Mentee Robotics hasn’t been in stealth, exactly.
The Israeli firm caught a small wave of press at the tail end of 2022, following Tesla’s initial humanoid robotics announcement.
Even so, the firm caught some headlines because its co-founder and chair, Amnon Shashua, founded Mobileye and the well-funded AI firm, AI21 Labs.
On Wednesday, however, the company offered up a glimpse of Menteebot, its own stab at the rapidly growing humanoid category.
In fact, this is one of those spots where the precise definition of what constitutes a humanoid system gets blurred.
HR startup Rippling is in discussions to raise at a $13.4B valuation, up from $11.25B The round could total $870M, including $670M worth of secondaryLate stage HRtech startup Rippling is raising new capital.
This will be Rippling’s Series F, and could raise its valuation to as high as $13.4 billion on a post-money basis, up from the $11.25 billion valuation it reached when it last raised capital in a $500 million Series E just a year ago.
Rippling had raised $1.2 billion total previous to this round.
Rippling competitor Gusto told TechCrunch that it reached $500 million in trailing revenue last year, along with cash flow positivity.
Earlier this year Deel, which focuses on payroll for teams that cross borders, said that it had reached $500 million worth of annual recurring revenue.
Investors and founders can meet their match with Cherub, the ‘Raya of angel investing’Jaclyn Johnson and Angeline Vuong were on a hike deliberating how hard it can be for people to get started in angel investing when they realized they had stumbled upon a startup idea.
Today they are the co-founders of Cherub, a marketplace that pairs angel investors with entrepreneurs.
Johnson likens Los Angeles-based Cherub to Raya, an online membership-based community for dating, in that it matches founders and angel investors based on their preferences.
Of those deals, 40% were new angel investors, meaning they were accredited investors that had never written checks before.
Angel investor Allen Orr told TechCrunch that he had used other platforms such as AngelList in the past.
Design firm Zypsy will do $100,000 worth of work for 1% equity for early-stage startupsZypsy, a design firm with a track record of helping early-stage startups, has launched a new and somewhat unique venture investment program.
Instead startups will pay by issuing Zypsy 1% equity of their companies via a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity).
Zypsy has already added five startups to the first cohort of the design capital program (alphabetical order):Pilot projects with over 25 startups for three yearsThe six-year-old design company has worked with more than 25 startups.
“They are ‘cash-based clients, not an ‘equity-based portfolios’ like five companies we mentioned in the first design capital program,” he said.
In 2023, Zypsy raised $3 million to establish Design Capital.
If so, ensuring your cap table and data room are pristine could be the difference between a smooth, swift raise and a drawn-out, costly process.
At TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, join Fidelity Private Shares’ session, “Preparing to Raise: Cap Table Best Practices to Help You Close Fast” to gain invaluable insights from industry experts.
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At Fidelity, she spearheads initiatives to support founders and investors with equity management tools, fundraising strategy, and go-to-market best practices.
For the firm that calls itself “the first check in deep tech,” the last check for SOSV’s latest $306 million fund took a bit longer than founder Sean O’Sullivan would have liked.
“We’re concentrating and double doubling down on deep tech,” O’Sullivan said.
We’re doing a fewer number of companies, more like 80 deep tech companies per year.
O’Sullivan said that SOSV intends to invest about 70% of the funds in climate tech companies, 25% in health tech, and the remaining 5% will be reserved for opportunistic investments.
“We have a special place to serve because we do deep tech, because we do get into the biology, we do get into the chemistry, the physics and the electronics.
ISAs are a technical spec at the foundation of every chip, describing how software controls the chip’s hardware.
In addition to building the chip, Rivos is working on self-contained data center hardware based on the Open Compute Project modular standard, which will effectively serve as plug-and-play chip housing.
Startups by the dozens, meanwhile, are angling for a slice of a custom data center chip market that could reach $10 billion this year and double by 2025.
Habana Labs, the Intel-owned AI chip company, laid off an estimated 10% of its workforce last year.
Kumar wouldn’t talk about customers, and Rivos’ chip isn’t anticipated to reach mass production until sometime next year.
Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market.
It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round.
Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said.
Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms.
ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.
TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutiny Plus, a Faraday Future whistleblower case and humanoid robots in car factoriesWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox.
It was another wild week in the world of transportation, particularly in the EV startup and automated driving industries.
Exoes, a French-based startup that developed battery cooling technology for EVs, raised €35 million ($37.5 million) from BpiFrance and Meridiam Green Impact Growth Fund.
Both former employees have filed lawsuits claiming the troubled EV company has been lying about some of the few sales it has announced to date.
Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech.
Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event.
Lorenzo wrote about how hackers stole over ~340,000 Social Security numbers from government consulting firm Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA).
Elsewhere, Sarah had the story on Spotify’s personalized AI playlists, which lets users create a playlist based on written prompts.
Emulators in the store: Apple updated its App Store rules to globally allow emulators for retro console games an option for downloading titles.
