Startups

ChowNow snaps up YC-backed POS platform Cuboh and is laying off 20% of staff

ChowNow acquired Cuboh, a point-of-sale platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.

Musical toy startup Playtime Engineering wants to simplify electronic music making for kids

Troy Sheets began making music at 15 years old in his home studio with a keyboard synthesizer, drum machine and four-track cassette recorder — an impressive setup for a high school sophomore. Howeve

Discipulus Ventures mentors young founders to revive a Norman Rockwell vision of America

Scores of accelerator programs run every year with the aim of identifying and cultivating founders in the earliest stages of building a company. Only a fraction seek out founders who are explicitly al

Vibrant Planet uses AI for land mapping and improving climate resiliency

As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, damage from wildfires has increased with it. The amount of forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, according to the Na

Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news app Artifact may not be shutting down after all

Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January the award-winni

Former Nextdoor exec raises $25 million for PipeDreams, a startup rolling up HVAC companies

Dan Laufer swore off ever founding a startup again after he sold apartment rental platform RentLingo in 2021, but Laufer also couldn’t ignore the potential to solve a problem he saw unfolding as

AI and data infrastructure drives demand for open source startups

A new report highlights the demand for startups building open source tools and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution, with the adjacent data infrastructure vertical also heating up. Runa Capi

900.care sells waterless personal care products and lets you add tap water at home

Here’s the harsh truth behind personal care products: You’re mostly buying water and plastic. The main ingredient in a bottle of shampoo or shower gel is water, which is then mixed with a bunch of

Mallard Bay is the Airbnb for guided hunting and fishing

Mallard Bay is building a marketplace and a vertical SaaS platform for guided fishing and hunting industries.

Meet Cherry, an AI shopping assistant that helps you discover products using screenshots or images

A new app from a startup called Cherry is aiming to transform the online shopping experience with its AI assistant that allows users to discover products across the internet using just a screenshot or

Ramp CEO says the fintech startup is just scratching the surface

Fintech exploded over the last five years. Startups in the category raised more than $350 billion in VC funding from 2019 through 2023, according to data from CB Insights. Despite all that growth, Eri

Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024

While some investors are loudly bemoaning that the IPO window can’t stay shut forever, other VCs themselves are actually part of the problem. A lot of standard VC deal terms give investors the a

Pornhub says, ‘Bad Texas! No smut for you!’

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Pornhub has been playing a game of chicke

Pitch Deck Teardown: SuperScale’s $5.4M Series A deck

The company is promising to make marketing for games easier, and we know that great marketing is one of the crucial differences between an OK outcome and a smash-hit success.

TipTop, the new app from Postmates’ founder and CEO, now lets you buy devices with trade-ins and cash

Customers can trade in an old Samsung Galaxy for a discount on an iPad, an Apple HomePod mini for a Nintendo Switch, or an iPhone for a Nothing phone.

Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’

The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from gut troubl

VCs will get liquidity in 2024 from the secondary market, not IPOs

If you asked a bunch of VCs at the end of 2023 if the IPO market would finally open again in 2024, most of them would have said yes. We know because TechCrunch surveyed more than 40 of them in Decembe

ShopMy lands $18.5M to help influencers earn more money from promoting products

ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced that it raised $18.5 million. The company will use the money to help scale its network of

Volley’s AI-enabled ball machine for racquet sports can simulate gameplay

A new sports tech startup, Volley, aims to revolutionize the way racquet sports players (platform tennis, tennis, padel and pickleball) train with its AI-enabled sports training machine. Unlike tradit

Glacier is training AI-powered recycling robots

This week, Glacier co-founder Rebecca Hu chats with Found about wish-cycling and robots.
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