Startup Baseten is reportedly close to finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion as the “inference gold rush" marches on.

TechCrunch spoke to investors to find the hottest startups in the Spring 2026 YC batch. Some of them commanded valuations of over $175 million, VCs said.

After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey — from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth — Brown wants to help others do the same. 

Forget stickers, GIFs, and emoji reactions. Pixi is betting that the next evolution of messaging is interactive augmented reality (AR).

World models are the next big thing in AI beyond LLMs and, with this round, Odyssey has cemented itself as one of the startups to watch.

SpaceX’s reported $60 billion Cursor deal could turn AI coding agents into strategic infrastructure for software teams and frontier model competition.

If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.

Pramaana will focus on highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation — where errors can be costly and reliability is at a premium.

With this acquisition, DeepL is opening an office in San Francisco to expand its U.S. business.

Anthropic's popularity with business users is growing so well that the latest beef with the government might actually boost it, data from Ramp suggests.

African payments infrastructure company Flutterwave has hit a new valuation and landed blockchain company Ripple as an investor and partner.

Probably wants to prevent hallucinations and factual errors from reaching users, and achieve accuracy on par with deterministic systems.

Instead of heating metals, Foundation Alloy beats them into submission. The startup has raised $22 million to scale up production of its alloys.

Respond.io, one of Malaysia's startups to watch, uses AI agents to handle high volumes of customer inquiries and charges per convo, not per seat.

Indian IT services company HCLTech is investing $150 million in the Bengaluru startup.

NewCore argues the next challenge in enterprise security will be managing AI agents, not people.

Orbio announces $21 million Series A in round led by Dawn Capital.

Startups are trying to "ride that SpaceX IPO wave."

Tech leaders debate whether the Anthropic episode is a wake-up call for India’s AI ambitions.

Andrew Yang made a list of everything Americans overpay for — housing, food, wireless — and thinks the next startup gold rush is giving that money back.