved

Apr 10, 2025

Glossier might lose its unicorn status, report says

Glossier is reportedly fundraising again, aiming to raise $100 million with a valuation “south of a billion dollars,” according to Puck. Glossier, still one of the more popular beauty brands, was last valued at $1.8 billion nearly four years ago, but has struggled with profitability and scale these past few years. Glossier did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Sources who spoke to Puck stressed that Glossier doesn’t necessarily need the money, but had a desire for new consum

Apr 10, 2025

Inventex founder, an engineer for Coinbase at 14, wants to revolutionize patent applications

Daniel Ruskin started his career when he was a mere 14 years old as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a teenager “who knew how to code and wanted to build cool things.” Obviously too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did freelance development work he found on reddit in exchange for bitcoin. There he saw that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly sent the head of operations a cold email asking if he could work for the crypto exchange. “Long story short, I ended up writing much of the

Apr 10, 2025

Inventex founder, an engineer for Coinbase at 14, wants to revolutionize patent applications with AI

Daniel Ruskin started his career when he was a mere 14 years old as an engineer for Coinbase. As he tells it, he was a teenager “who knew how to code and wanted to build cool things.” Obviously too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did freelance development work he found on reddit in exchange for bitcoin. There he saw that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly sent the head of operations a cold email asking if he could work for the crypto exchange. “Long story short, I ended up writing much of the

Apr 10, 2025

Drafted uses AI and video resumes to help early-career professionals land jobs

As the job market continues to get more competitive, it’s taking months for new grads to land employment, with many settling for roles that don’t align with their goals. To address this problem, Drafted, a new startup emerging from stealth, has built a jobs platform for students and early-career professionals, a subset of people who Drafted thinks is ignored by services like LinkedIn, Handshake, and Indeed. Drafted uses AI and video resumes to match candidates with jobs, going beyond the typic

Apr 10, 2025

Revent rocks the boat with $100M fund to invest in people and the planet

It would appear the environment and society remain relevant, whatever you might hear in some other quarters. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from the news that European specialist VC Revent has closed a €100 million ($109 million) Fund II to invest in “planetary and societal health” startups. Launched out of Berlin in 2021 by Otto Birnbaum and Lauren Lentz, Revent’s thesis was (and remains) that the most ambitious entrepreneurs want to build companies that drive societal progress,

Apr 10, 2025

A fresh $100M rolls into DIG Ventures as it bids to woo early-stage European startups

The number of “operator VCs” — former founders turned VCs — in Europe in recent years. This is common in the U.S., where the majority of VCs are former founders. The reverse is true in Europe, where most come from banking or finance. Recent examples in Europe include Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Glovo founder Oscar Pierre (Yellow Fund), and Pitch founder Christian Reber. After exiting MuleSoft to Salesforce in 2018 for a cool $6.5 billion, founder Ross Mason set up DIG Ventures initially as a

Apr 10, 2025

How a hydrogen explosion led a teenage founder to become Sequoia’s first defense tech investment

As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia in the summer of 2023, Mach had a major setback: a hydrogen gun prototype it was building exploded, sending hundreds of pieces of shrapnel flying and injuring a te

Apr 9, 2025

More good news for New York startups: Lerer Hippeau raised another $200M

New York’s A-list venture capital seed fund, Lerer Hippeau, announced on Wednesday that it closed a ninth $200 million fund. That’s a step up from its eighth fund, which closed at $140 million, it said. With the new fund, Lerer Hippeau has $1.4 billion of assets under management. Since its inception in 2010, Lerer Hippeau has backed a string of well-known startups that went public or were acquired, many of them from New York. The list includes Allbirds, Axios, Birchbox, Brit + Co, Casper, Namel

Apr 9, 2025

Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription

Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription, as well as priority access to the company’s newest AI models and features. A bit confusingly, Max comes in two flavors with different price points and usage limits. There’s a $100-per-month Max tier with 5x higher rate limits than

Apr 9, 2025

Kalshi CEO: ‘State law doesn’t really apply’ to us

Last week, prediction market startup Kalshi sued New Jersey and Nevada after they tried to shut down its recently launched sports trading operation. In the lawsuit, Kalshi claimed that, since they’re a federally regulated platform, state gaming commissions don’t have the authority to set rules for them. “We’re not necessarily very concerned [because] we are regulated at the federal level,” said Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour last week at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. “The state law doesn’t rea

Apr 9, 2025

Tired of doing laundry? These startups want to help.

Doing laundry can be a chore. It takes time and is tedious. Few people like to do it. So it’s no surprise that startups have emerged to take that load off your back — literally. And investors are lining up to fund new and older players alike. Eleven-month-old NoScrubs has just raised $2 million in a pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital for its on-demand laundry delivery service. And in late February, Rinse raised a $23 million Series D led by LG Electronics to continue growing its 12-year

Apr 9, 2025

Artisan, the ‘stop hiring humans’ AI agent startup, raises $25M – and is still hiring humans

It’s been a tough but exciting year for 24-year-old Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder and CEO of AI sales agent startup Artisan. Artisan just raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, Carmichael-Jack exclusively tells TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others participated as well. A year ago, Artisan was one of the most sought-after grads from the winter 2024 Y Combinator class, raising $12 million in September, one of the

Apr 9, 2025

Nuro’s $106M raise backs its shift from delivery robots to licensing autonomy tech

After months of hearty marketing efforts and large-scale technology demos across the U.S., Nuro has secured $106 million in fresh funding to help scale its autonomous driving technology and advance commercial partnerships. The Series E round brings Nuro’s total funding raised to $2.2 billion and its valuation to $6 billion. That’s a drop from the $8.6 billion post-money valuation Nuro secured after its $600 million Series D in 2021, but most startup valuations have come down from the highs see

Apr 9, 2025

The complete agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: AI unveiled

It’s been a couple of years since our last topic-focused, one-day event — but with AI transforming the tech landscape, we couldn’t miss the chance to gather 1,200 founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone shaping the future of AI for a deep dive into what’s next. On June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley, TechCrunch Sessions: AI lands right at the intersection of startups and the rapidly evolving AI boom. If you’re building in tech and want to get smart on where the industry stands

Apr 9, 2025

A 25-year-old police drone founder just raised $75M led by Index

If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick who dropped out of college to run the company. Brinc, which was founded in 2017 and counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a seed-stage investor, just announced today that it has raised $75 million in new funding led by Index Ventures. This bring

Apr 8, 2025

Deep Cogito emerges from stealth with hybrid AI ‘reasoning’ models

A new company, Deep Cogito, has emerged from stealth with a family of openly available AI models that can be switched between “reasoning” and non-reasoning modes. Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 have shown great promise in domains like math and physics, thanks to their ability to effectively fact-check themselves by working through complex problems step by step. This reasoning comes at a cost, however: higher computing and latency. That’s why labs like Anthropic are pursuing “hybrid” model ar

Apr 8, 2025

Does Colossal Biosciences’ dire wolf creation justify its $10B+ valuation?

On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years and made famous by the HBO show “Game of Thrones.” These white, fluffy animals live on a 2,000-acre preserve in a location so secretive that journalists, including from TechCrunch, who were invited to view the live animals, were not invited to the compound itself, located in the northern United States. Inst

Apr 8, 2025

Amazon’s Zoox begins robotaxi testing in Los Angeles

Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous vehicle unit, is deploying a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles on the streets of Los Angeles starting Tuesday — a modest, yet meaningful step as the company inches toward offering public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year. The data-collection effort marks Zoox’s entrance into its sixth city and lays the groundwork for a future robotaxi service. Unlike rival Waymo, which is already providing paid robotaxi rides in LA, Zoox is still in the early

Apr 8, 2025