Lightrun grabs $70M using AI to debug code in production

April 28, 2025
AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Today, an Israeli startup called Lightrun — which has built an […]

OmniRetail shakes up Africa’s B2B e-commerce market with $20M Series A

April 28, 2025
When Deepankar Rustagi last raised money for OmniRetail in 2022, excitement was high for African startups addressing the supply chain and operational challenges in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. At one point, these startups received more capital than all sectors, except fintech. Recently, though, the industry’s enthusiasm and venture capital’s interest have faded, as […]

Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok

April 28, 2025
Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: “Let’s expose luxury’s biggest secret.”  He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one…

From coding tests to billion-dollar startups, Ali Partovi’s eight-year experiment is paying off

April 28, 2025
In Silicon Valley, where the same high-wattage names tend to dominate the headlines, Ali Partovi has long wielded outsized influence despite limited name recognition. The Iranian-born Harvard graduate built an impressive resume early on — joining the founding team of LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million), co-founding iLike (sold to MySpace for […]

Early cancer detection startup Craif raises $22M

April 28, 2025
Cancer ranks as one of the top causes of death worldwide. The National Cancer Institute reported nearly 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths globally in 2022, with projections showing a rise to 29.9 million new cases by 2040. Craif, spun off from Nagoya University in Japan in 2018, is using microRNA(miRNA) […]

4chan is back online, says it’s been ‘starved of money’

April 27, 2025
4chan is partly back online after a hack took the infamous image-sharing site down for nearly two weeks. The site first went down on April 14, with the person responsible for the hack apparently leaking data including a list of moderators and “janitors” (one janitor told TechCrunch they were “confident” that the leaked data was […]

Welcome to Chat Haus, the coworking space for AI chatbots

April 27, 2025
Nestled between an elementary school and a public library in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood sits a new kind of “luxury” coworking space.  Dubbed the Chat Haus, this space has many of the elements you’d find in a traditional coworking office: people hammering away at their computer keyboards, another person taking a phone call, someone else pausing […]