AI chip company Kneron raises $49M to scale up its commercial efforts

Kneron, which is developing AI chips to power self-driving cars, among other autonomous machines, today announced that it raised $49 mlion in an extension to its Series B round from investors including Foxconn, Alltek, Horizon Ventures, Liteon Technology Corp., Adata and PalPot. Kneron’s CEO,

The recent tech IPOs are flirting with negative territory

The IPOs of Instacart and Klaviyo last week brought much-needed liquidity to the startup ecosystem, enlivening hopes of more exits in the weeks and months ahead. Sure, there have been some mergers and acquisitions in startup land, but massive exits all but require IPOs, so it was great to finally s

VC firm Fuse closes $250M fund to invest in Pacific Northwest startups

Funding for startups in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) fell precipitously early this year. From January to March, PNW financing dipped 80% to $246 million, down from $1.2 billion during the same period in 2022. But one venture capital firm is anticipating a recovery. Fuse, a Bellevue,

TeachMe.To lands $2M to connect beginner athletes with local coaches

TeachMe.To, a sports coaching platform for beginner athletes, secured $2 million in seed funding, the company exclusively told technewss. The funding will be used to scale the platform, launch a new app for students and expand beyond its sports offerings. The startup was founded in late 2021 by CE

Elicit is building a tool to automate scientific literature review

For researchers, reading scientific papers can be immensely time-consuming. According to one survey, scientists spend seven hours each week searching for information. Another survey suggests that systematic reviews of literature — scholarly syntheses of the evidence on a particular topic R

Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, the two firms said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier. The e-commerce group sai

Correcto grabs $7M to build out its ‘Grammarly for Spanish’

The generative AI boom has put a spring in the step of Correcto, a Madrid-based language writing tool startup focused on Spanish speakers that’s today announcing $7 million in seed funding. The round is led by London-based Octopus Ventures, with Carya Venture Partners and River Park Ventures

Building an equitable cap table puts more tools in a startup’s toolbox

The person a founder chooses to back their company is important beyond the capital these investors provide. Each backer brings specific experiences and networks that can help founders in various ways. Getting the right people involved in a company early is instrumental in helping it grow. Ashley Ma

Despite the ups and downs of the fintech space, people still really care about it

Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! Disrupt! Last week, our team was at technewss Disrupt 2023, which featured a dedicated fintech

Disability tech startups kill the cynic in me

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. The Perkins School for the Blind has identified over 1,400 companies that are designing and bu

Bay Area baby belly beholding Battlefield bounty

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. If this newsletter comes across as a deranged delirium of barely coherent words, then blame technewss Disrupt. This week, the technewss team descended on San Francisco's Moscone Center to celebrate one of the bigge

Pitch Deck Teardown: Transcend’s $20M Series B deck

If you’ve ever had to plan a large infrastructure project — like building a new section of a city or trying to figure out how much water and wastewater you need in a certain area — you’ve probably run into a few problems along the way. “But modeling and planning,” I hear

South Africa’s FinanceGPT simplifies financial analysis, set to interface in local languages

FinanceGPT is a generative AI startup built to help companies in their financial analysis tasks. Initially built for startups without in-house finance teams, and VCs looking to run financial health checks for their portfolios in Africa, FinanceGPT (Ipoxcap) says it has over the last five months gro

Communia hopes to build a digital safe space for women

Olivia Deramus didn't plan on becoming an entrepreneur. She grew up in Washington, D.C., obtained a degree in international relations and went the nonprofit route, helming campaigns around anti-violence work. Somewhere along the line, she pondered about the lack of digital safe spaces for women