Startups

German AI startup Aleph Alpha has raised a Series B funding round of $500 million from a consortium of seven new investors, as well as existing investors from previous rounds. Founded in 2019, Aleph Alpha's funding may be dwarfed by that of Microsoft-backed OpenAI ($11.3 billion), but the start

It’s tough to recover from catastrophic system failures when you’re flying blind. Yet, many companies admit they’re doing just that — flying blind, more or less — where it concerns their software and critical infrastructure. In a recent survey by Logz.io, the observabi

Appetite, an app for discovering and booking restaurants, is aiming to streamline the process of planning nights out with friends and family. After beta testing the app with 14,000 users, the startup is now releasing Appetite to everyone in the United Kingdom, with expansions planned for Europe and

U.K. femcare-turned-gynaecological-health startup, Daye, has expanded its tampon-based home screening service to add STI testing. The startup is billing this “non-invasive screening” service for sexually transmitted infections as a “world first”. The “STI Diagnostic Ta

Vegan cheese isn’t usually anything to write home about, in terms of taste and texture. Dreamfarm, a startup based in Parma, in the Food Valley of Italy, is hoping to change that. It’s cooked up a plant-based mozzarella using a base of fermented almonds, and just a handful of other ingr

Ten years ago, Pear VC, then a tiny new venture firm, operated out of a nondescript office in Palo Alto that was enlivened by bright, computer-themed art. Last week, the outfit — which closed its largest fund to date in May — quietly inked a deal to sublease 30,000 square feet of “Class A

W elcome to the technewss Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's inspired by the daily technewss+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Take predictions and urban legends with skepticism: Luko is not France’s next unicorn, a

A tougher fundraising environment reveals which companies and sectors investors have real conviction in, and which areas aren’t attractive outside of a bull market. AI startups dominated dealmaking this year, but there is another sector that VCs have stayed committed to: defense tech. We saw

Indian edtech giant Byju’s said on Saturday that revenue of its core business, its largest, in the financial year ending March 2022, stood at $429.18 million, making it clear that the most valuable Indian startup has missed the unaudited $1.25 billion revenue it projected for the group a year

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Startups exist to solve complex problems, not to be a quick moneymaking scheme, and their success lies in their unique value proposition. The harder the problem a startup is tackling, the stronger their competitive advan

Good morning, everyone! It's Friday! Today I'm thinking about planning for the future. We plan for rain, we plan our meals for the week, and we even make long-term plans, like putting money into a 401(k). But sometimes things that should be planned for fall by the wayside.

Silicon Valley Bank was in Austin this week, sponsoring and hosting parties at AfroTech, the largest Black tech conference in the nation. It's been eight months since SVB's dramatic collapse, where hundreds, if not thousands, of founders fled to competing banks. At one of their parties, reg

For this edition of Pitch Deck Teardown, I figured I’d try something new: We’re taking a close look at the CancerVAX campaign on the equity crowdfunding platform, StartEngine. The team didn’t invite me to review the campaign or the pitch, I don’t know much about cancer trea

I'm spotting a worrying trend among startup founders who seem to think that running a startup is effectively a get-rich-quick scheme. Apart from that mindset being wrong and naive, I suspect there's something a lot more insidious at play here: misunderstanding on a fundamental level what st