Tag: best ai startup funding 2026

As cybercriminals eagerly embrace AI tools, OpenAI needs all the help it can get securing its own systems from external hacks. That includes teaming up with a shadowy cybersecurity startup founded by a cadre of former DOGE employees. The startup, called Cathedral, is best known for reportedly hacking into Anthropic’s private systems as part of the AI lab’s bug bounty program. Cathedral told the Washington Post that the hack was performed in under twelve ho

Published on October 21, 2026 at 07:59 Comment 2 𝕏 Print © DPA/AP Two weeks after the split between Ecosia and Mistral, Berlin rolls out the red carpet for Nvidia. Billions on display, funded start-ups, and an order from the chancellor: open your data. In early October, the German search engine Ecosia slammed the door on Mistral after five months of partnership, trading the French AI champion for open models, some of them Chinese. On October 19, Chancellor

A tech startup is offering New York City residents free home cleaning with a twist—it will send “professional cleaners” wearing cameras to record everything they do. All that data will supposedly be used to train AI-driven robots. The unusual pitch comes from the German startup MicroAGI, whose website describes the company as a “team of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to accelerate embodied AI.” It began publicizing the free home-cleanin

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this looks like an acqui-hire. Davidson’s announcement focused largely on how he built his AI travel agent Odessia by directing teams of AI agents. The year-old Odessia raised a $6 million pre-seed round led by Sequoia, and launched its AI travel agent around 5 months ago. Davidson says that it had helped early adopters plan millions of dollars worth of travel, but the tool has already been shut down. OpenAI did no

Counsel Health is an AI-powered healthcare platform that combines a chat-based medical experience with access to licensed physicians. Its service was integrated into the Oura app in June. Users can connect with Counsel’s medical AI to get personalized medical advice, and chat with a physician when needed, all within the Oura app. Now, the companies plan to expand on their existing partnership to build across preventative care, acute care, and specialty and

Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the funding round, and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund, and others also participated. The AI company said it will continue hiring both at home and abroad. Manus did not disclose its valuation, but last month was said to be in talks with investors to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation. Manus, which went viral following a demo of its AI agent last year, relocated its st

In March, MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI for an undisclosed sum after it zoomed ahead of the older calorie app in the app store rankings. The deal was big enough to convince Yadegari and his co-founders to sell the company after it had pulled in over $30 million in annual revenue in under two years, MyFitnessPal told TechCrunch at the time. Yadegari and his co-founders originally went to work for their new owner, continuing development on Cal AI, but he left

The three-day countdown is on, and so are your pass savings of up to $100. Grab your pass before TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 doors open on October 13 at 8 a.m. PT. Bring a co-founder, colleague, or peer and get a second ticket of the same type at 50% off. Coming with a group? Enjoy even more savings when you register four or more attendees. Discover the next breakout company at Disrupt For more than a decade, discovering ambitious early-stage companies has bee

There was just one problem: The technology his idea required didn’t exist yet. “Then ChatGPT came along,” said Dram, recalling when OpenAI released the generative AI chatbot that uses large language models (LLMs) in November 2022. His old idea suddenly seemed a lot more possible. Within six months, he launched the concept of Blueprints AI, a startup that uses AI to produce code-compliant and permit-ready architectural construction blueprints in minutes fro

“Over the past year, Character.ai has taken meaningful steps to sustain and improve its business in the face of significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds. After a comprehensive review of the available alternatives, the board determined that this court-supervised sale process provides the Company with the best opportunity to maximize value for all stakeholders,” Character.AI CEO Colin Adams said in a statement. The startup has also agreed to

It is writing checks via various strategies, ranging from offering massive loans to data centers to investing in frontier AI models and applications. Earlier this year, the firm launched Blackstone N1 (BXN1), a San Francisco-based central hub for its AI initiatives. The group is led by Khaira, who relocated from New York to be at the epicenter of AI. Unlike earlier tech cycles such as mobile or SaaS, which allowed companies to reach significant scale with

The idea isn’t entirely new. Companies like Crusoe and Schneider Electric also sell prefabricated pods, but Runware says it can ship its pods faster. Flaviu Radulescu, co-founder and CEO of Runware, told TechCrunch that the company plans to scale production at its Romania-based factory to 30 megawatts of data center capacity per day by 2028, or nearly 1 gigawatt per month. That’s a whole lot of capacity: At that pace, Runware would produce roughly as much

In embodied AI, you can't jump in and do everything at the outset, nor can you do nothing at all. Author |Qi Chengyong Editor | Cen Feng Dong Hao is a thoroughly atypical figure in the embodied intelligence industry. For most people, their impression of him stops at his status as a young scholar who was already a doctoral supervisor at Peking University at 29, and his recent industry credentials as chief scientist at Qiyuan Robotics, leading the push to ad

While frontier AI models have solved a remarkable series of outstanding mathematics problems and made progress in the life sciences, they have yet to truly plumb the complex physics in advanced materials. “It’s more difficult to specify problems clearly in materials science because it’s not like math, where you have a very specific definition and can get to a yes or no,” said Advaith Sridhar, a co-founder of Discovered Materials, which was part of Y Combin

His new venture, Physicl, has raised $10 million in seed funding led by Inovia Capital to help world model designers and robot builders solve thorny training problems with more realistic simulations. Founder and CEO de Vigan spent the last decade building nfinite, which made it easy for brands and retailers to create 3D models of their goods and display them online. The arrival of transformer-based AI models led that company to focus more on generative ima

For a newly formed AI startup team, the hardest moment is often not after the product launches, but before it has taken shape: the technical roadmap is in place, the core members have joined, and they may even have identified a market worth pursuing, yet they have neither a mature product nor revenue data. Where will the first round of funding come from? Who would be willing to believe in a group of founders at such an early stage? This first check can oft