BigEndian founders hope to use their deep chip experience to help establish India in semiconductors

India, despite being home to 20% of the world’s chip designers, lacks a significant presence in the global semiconductor market. However, in recent months, the Indian government has begun investing in an effort to establish the country in semiconductors, as companies worldwide have adopted a

SparkLabs closes $50M fund to back AI startups

SparkLabs — an early-stage venture capital firm that has made a name for itself for backing OpenAI as well as a host of other AI startups such as Vectara, Allganize, Kneron, Anthropic, xAI, Glade (YC S23) and Lucidya AI — is gearing up to double down on more startups in the space. The V

Fundraising is a lot easier when you have traction

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can't miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week was a bit of a carryover from the one before as Bolt’s drama keeps unfolding — another story to be continued. But capita

Generative AI coding startup Magic lands $320M investment from Eric Schmidt, Atlassian and others

Magic, an AI startup creating models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, has raised a large tranche of cash from investors, including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post on Thursday, Magic said that it closed a $320 million fundraising round with contributio

VCs are so eager for AI startups, they’re buying into each others' SPVs at high prices

VCs are increasingly buying shares of late-stage startups on the secondary market as they try to get pieces of the hottest ones — especially AI companies. But they are also increasingly doing so through financial instruments called special purpose vehicles (SVPs). Some of those SPVs are becoming

M&A can open up the playing field for the competition

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can't miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Despite it being summer, this week was rich with announcements. Let’s dive in. Most interesting startup st

Antler doubles down on Southeast Asia with $72M second startup fund

Antler, the Singapore VC that focuses on early-stage investments, just closed its second Southeast Asia fund. It’s raised $72 million to double down on startups in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. This should be welcome news for startups. Like other regions, Southeast Asia has fac

CloudPay, a payroll services provider, lands $120M in new funding

In 1996, two companies, Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions, formed a venture called CloudPay to provide payroll and payments services to enterprise clients. CloudPay grew quietly over the next several decades, adding workflow automation features to maintain pace with upstart rivals. It’s sti

Database startup Neon nabs a Microsoft investment

In a sign that big tech companies are ready and willing to shell out cash for database tech, Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, on Wednesday announced that Microsoft’s venture arm M12 led a $25 million strategic investment in its business. The capital

Who cut the plant-based cheese? Plonts did with microbes, and it's stinky

Among plant-based alternative proteins, plant-based cheese continues to have a function and taste problem. That's where Plonts comes in. Company founders and co-CEOs Nathaniel Chu and Josh Moser say microbes are the key to what will fix the taste, smell, flavor, stretch and melt of plant-based

Hyperspace is using ‘domain-specific computing’ to accelerate database searches

The growth in the demand for generative AI apps has led to a need for larger and larger databases to store the associated data (e.g. model training data). These databases tend to be resource-intensive from a hardware perspective and, depending on the algorithms used to orchestrate them, they can be

Even after $1.6B in VC money, the lab-grown meat industry is facing 'massive' issues

When Mosa Meat served up a first-of-its-kind, lab-grown hamburger in 2013, it cost over $300,000. Eleven years later, around 200 startups worldwide remain hopeful that growing meat from cells, rather than slaughtering animals, will one day be a major portion of our food supply.  Despite their

Self-driving truck startup Aurora Innovation raises $483M in share sale ahead of commercial launch

Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation was hoping to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races toward a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024. The company, which had arranged to sell up to $420 million worth of shares, exceeded its goal and raised $483 milli

bunch raises $15.5M for its platform that simplifies investment management for VCs

Public market investors have a large variety of infrastructure and software that helps them keep track of, analyze and manage their investments, but that’s not the case for investors in private companies, such as venture capitalists. Indeed, a lot of private market investors have to manage an