AI Startups

AIxCrypto Holdings, a pre-revenue company building a robot-rental marketplace, saw its cash fall 97% in six months to $577,328 at June 30, after funneling $12 million into Faraday Future securities and recording a $10.27…

OpenAI has acquired presentation startup NextSlide in an undisclosed deal that closed earlier in 2026, according to founder Ahmed Beshry, who announced the transaction on August 8. NextSlide's tool converts prompts, note…

Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, invested an additional $400 million in Source Foundry, a California chip manufacturing startup founded in 2025 by Stanford researchers Abdulm…

AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness invested $400 million in Source Foundry, a stealth chip startup founded by Stanford researchers, bringing its total investment to $500 million. The fund, founded by former Open…

Unitree Robotics priced its Shanghai IPO at 150.80 yuan a share on August 6, valuing China's leading humanoid robot maker at roughly $9 billion, with DeepSeek and state oil giant CNPC buying in as strategic investors. Th…

OpenAI has acquired presentation startup NextSlide, whose team will now work on integrating presentation features into ChatGPT, according to TechCrunch. The acquisition is part of OpenAI's strategy to expand ChatGPT's na…

Cursor, the $60 billion AI coding tools company recently acquired by SpaceX, wins elite AI engineers through personalized recruiting tactics such as private Slack channels, daily standups, and thoughtful gifts, according…

Vertical AI startups such as Harvey, Casetext, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot are essentially repackaging 1990s-era specialized software with modern machine learning, according to an analysis of the MaaS (Model-as-a-Service)…

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan urged entrepreneurs to fully embrace AI, saying it can run on their own infrastructure and compound knowledge over time, dramatically increasing their ability to act on ideas and build business…

Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent, acquired TierZero on July 20, 2026, marking the first of three acquisitions announced in a single week, to extend Devin from writing software into keeping it running.…

Cognition, the maker of Devin, acquired The Interaction Company of California, the parent of personal AI assistant Poke, in a deal reported in the low nine figures and announced on July 23, 2026. Poke, which operates ove…

Leni, a finance-grade agentic AI analyst founded around 2021 by Arunabh Dastidar (CEO), Gaurav Madani, and Zain Nathoo, has raised roughly $6.6M, including a March 2024 seed led by York IE with Second Century Ventures an…

Fundraisly, an AI-driven guided fundraising service, claims to have helped more than 200 startups raise over $1.1 billion and booked over 3,000 investor meetings, with an 8.7-out-of-10 founder rating, though these figure…

Ellis, an AI-native operations platform for private credit funds, launched out of stealth on July 30, 2026, with over $10 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital, alongside 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla…

Passionfroot, an AI-powered B2B creator-marketing platform founded in 2021 in Berlin by CEO Jen Phan and Patricia Wehner, has raised roughly $22.2M across three rounds, including a $15M Series A led by Insight Partners a…

Bluefish AI, a generative engine optimization platform founded in 2024, has raised roughly $68M to help Fortune 500 brands monitor and optimize their visibility in AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude, and Perpl…

Fazeshift, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded in 2023 in San Francisco, deploys AI agents that automate accounts-receivable workflows on top of existing ERPs, and has raised $22M total including a $17M Series A announ…

LinqAlpha, an AI research platform founded in 2022, raised a $22 million Series A led by AVP with participation from Atinum Investment and GFT Ventures, bringing total funding to approximately $28.6 million. The platform…

Naive, co-founded by Sean Dorje and Dennis Zax, has raised a $28.5M Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, announced August 2026, to provide a single API that packages company formation, payments, communications, and co…

Andrew Feldman, cofounder and CEO of AI chip company Cerebras, which is valued at $49.5 billion, said on the 20VC podcast that it is 'mind-boggling' to think people can achieve greatness by working 38 hours a week with w…