PrettyDamnQuick snaps up $25M to speed up online checkout

A startup hoping to provide a credible alternative to Amazon has picked up funding to double down on the gap in the market. PrettyDamnQuick (PDQ) provides tech to retailers to let them customize and test different shipping and checkout flows, and now it has picked up a deal of its own: a $25 millio

Innovaccer aims to become healthcare’s AI powerhouse with $275M Series F

When it comes to data, perhaps no sector has as much of it and in as many distinct silos as the healthcare industry. Hundreds of millions of patient records reside within various electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by vendors like Epic, Cerner, and Athena. Insurance companies hold extensiv

Rounded is an AI orchestration platform that lets anyone build an AI voice agent

French startup Rounded believes AI voice agents are going to become the default way customers interact with companies, so instead of building AI voice agents that are ready to use, the company is building an orchestration platform that lets companies build their own voice agent. Rounded started of

Biosphere zaps germs with UV light to make biomanufacturing cheaper

Ask any scientist that has worked with cell cultures in a lab: Contamination is high on their list of fears. Even one stray bacterium or fungal spore can spoil an entire experiment. Now imagine scaling that risk up to biomanufacturing, which uses living cells to make a range of stuff, including dr

Hackers are exploiting a new Ivanti VPN security bug to hack into company networks

U.S. software giant Ivanti has warned that a zero-day vulnerability in its widely used enterprise VPN appliance has been exploited to compromise the networks of its corporate customers. Ivanti said on Wednesday that the critical-rated vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-0282, can be exploited with

Xocean raises $119M to capture ocean data with uncrewed surface vessels

Xocean, an Irish marine robotics startup that provides ocean data to the energy and hydrography industries using uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), has raised €115 million ($119 million) as it looks to expand coverage to additional sectors. Founded in 2017, Xocean has built a fleet of remotely-con

VLC tops 6 billion downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

VLC media player, the popular open source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system. The new feature automatically generates real-time subtitles — which can then also be translated in many languages — for

Apple might be working on a new 'Invites' app

The year has just begun, and Apple might already be in “Sherlocking” mode to create a new app for iOS called Invites. Details are still thin on what this app might look like, but it could potentially be a competitor to Evite or Partiful. According to findings in iOS 18.3 beta 2 code b

Grand Games, the Turkish startup behind Magic Sort, drinks up $30M

Gaming startups, specifically those building casual mobile games, are very hot in Turkey right now, and today, another one is announcing a sizable round just nine months into its existence. Grand Games, the publisher behind Magic Sort and Car Match, has picked up $30 million in funding — money

Defiant is a new European VC firm that uses data and products to make better investments

Defiant is a new early-stage VC firm focused on B2B SaaS and fintech coming out of stealth Thursday. Joseph Pizzolato (pictured right) and Cam Rail (pictured left), the duo at the helm of the firm who met when they were six years old, have already secured $30 million and plan to raise as much as $7

xAI is testing a stand-alone iOS app for its Grok chatbot

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is testing out a stand-alone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now. The app, currently live in multiple countries, including the U.S., Australia, and India, can access real-time data from the web and X; offers generative AI

Flipkart hires Dunzo’s co-founder to lead quick commerce push

Flipkart has hired Kabeer Biswas, the co-founder of Indian delivery startup Dunzo, as the Walmart-owned e-commerce group expands its quick-commerce business in the country. Biswas will lead Flipkart’s quick-commerce effort, called Flipkart Minutes, a source familiar with the matter told Tech

Elon Musk agrees that we’ve exhausted AI training data

Elon Musk concurs with other AI experts that there’s little real-world data left to train AI models on. “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge … in AI training,” Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn o

We talked to the guy who was stuck in a Waymo robotaxi on a dizzying loop

A month ago, a video circulated around social media of a Waymo robotaxi stuck in a roundabout loop — an isolated incident with no passengers in the vehicle, according to Waymo. Apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing. Around the same time, in another Waymo robotaxi headed f