TechCrunch Startup News

When Anthony Sardain began developing Cavela in 2023, an AI startup that helps brands automate supplier sourcing, he did not foresee that new tariffs would drive customers to become increasingly wary of manufacturing products in China.

Function Health, which offers a regular lab testing service to help people track their health, wants to change that by consolidating health data and making it usable for its customers by connecting that data to an AI model. To further that effort, the company recently raised $298 million in a Series B round led by Redpoint Ventures at a valuation of $2.5 billion.

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“The best ideas in drug discovery were often blocked not by biology, but by synthesis,” Boiko told TechCrunch. Synthesis is the creation of new molecules by using chemical reactions. It’s like a recipe or Lego pieces, where small pieces, ingredients, molecules, come together to form a wider puzzle picture, a food dish, a larger molecule.

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Instead of getting an AI-generated travel plan, Boop aims to give users access to itineraries from real people who went on real trips.

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With consumers increasingly asking questions to ChatGPT, not Google, product discovery is changing — and the promise to give brands visibility and control over this fast-growing search channel has made Peec AI one of Europe's hottest startups.

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On Monday, Luminal announced $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by Felicis Ventures with angel investment from Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch, and Ben Porterfield. 

Also, as U.S. giants like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic race to develop the large language models that underpin their AI products, startups such as Sakana AI, Mistral AI, DeepSeek, and AI 21 Labs are carving out their own niche with specialized models designed for specific regions, industries, or unique features.

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Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos seems to be getting his hands dirty once again: the billionaire is partly backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus that has raised $6.2 billion in funding, and will take on duties as co-chief executive.

Plus, Bone AI, a South Korean startup, is combining AI and manufacturing to build next-gen defense robotics and challenge the region’s industry giants.

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Israeli startup Milestone raised a $10 million seed funding round to correlate AI tool usage with engineering metrics, including code quality.

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The solar-thermal startup wants to deliver electricity for as little as one cent per kWh. But first it has to scale production to 1 million units per year.

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The goalposts are moving for AI startups when it comes to growth, product features and just about everything else.

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WisdomAI is offering AI-driven data analytics that can answer business questions from structured, unstructured, and even “dirty” data, meaning data not cleaned of typos or errors.

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