SparkCharge raises $30M to help fleets electrify without commitments
SparkCharge raised $15.5 million in equity and secured a $15 million loan to expand its fleet charging operations.
Powering next-gen services with AI in regulated industries
Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks. Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient’s time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic…
Alation acquires Numbers Station to bolster its AI agent offerings
Alation plans to integrate Numbers Station’s products into its own as soon as the end of this quarter, Alation co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani told TechCrunch.
South Loop Ventures closes $21M fund in Houston to build up local tech ecosystem
South Loop Ventures, a Houston-based venture firm, announced a $21 million Fund I, with Rice Management Company and Chevron Technology Ventures serving as anchor investors. The firm, which launched in 2022, focuses on seed and pre-seed companies, with $400,000 as the average check size. It also primarily hopes to focus on backing founders of color. […]
Brex partners with former competitor Zip, with an eye on reducing cash burn to get to an IPO
Brex has once again made the surprising, but perhaps realistic, decision to partner with another one-time competitor. This time Zip, the CEOs of both companies told TechCrunch exclusively. In April 2022, fintech Brex announced it was making “a big push” into both the enterprise and software. The news was notable considering that Brex originally was […]
The Download: introducing the AI energy package
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. It’s well documented that AI is a power-hungry technology. But there has been far less reporting on the extent…
OpenAI’s Codex is part of a new cohort of agentic coding tools
Last Friday, OpenAI introduced a new coding system called Codex, designed to perform complex programming tasks from natural language commands. Codex moves OpenAI into a new cohort of agentic coding tools that is just beginning to take shape. From GitHub’s early Copilot to contemporary tools like Cursor and Windsurf, most AI coding assistants operate as […]
Gravitee, a platform that helps companies manage APIs, raises $60M
Gravitee, a platform designed to help companies manage their APIs and other digital traffic pipelines, has raised $60 million in a Series C funding round led by Sixth Street Growth with participation from Riverside Acceleration Capital and Albion VC. The new capital, which brings Gravitee’s total raised to just over $125 million, will be used […]
In a good sign for consumer internet startups, Creator Ventures raises $45M
“I’ve got a pretty wild story to tell you,” the early YouTube star Caspar Lee says in a TikTok. He goes on to tell the story of how a startup founder slid into his LinkedIn DMs with a pitch about an eco-friendly deodorant called Wild. He ignored the message at first, but his cousin Sasha […]
Affiniti’s 20- and 22-year-old founders raise $17M led by SignalFire just 6 months after an $11M seed
Affiniti founders Aaron Bai and Sahil Phadnis are building the kind of expense management software for main street small businesses that tech startups have enjoyed for years.
AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come
The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to…