TechCrunch Startup News

19-year-old Dhravya Shah, who is originally from Mumbai, has built a memory layer for AI applications with Google's AI chief's backing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Heidi Health raised a $65 million Series B led by Steven Cohen’s Point72. Also, Sugar Free Capital raises $32M inaugural fund to invest in MIT early-staged founders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social event planning app Partiful, which calls itself “Facebook events for hot people,” has firmly replaced Facebook as the go-to platform for sending party invitations. But what Partiful also has in common with Facebook is that it’s collecting a tsunami of user data, and Partiful could have done better at keeping that data secure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zehra Naqvi grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s and recently started Lore, a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions. The company has already raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. It is set to emerge from stealth on October 6th. Also, when Jamie Gull graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with a master’s degree in aeronautics, there was one place he wanted to go next: the desert. The Mojave desert, to be specific. A company called Scaled Composites had spent years developing experimental aircraft out on that arid land, and Gull wanted in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. government shutdown could stifle deal flow, freeze visa processing for workers, and cause other problems for startups and the broader tech sector, especially if it lasts longer than a week, according to experts who spoke to TechCrunch. Also, Bryan Onel’s father was a locksmith. As for Onel, he described himself as the digital equivalent. Ethical hacking was Onel’s hobby growing up. He studied AI at university and then turned that hacking hobby into a profession. Onel told TechCrunch, “I spent a decade performing penetration tests for over 150 companies across all sectors.” He added that he kept easily breaking into companies that had passed their security checks.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simple is an AI-powered health coaching app that helps people lose weight. Electroflow drew inspiration from batteries themselves to develop a new way of producing LFP material for EVs. The process could undercut today's lowest price sources in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup was started earlier this year by Yang Fan Yun and Charlie Deane. Yun is a former product manager at Uber, while Deane founded a company selling server proxies. When he was at Uber, he realized that a lot of people around him were doing grunt work in their browsers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Periodic Labs was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMind, where one of his projects was, for instance, an AI tool called GNoME. Researchers say that tool discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023, materials that could one day be used to power new generations of technology.  Whoop Advanced Labs offers health-screening blood tests from Quest Diagnostics that cover a variety of markers, from calcium to white blood cells. The platform integrates those results with the band’s continuous monitoring of activity, sleep, respiratory rate, and blood pressure to offer more personalized wellness advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CommanderAI launched in early 2024 as a customer relationship manager and sales prospecting platform built for waste management — and other industrial services like dumpster rentals and industrial recyclers – to fill that gap.   Also, Silicon Valley-based Cerebras announced it raised a $1.1 billion Series G round on Tuesday that valued the AI hardware company at $8.1 billion. The round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital, among others.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s no secret that vibe coding — using AI-powered coding tools to build apps and websites via natural language prompts — is exploding in popularity. In July, Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch, plans to close the year at $250 million ARR and thinks it will hit $1 billion ARR within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Replit said earlier this month that its ARR soared from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year. Also, job seekers in all fields can expect to soon be doing a lot more initial screening interviews. While that may sound like positive news, it doesn’t mean that there will suddenly be more open positions. Instead, recruiters, often bogged down with determining which applicants are qualified for the next round, will outsource the routine screening tasks — like checking backgrounds, salary needs, and availability — to (you guessed it) AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices