Funding rounds, founder stories, and the most innovative startups disrupting industries.
107 articles
Mercor's August 22 round was led by Victor Liang at Felicis with participation from Nvidia's venture arm, General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures. The company will use the cash to triple its headcount to 1,500 contractors and expand beyond its existing customer base of OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor.
Germany-based Neura Robotics is preparing to raise up to 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) to bring a humanoid robot to mass production. The round, disclosed on August 20, would make Neura the largest European humanoid-robot bet and the first to position itself as a third pole outside the US-China axis.
CEO Nicolas Kopp tells TechCrunch the AI-native ERP platform hit $1B valuation led by Iconiq with Sequoia and a16z — having already raised $200M, added 600 customers including an EY alliance, and doubled annualized revenue last quarter alone.
Hypersonic weapons startup Castelion closed more than $1 billion in Series C funding on August 18–19, while Reach Capital announced a $265 million Fund V aimed at AI startups in education, health, and the future of work. The largest rounds of the week all favored companies with hard-to-replicate systems, data, or regulated distribution.
AI inference startup Groq closed a $350 million round on August 18 at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, roughly half its September 2025 mark. The round was led by Disruptive with planned participation from NVIDIA and values Groq's pivot from chip sales to a 'neocloud' inference service at a meaningful discount to its prior peak.
Databricks closed a $5 billion round led by Coatue, Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price, and new backer Sixth Street Growth at a $190 billion valuation — the largest AI infrastructure round of the year. Three days later, China-side Unitree confirmed its Shanghai stock-market debut on August 19 after raising 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) in its IPO.
Hangzhou-based Unitree priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at 150.8 yuan per share on August 10, aiming to raise 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million) and become the first mainland-listed humanoid robot manufacturer, with DeepSeek buying in as a strategic anchor.
Databricks raised $5 billion at a $190 billion valuation on August 13 — six months after a $134 billion round — as the data and AI company reported a $7 billion-plus revenue run-rate growing more than 80% year over year.
CodeRabbit raised $143 million in a Series C round valuing the AI code review company at $1.5 billion, co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital, less than a year after a $60 million Series B.
The Swedish app builder closed a Series C led by Menlo Ventures and the EU-backed Scaleup Fund, doubling its valuation from December's $330 million round, Sifted reported Wednesday.
Blacksmith raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners on August 12, valuing the AI code-validation startup at $550 million — nearly ten times its Series A valuation from less than a year ago.
The New York startup's platform aggregates patient data, AI models and care protocols for the $400 billion MSK market, with Bessemer Venture Partners leading the round that brings total funding to $63 million.
The bitcoin miner will build 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity for Anthropic at its Rockdale, Texas campus, in a deal worth up to $16.1 billion with extensions, as crypto miners are revalued as AI infrastructure owners.
Sequoia Capital and the US Defense Department's American Strategic Technology Fund co-led the Series C for the Torrance startup, which builds the Archer AI strike drone and Bandit counter-UAS interceptor.
Two-year-old Cambridge Aerospace raised $300 million in a Series C led by SpaceX backer DFJ Growth, valuing the British air defence startup at $3.4 billion, Sifted reported on August 10.
Hadrian, which builds AI-powered factories for defense and aerospace customers, closed a $1.37 billion round at a $7.9 billion valuation on August 6 — more than quadrupling its January valuation, CNBC reported.
Optical networking startup Lumilens launched with $900 million in funding, including a $700 million Series C at a $5.51 billion valuation led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures and Spark Capital, to build optical chips for AI data centers.
Harvey, the legal AI company, is raising at least $500 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, a 40% jump from five months ago, as its annualized revenue tops $350 million, The Information reported on August 7.
A publicly traded fund listed on Robinhood will give everyday investors exposure to the private portfolios of Y Combinator startups, with the company targeting roughly $200 million. TechCrunch reports the fund is slated to start trading.
Hadrian, the Torrance-based advanced manufacturing startup, closed a $1.37 billion Series D at a $7.87 billion valuation on August 6 — more than quadrupling its valuation since January — to scale its highly automated, AI-run factories for US defense and aerospace, TechCrunch's TechStartups reported.
Amazon is helping Superblocks, a 50-person vibe-coding startup with $60 million raised, bring agentic apps under IT control via Amazon Bedrock — the latest sign that hyperscalers want enterprises to buy AI from them, not from frontier labs.