#startup-funding

#startup-funding

The reason for the audio model was that we noticed that there was a gap in accents because a lot of our users are international. Accents are just very important.

"We didn't know what we had," Michele Stansfield, co-founder and CEO of Cauldron Ferm, told TechCrunch. But eventually, Stansfield realized they had more than initially thought.

The idea that you're going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they're going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense. Most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence.

Back for 2026, the program is providing $100,000 in grant funding for founders who are ready to pitch, learn, and grow. This year, the program features two pitch competitions: one in-person event in Toronto in June, and a national virtual competition in November. Regardless of what town, province, or territory you are from, there's a path for you to compete, and a path to funding that could change the trajectory of your business.

There's a lot of apps helping you meet new people for dating or friendship, but not a lot are focused on your existing relationships and how you maintain and nurture those over time. The app pulls key details from social media content and turns them into a calendar-style hold to share with friends or family, turning social media scrolling into real-world plans.

I went in as an artist, and I stayed there for almost seven years. And through the years, I was less of an artist every year. Not being limited to the creative side of things helped him explore other aspects of game-making, from art direction to working with external partners.

When a business succeeds, it isn't necessarily because of some intricate business plan or elaborately devised model. Such is the case with Texas Roadhouse, a concept that was initially written down on a cocktail napkin before it blossomed into the enterprise we know today. As soon as founder Kent Taylor found investors for his dream, he quickly sketched out his vision using the resources available to him.

People want to feel human. While AI has taken over the internet and social media has evolved to feel less social, there's also been a resurgence of analog media: landlines, photo booths, record players. This cultural shift signaled to Escargot's founders that now was a good moment to launch a product centered on nostalgia for paper goods as a foil to the futuristic tech coming out of Silicon Valley.

I think it's very, very early days in this new wave of AI, particularly on the user interface interaction side of things. The technology developed very quickly, but it takes human time to figure out the right interaction patterns.

AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Learn More → Hook - $10M Series A Music & Entertainment Hook, a creative social music app for making and sharing song remixes and mashups, has raised $10M in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Founded by Gaurav Sharma in 2022, Hook has now raised a total of $16.5M in reported equity funding.

Quantonation Ventures, a venture firm investing in quantum and physics-based startups, has closed its oversubscribed second fund at €220 million, or approximately $260 million. That's more than twice the size of its inaugural fund, and comes in addition to other signals that the quantum winter isn't coming yet. While some warned that too much quantum hype and not enough tangible outcomes would eventually cause funding to collapse, the opposite has happened.

Thanks to our incredible partnership with Tidalwave, we've been able to launch Flat Branch Home, Jamie Pandolfo, president of Flat Branch Home Loans, said in a statement. The future of technology is here, and we're embracing it for a better experience for our borrowers and our loan officers. Tidalwave has given us the opportunity to take our origination to the next level.

"The future of the wallet is very different than it is today, as it's becoming a much more dynamic surface," said Eric Senn, CEO and cofounder of digital wallet development startup Badge. He pointed to Apple's new ticket interface as an example-not just a ticket but a portal to merch, food ordering, and venue maps. To Senn, it's part of a larger shift: the wallet becoming a core layer of the iOS and Android ecosystem, not just a feature tucked inside it.

As the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket dominate the attention of investors and regulators, a sports-focused challenger called Novig is announcing $75 million in fresh funding to compete with the twin giants. Led by the blockchain venture firm Pantera Capital, Novig's Series B round values the startup at $500 million. Once a highly restricted pastime, sports betting has in recent years seeped into every corner of the U.S. economy.

Runway, a generative AI platform for creating and editing videos, images, and multimedia content using text-to-video and related AI models, has raised $315M in Series E funding led by General Atlantic. Founded by Alejandro Ortiz, Anastasis Germanidis, and Cristobal Barrera in 2018, Runway has now raised a total of $859.5M in reported equity funding. Garner Health, a healthcare benefit platform for finding high-quality in-network doctors, has raised $118M in Series D funding led by Kleiner Perkins.

Yes, vibe-coding apps like Claude Code and Replit make it possible to build games, too, but Moonlake is purpose-built for the task. It will never ask you to copy a snippet of code, offers templates to start with if you'd like, and has straightforward paths to bring in your own assets, too. It remembers your vision and constantly works to improve it alongside you.

The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders. Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who "got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us," Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn't take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic.

There's just so much to do. So, the advances that we've gotten over the last five to ten years have been spectacular. We love the tools. We use them every day. But the question is, is this the whole universe of things that needs to happen? And we thought about it very carefully and our answer was no, there's a lot more to do.

As Valentine's Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be gearing up for first dates - not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop pairs students with potential dates once per week based on their responses to a questionnaire. A Stanford whiz kid is trying to disrupt an established industry from his Palo Alto dorm? Stop me if you've heard this one before!

John Conafay, a veteran of the US Air Force, has spent most of his career leading business development at public and private aerospace companies, including Spire, Astranis, and ABL Space Systems. At each company, Conafay ran into the same software hurdle: collaborating on government contracts was a logistical mess that forced his teams and their federal counterparts to rely on a tedious back-and-forth of PDFs and Excel files.

Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent cofounded by Marc Lore and CEO Melissa Bridgeford, is coming out of a nearly 5-year private beta with an ambitious promise: to end the era of endless scrolling in ecommerce and replace it with a personalized and streamlined shopping experience. Launched publicly on Feb. 11, the New York-based startup is betting that the next wave of online retail will be driven not by bigger marketplaces,

While entrepreneurship can be challenging, Black founders often face additional barriers in accessing funding, mentorship, and networks, barriers that can also create psychological hurdles. In fact, a 2025 BDC study found that 72% of Black entrepreneurs shared that the fear of racial stereotypes almost stopped them from starting a business. To support founders on every stage of their journey, we've updated our guide to highlight programs, funding, mentorship, and community resources specifically for Black entrepreneurs across Canada!

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan initially defended the choice on X. YC-backed Canadian startups that reincorporated in the US had twice the average valuation as those that didn't, he wrote. "There are lots of reasons to build great companies in Canada, and there are lots of great YC and non-YC startups that thrive and are making the Canadian tech scene great," he wrote a few hours later. "Where you are incorporated increases your access to capital. That's it."

The round was led by Google Ventures , with participation from existing investors, underscoring continued appetite for applied AI products that have already found a clear commercial use. Synthesia builds generative AI tools that let companies create videos using AI-generated avatars instead of cameras, studios, or presenters. The technology has found a strong foothold in corporate training, internal communications, and product explainers, areas where speed, scale, and consistency often matter more than production gloss.