lux capital
Gift Guide: Leading VCs recommend their favorite reads from 2019
As we reach the end of 2019 and approach crunch time for everyone who has procrastinated holiday gift buying, we wanted to highlight a few more great reads that might…
Hugging Face raises $15 million to build the definitive natural language processing library
Hugging Face has raised a $15 million funding round led by Lux Capital. The company first built a mobile app that let you chat with an artificial BFF, a sort…
The world of healthcare has notoriously been described as “broken” — plagued with high-friction workflows, sky-high costs and convoluted business models. Over the past several years, a long list of…
These new data sources are creating high-impact tools for investors
VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same tools we’ve used for the past 20+ years — Excel and recent college grads searching Google.
Louis Bacon’s sunset ride may foretell ‘mechanized future’ of data-driven investing
Quants, passive investing and robots aren’t necessarily better than humans at investing, but because they already traffic in digital data to do their work, they can show investors what they’re…
The Valley’s affinity for robotics shows no signs of cooling. Technical enhancements through innovations like AI/ML, compute power and big data utilization continue to drive new performance milestones, efficiencies and…
No one knows how effective digital therapies are, but a new tool from Elektra Labs aims to change that
Depending on which study you believe, the wearable and digital health market could be worth anywhere from $30 billion to nearly $90 billion in the next six years. If the…
LabGenius, a London-based startup applying AI and “robotic automation” to protein drug discovery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious…
Caper wants to deliver a major update to the self-checkout aisle without keeping its dreaded catchphrases, i.e. “Unknown item in the bagging area,” “Please place the item in the bag.”…
Y Combinator Demo Day, revenue-based VC funding, Pivotal, Dell, Tumblr, WeWork, and more
Editor’s note Due to bad travel logistics (thanks SFO), I wasn’t able to get the mid-week edition of the Extra Crunch roundup newsletter out. Sorry about that. Instead, here is…
Protein replacement startups are coming for food additives as Shiru launches from Y Combinator
Shiru, a new company that’s launching from the latest batch of Y Combinator-backed startups, is joining the ranks of the businesses angling for a spot at the vanguard of the…
Gaming continues to grow in popularity, with esports revenue growing 23% from last year to top $1 billion in 2019. But the metrics by which talent is evaluated in gaming,…
Lux Capital just closed on a whopping $1 billion in capital, doubling the amount of money it manages
When founders think about the venture firms most likely to invest in space or robotics or other bleeding-edge technologies, a handful of firms tend to jump immediately to mind. One…
Featured Article
Powering the brains of tomorrow’s intelligent machines
Sense and compute are the electronic eyes and ears that will be the ultimate power behind automating menial work and encouraging humans to cultivate their creativity.
Audi self-driving unit taps newcomer Aeva for its unique lidar
Audi’s self-driving unit has tapped a startup with a unique approach to lidar as it ramps up testing in Munich using a fleet of autonomous electric e-tron crossover vehicles. Audi…
A fight is brewing between two machine intelligence startups, and neither side looks all that smart
Sometimes, reading a lawsuit, it’s tempting to pick sides, to judge who is more right than wrong based on its contents. But a new lawsuit involving two venture-backed companies —…
J&J spends $3.4 billion in cash for Auris Health’s lung cancer diagnostics and surgical robots
Johnson & Johnson’s robotic surgery and medical device division, Ethicon, is dropping $3.4 billion in cash to pick up Auris Health, a developer of robotic diagnostics and surgical devices initially…
Get ready for TC Sessions: Robotics + AI with highlights from last year’s event
As we get ready for TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI on April 18 at UC Berkeley, we can’t help but look back at last year’s robotics event. With more than 1,000…
Former eBay product chief RJ Pittman takes the reins at 3D capture company Matterport
Matterport, a provider of 3D image capture technology, has named former eBay chief product officer RJ Pittman as its new chief executive. Pittman will take the reins from former chief…
RDMD attacks rare diseases with data mined from health records
You wouldn’t expect a medical app to get its start as a Snapchat competitor. Neither did video chat startup TapTalk’s founder Onno Faber. But four years ago he was diagnosed with…
The dream of a startup founder can often be summarized by the following well-intentioned, and mostly delusional, quote: “We’ll raise a few rounds and in a few years we’ll IPO…
Last week at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, TechCrunch held its second TC Sessions: Robotics event. It was a full day of panels and demos, featuring the top minds in robotics,…
All-star team of synthetic biologists raise $53 million for cancer therapy startup Senti
A who’s-who from the world of synthetic biological research have come together to launch Senti Biosciences with $53 million in funding from a slew of venture capital investors. Led by…
Primer helps governments and corporations monitor and understand the world’s information
When Google was founded in 1998, its goal was to organize the world’s information. And for the most part, mission accomplished — but in 19 years the goalpost has moved…
Veo Robotics raises $12 million for its vision of a harmonious human-robot workplace
Since Isaac Asimov first laid out the three laws of robotics in 1942, human safety has been the No. 1 concern of the inventors, innovators and futurists who have pondered…
Orbital Insight, a geospatial analytics startup, announced it had completed raising a $50 million Series C round of financing from Sequoia. The fresh capital brings the company’s total fundraising to…
Mythic launches a chip to enable computer vision and voice control on any device
Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it’s a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to…
Evolv raises $18 million for body scanners that don’t cause long lines at security
The only places where one used to worry about the possibility of mass casualties were “high-value targets,” like airports — places that have scanners, inspections and guards. But attackers now…
Latch tools up with second smart access product for offices, apartment blocks
New York-based smart lock maker Latch, which targets the enterprise market, selling its locks plus a subscription digital entry management service to building owners wanting to offer value-add services to…
Lux Capital closes $400 million fund to back startups ‘inventing the future’
Lux Capital’s portfolio companies sound like they ripped their product concepts from the pages of science fiction. Among these are self-driving car startup Zoox, a company gathering oceanographic data from…
