Mercor, an AI recruiting startup founded by 21-year-olds, raises $100M at $2B valuation

Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion—eight times its previous valuation, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. Existing investors Benchmark, General Catalyst, and DST Global also…

Read More

Hightouch raises $80M on a $1.2B valuation for marketing tools powered by AI

Last decade, companies like Segment rewrote the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from disparate apps to improve marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch — co-founded by a former engineering manager at Segment — is announcing $80 million in funding for the next chapter: a platform that lets sales, marketing, and…

Read More

Eric Schmidt’s SandboxAQ aims for $5B valuation for its AI/quantum Google moonshot

VCs are spending gobs of money on AI startups — especially those run by big names in tech — so SandboxAQ is putting its hand out again, even though it raised a whopping $500 million in early 2023. The spinout from Google parent company Alphabet is reportedly seeking to raise another round that would value…

Read More

Grok’s image generator, Black Forest Labs, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, say sources

While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising foundational models can still open doors, and checkbooks. Multiple sources tell us that Black Forest Labs — a startup that’s building generative AI image models and came out of stealth two months ago with…

Read More

GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium raises $150M at a $1.25B valuation

A startup whose product competes with GitHub Copilot and other AI-powered coding assistants has achieved unicorn status. On Thursday, Codeium said it closed a $150 million Series C round led by General Catalyst that values the company at $1.25 billion post-money. The round, which also saw participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks, brings…

Read More

Anysphere, a GitHub Copilot rival, has raised $60M Series A at  $400M valuation from a16z, Thrive, sources say

Anysphere, a two-year-old startup that’s developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor, has raised over $60 million in a Series A financing at a $400 million post-money valuation, two sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch.  The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, also participated…

Read More

AI startup Hebbia rased $130M at a $700M valuation on $13 million of profitable revenue

Hebbia, a startup that uses generative AI to search large documents and respond to large questions, has raised a $130 million Series B at a roughly $700 million valuation led by Andresen Horowitz with participation of Index Ventures, Google Ventures and Peter Thiel. And its funding demonstrates that 50x annual recurring revenue (ARR) is becoming…

Read More

Poolside is raising $400M+ at a $2B valuation to build a supercharged coding co-pilot

Paris has quickly established itself as a major European center for AI startups, and now another deal in the works could cement that position even further.  Poolside.ai, a generative AI company based out of Paris that is building tools to speed up software development, is in the process of raising at least $400 million, on…

Read More