Robinhood’s startup fund stumbles in NYSE debut

The fund currently offers retail investors exposure to eight startups, including Mercor, Ramp, and Stripe, with plans to expand its portfolio.

Anthropic’s Pentagon deal is a cautionary tale for startups chasing federal contracts

The Pentagon has officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the two failed to agree on how much control the military should have over its AI models, including its use in autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. As Anthropic’s $…

City Detect, which uses AI to help cities stay safe and clean, raises $13M Series A

City Detect, a company that helps local governments prevent urban decay, is in at least 17 cities so far, including Dallas and Miami.

DiligenceSquared uses AI, voice agents to make M&A research affordable

Instead of relying on expensive management consultants, the startup uses AI voice agents to conduct interviews with customers of the companies the PE firms are considering buying.

Cluely CEO Roy Lee admits to publicly lying about revenue numbers last year

The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely CEO Roy Lee shared last summer was a lie, its founder and CEO Roy Lee admitted on Thursday on X.

Hardware testing startup Nominal hits $1B valuation, raises $155M in 10 months

Nominal provides hardware testing equipment to defense tech companies. Founders Fund led the preemptive deal.

EXCLUSIVE: Luma launches creative AI agents powered by its new ‘Unified Intelligence’ models

Luma introduced Luma Agents, powered by its new “Unified Intelligence” models, designed to coordinate multiple AI systems and generate end-to-end creative work across text, images, video and audio.

How 1,000+ customer calls shaped a breakout enterprise AI startup

On this episode of Build Mode, David Park joins Isabelle Johannessen to discuss how he and his team are intentionally iterating, fundraising, and scaling Narada.

Lio raises $30M from Andreessen Horowitz and others to automate enterprise procurement

AI procurement startup Lio announced a $30 million Series A in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

His house burned down. He used the insurance money to build PopSockets.

Does a consumer hardware company need to get on the VC treadmill to succeed? Eleven years and 290 million products sold across 115 countries later, PopSockets has proven that the bootstrapped, low-dilution p…