Startups

Despite ongoing economic uncertainty, there will always be a path forward for determined founders with strong ideas and smart investors with an eye for opportunity. But make no mistake, the challenges are real and sizable. Global funding in Q1 2023 was down 53% compared to Q1 2022, a precipitous dr

As part of our ongoing coverage of VC performance in the first half of 2023, technewss+ surveyed 15 investors about their investment cadence and their plans for the second half of the year. As expected, it appears a good mix of investors wrote checks at the rate they’d aimed for, while other

If you live in a state where online sports betting is legal, companies like FanDuel, Caesars Sportsbook and DraftKings don’t let you forget it. They dominate TV ad slots during sports games and seemingly everywhere else, too. They give the mirage that the market is saturated with no room for

If you're adventurous with your food, or just like to keep up with the fast-moving food tech industry, here's a roundup of this week's stories and some notable news we weren't able to cover. Upside Foods gets on the plate In what is perhaps the first ever sale of cultivated meat in

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how some of the biggest companies in the world have as much — if not more — power than entire countries. Most countries, at least, have some level of democratic

Services like Midjourney and ChatGPT have pushed the boundaries of how AI can create images and text out of basic text prompts. Now, audio appears to be the inevitable next frontier. Music generation based on word prompts, AI tutors for language learning and voice simulators have all seen developme

It’s rare to find a pitch deck that forces me to dig deep to unearth something to criticize. The last time was with Orange’s seed deck, and in this week’s installment, I had to dive deep into the deck that Super.com used for its $60 million equity, plus $25 million venture debt ro

Fidelity has further slashed the estimated worth of its holding in the social platform Reddit and the chat app Discord as well as SaaS startup Gupshup, giving a preview into how one of the world’s largest asset managers sees the impact of the ongoing slowdown in the public market on privately

Seoul-based e-commerce company Levit, an operator of the shopping app Alwayz, wants to make the shopping experience more entertaining and affordable. The two-year-old startup has recently raised $46 million in a Series B round of funding led by DST Global Partners with participation from new invest

Everyone knows that raising venture capital has been harder for startups lately — unless you are building an AI startup, of course. But instead of only talking to founders, we’re flipping the script today. We wanted to hear from investors how their portcos are handling a cash-light environm

Fund of funds (FoF) were created to serve as a bridge for LPs to get access to managers they couldn’t back otherwise. But in an environment where funds are not seeing consistent support from their existing LPs, and there are more venture funds than ever, is their role still relevant? Fund of

Pokémon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees. During last year’s layoffs, Niantic canceled four projects, including a Transformers game. Some Niantic games will meet the same fate this time around. After four months in the App Sto

It’s a big day for generative AI funding. On the heels of Inflection AI landing a $1.3 billion investment, Runway, a startup building generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, today announced a $141 million extension to its Series C round from Google, Nvidia and Salesforce, among o

Just about every developer wants to create APIs to help other companies connect to their services more easily, but creating and documenting an API is a time-consuming process. Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, wants to make that an easier and more automated set of activities. Today, the company em