Fundraising

To sweeten the pot, Amazon is pledging that startups in this year’s Generative AI Accelerator cohort will gain access to experts and tech from Nvidia, the program’s presenting partner.

Amazon says it’ll spend $230 million on generative AI startups

The specter of wastewater threatens to stall the construction of battery factories. One startup, though, says the solution is to recycle it.

Aepnus wants to create a circular economy for key battery manufacturing materials

AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company, has raised $65 million to build “the finance function of the future” for midsized companies.

AccountsIQ takes in $65M to boost bookkeeping with AI

The most critical systems of our modern world rely on GPS, from aviation and road networks to emergency and disaster response, from precision farming and power grids to weather forecasting…

Tern AI wants to reduce reliance on GPS with low-cost navigation alternative 

The hotel guest management technology company’s platform digitizes the hotel guest journey from post-booking through checkout.

Insight Partners backs Canary Technologies’ mission to elevate hotel guest experiences

InScope leverages machine learning and large language models to provide financial reporting and auditing processes for mid-market and enterprises.

Lightspeed Venture Partners leads $4.3M seed in automated financial reporting fintech InScope

RetailReady targets the $40 billion compliance market to help reduce the number of retail compliance losses that shippers incur annually due to incorrectly shipped packages.

YC grad RetailReady raises $3.3M for an AI warehouse app that hopes to save brands billions

Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led…

Gorilla, a Belgian startup that helps energy providers crunch big data, raises $25M

Black Semiconductor, which is developing a chip-connecting technology based on graphene, has raised $273M in a combination of private and public funding. 

Black Semiconductor nabs $273M in Germany to supercharge how chips work together

Featured Article

Let there be Light! Danish startup exits stealth with $13M seed funding to bring AI to general ledgers

It’s not the sexiest of subject matters, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack — software used by the chief financial officers of the world — is ripe for disruption. That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth…

12:00 am PDT • June 12, 2024
Let there be Light! Danish startup exits stealth with $13M seed funding to bring AI to general ledgers

When generative AI tools started making waves in late 2022 after the launch of ChatGPT, the finance industry was one of the first to recognize these tools’ potential for speeding…

Linq raises $6.6M to use AI to make research easier for financial analysts

A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its…

Flow claims it can 100x any CPU’s power with its companion chip and some elbow grease

Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (around $640 million) in a mix of equity and debt.

Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI raises $640M

When Urvashi Barooah applied to MBA programs in 2015, she focused her applications around her dream of becoming a venture capitalist. She got rejected from every school, and was told…

How Urvashi Barooah broke into venture after everyone told her she couldn’t

French startup Kelvin, which uses computer vision and machine learning to make it easier to audit homes for energy efficiency, has raised $5.1M.

Kelvin wants to help save the planet by applying AI to home energy audits

Dubai-based fractional property investment platform Stake has raised $14 million in Series A funding.

Stake raises $14M to bring its fractional property investment platform to Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi

“We were motivated to fundraise because we think the ’24 vintage is going to be a good one,” founder Craig Shapiro said.

After hits like Reddit and Scopely, Collaborative Fund easily raised a $125M fund to tackle climate, health and food

Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by…

Anterior grabs $20M from NEA to expedite health insurance approvals with AI

Featured Article

In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch

When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be…

12:20 pm PDT • June 7, 2024
In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Anna will be covering for him this week. Sign up here to…

Startups Weekly: Ups, downs, and silver linings

The company is in the process of building a gigawatt-scale factory in Kentucky to produce its nickel-hydrogen batteries.

Novel battery manufacturer EnerVenue is raising $515M, per filing

Prolific Machines believes it has a way of transitioning away from molecules to something better: light.

Prolific Machines, with a $55M Series B, shines ‘light’ on a better way to grow lab proteins for food and medicine

Torpago’s Powered By product is geared for regional and community banks, with under $20 billion in assets, to launch their own branded cards and spend management programs.

Fintech Torpago has a unique way to compete with Brex and Ramp: Turning banks into customers

Taloflow, an early stage startup changing the way companies evaluate and select software, has raised $1.3M in a seed round.

Taloflow puts AI to work on software vendor selection to reduce costs and save time

After growing 500% year-over-year in the past year, Understory is now launching a product focused on the renewable energy sector.

Insurance provider Understory gets into renewable energy following $15M Series A

The startup is hoping its durable filters can make metals refining and battery recycling more efficient, too.

SiTration uses silicon wafers to reclaim critical minerals from mining waste

Spun out of Bosch, Dive wants to change how manufacturers use computer simulations by both using modern mathematical approaches and cloud computing.

Dive goes cloud-native for its computational fluid dynamics simulation service

Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest that they began trying to understand how to use search engines to…

How a couple of former Pinterest search experts caught Biz Stone’s attention

The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates, and those that facilitate a full-control approach.

Storyblok raises $80M to add more AI to its ‘headless’ CMS aimed at non-technical people

The global spend management sector is experiencing a tailwind of sorts. North America is arguably the biggest market in this space, but spend management companies have seen demand rise across…

Spend management startup SiFi raises $10M to grow further in Saudi Arabia