AI Startups

Teradyne now generates roughly 70% of its revenue from AI-related demand, up from 40-50% two quarters ago, ahead of its Q2 2026 earnings report expected between July 28-29. The chip-testing giant's Q1 2026 revenue hit an…

Ant International, the Singapore-headquartered global arm of Jack Ma's fintech empire, closed a $1.2 billion Series A on July 21, 2026, backed by Ant Group and Alibaba Group, to fund cross-border payment rails and AI age…

Y Combinator is calling for startups to build an AI-powered adaptive tutor for young children, inspired by the Primer from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, aiming to deliver one-on-one tutoring quality at consumer scal…

Joe Spector, cofounder of the $9.3 billion telehealth company Hims, replaced the marketing department at his pet care startup Dutch with AI-driven tooling and cut customer acquisition costs 20% in four months, from Janua…

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has paused discussions on a second funding round just weeks after closing a $7.4 billion raise at a $52 billion valuation, according to the company's direct communication with prospective inve…

DeepSeek has told prospective investors to pause its second funding round, which was expected to value the company at $71 billion to $74 billion, according to Bloomberg. The Chinese AI company closed its first external r…

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, is seeking to raise at least 10 billion yuan in a follow-on funding round at a pre-money valuation of roughly $71 billion, just weeks after closing its first external raise of over 50 bi…

DeepSeek has told prospective investors in its second fundraising round that it is suspending the deal for now, days after comments widely attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng about US-Chinese AI competition went viral. T…

AI monetization is shifting from efficiency gains to creating new value propositions, with real profits emerging in the implementation layer where raw models are turned into billable solutions, according to an analysis o…

Midjourney, a leading generative AI company whose products are licensed by Meta, has acquired Co-Star Astrology, one of the most popular horoscope apps, in a surprise deal announced by Co-Star founder and CEO Banu Guler.…

SPAN, in partnership with Nvidia and PulteGroup, will mount 16-GPU compute nodes on suburban homes starting Q3 2026, offering hosts $150-a-month utility and internet coverage, as AI's power demand drives electricity pric…

AI tools such as Cursor, Lovable, and Replit Agent have slashed MVP build costs from $40,000–$60,000 in agency fees to under $10,000 in tooling and compute costs, but most founders still burn their seed round on unvalida…

Three executives from Atlassian, Anthropic, and Scale Venture Partners independently converged on the same AI playbook at SaaStr AI 2026: the winning approach is not to choose between binary options like chat versus dedi…

Dutch, a veterinary telehealth company founded by Hims cofounder Joe Spector, is growing 20% month over month after firing its outside marketing agency and replacing it with an in-house team that uses AI tools to produce…

Nearly 200 venture-backed startups, organized by the Little Tech Association, sent letters to President Trump and other officials on July 22 urging the U.S. government not to restrict access to Chinese open-weight AI mod…

More than 200 startups, including members of Y Combinator's network, are opposing proposed U.S. bans on Chinese AI models that have already cut costs in half for companies like Coinbase, which reported a 50% reduction in…

SpaceX's S-1 IPO filing reveals Anthropic pays SpaceXAI $1.25 billion per month for exclusive access to all 220,000 Nvidia GPUs at the Colossus 1 facility in Tennessee through May 2029, the largest AI compute deal in his…

The AI industry is shifting its focus from raw model intelligence to 'intelligence per dollar,' as many models become good enough for business tasks and buyers prioritize cost efficiency. Amazon's rebuild of Alexa+ exemp…

Anthropic released Fable-lite, a smaller version of its AI model, while Block introduced Buzz, a new product, according to Tom Krazit's Runtime newsletter. Google unveiled a new security model, Poolside released a new op…

NAVER is scaling its GAK Sejong AI data center in South Korea to 200 megawatts by 2028, backed by roughly $10 billion in combined investment from NVIDIA and Brookfield Asset Management. The facility, which will run NVIDI…