Startups
Funded companies, founders, term sheets, demo days, and the early-stage AI scene reported with a healthy skepticism.
Latest in Startups
HeyGen now lets small business owners skip the camera entirely — and its own survey explains why they will
The company's new in-house Voice model debuted October 9 at #1 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, finishing off an avatar-plus-voice stack aimed squarely at founders who film and then chicken out.
Shopify's Canvas Lets Founders Chat a Custom Storefront Into Existence in 20 Minutes
A new Sidekick-powered design surface renders a merchant's live store code as they talk to it. The generic Shopify template may finally be optional.
LTK just turned its app into a conversational shopping engine — and small product brands get a free discovery channel
LTK's new AI-powered Search tab launched Thursday, mashing interest browsing, natural-language search, and creator content into one experience. For small B2C brands already on the platform, it's a high-intent surface that didn't exist a week ago.
Higgsfield Hit a $1B Run Rate Selling AI Video Ads. The DTC Playbook Just Changed.
An 18-month-old startup says most of its revenue now comes from businesses generating ads. For small consumer brands still shooting product video by hand, the cost floor moved.
Sequoia and Kleiner just paid $1.8 billion to prove AI answer engines are the new front door
Profound's $180M Series D says the quiet part loud: showing up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity is now a customer-acquisition discipline. Most small businesses haven't started.
Anthropic Is Gunning for the Biggest IPO in History
The Claude maker is telling investors it wants to match or top SpaceX's $86.2 billion debut — with a public S-1 possibly landing this month, a $65 billion run rate, and Citi elbowing into the syndicate.
Etched hits $21B in 26 days, sells its first rack to the fund that just led its round
Jane Street took delivery of Etched's first inference cluster and then wrote the check that doubled the startup's valuation. In under four weeks.
Stripe buys OpenRouter for $7 billion-plus, and quietly becomes the toll booth for AI
A payments company just paid a 5x premium over May's valuation to own the switchboard between 8 million developers and 400+ AI models. Stripe now sees which models win.
Cognition raises $1 billion at $26 billion, and says Devin now writes 90% of its own code
The Devin startup more than doubled its valuation in eight months on $492M of run-rate revenue — and Scott Wu wants you to know he doesn't need to sell.
Anthropic comes for the small-business stack with Claude for Small Business
Packaged workflows, pre-built SaaS connectors, credit-card billing. Anthropic stops being a model provider for big companies and starts being a SaaS for everybody else.