It’s tough out there — and yet, doing my semi-regular jobs post always gives me hope.
Seems every time I post one of these, the number increases.
At 74 companies, this is undoubtedly the largest list we’ve made, by a wide margin.
That means more work for me in putting this post together, but if it helps a few folks find some work, it was definitely worth it.
1X Technologies (23 roles)Advanced Construction Robotics (4 roles)Aescape (5 roles)Aethon (5 roles)Agility Robotics (5 roles)Allvision (2 roles)Ambi Robotics (2 roles)ANYbotics (25 roles)Apptronik (16 roles)Astrobotic (23 roles)Atomic Machines (2 roles)Aurora (40 careers)Baubot (10 roles)Bear Robotics (13 roles)BHS Robotics (8 roles)Bloomfield Robotics (5 roles)Boxbot (3 roles)Carnegie Robotics (1 role)Cepheid (4 roles)Chef Robotics (15 roles)Civ Robotics (5 roles)Collaborative Robotics (10 roles)Covariant (20 roles)Dexterity (42 roles)Edge Case Research (1 role)Ekumen (3 roles)Enchanted Tools (50 roles)Engineered Arts (1 role)Exotec (174 roles)Eye-Bot (4 roles)Forcen (4 roles)Formant, Inc. (4 roles)Formic (8 roles)Formlogic (12 roles)Four Growers (4 roles)Foxglove (2 roles)Fulfil Solutions (15 roles)Gecko Robotics (18 roles)GrayMatter Robotics (11 roles)Hellbender (6 roles)Johnson & Johnson Med Tech (1 role)Keybotic (2 roles)Matic Robots (10 roles)Medra (3 roles)Mine Vision Systems (2 roles)Near Earth Autonomy (4 roles)Neocis (15 roles)Neubility (1 role)Neuraville (8 roles)Neya Systems (9 roles)Nimble Robotics (8 roles)Nuro (40 roles)Onward Robotics (2 roles)Plus.ai (3 roles)Polymath Robotics (2 roles)Pudu Robotics (2 roles)Pyka (10 roles)Reliable Robotics (36 roles)Roboto AI (1 role)Robust AI (14 roles)Sanctuary AI (14 roles)Sakar Robotics (6 roles)Scythe Robotics (11 roles)Seegrid (10 roles)Sphinx (5 roles)Stack AV (40 roles)Sunnybotics (2 roles)The AI Institute (19 roles)Titan Robotics (3 roles)UnitX (8 roles)Vecna Robotics (7 roles)Vention (20 roles)Viam (4 roles)Volley Automation (10 roles)
Airtree Ventures already returned its first fund thanks to Canva while maintaining the majority of its stakeVenture secondaries has exploded over the last couple of years.
While some firms have used the increase in activity to build up their positions in their most promising portfolio companies, Airtree Ventures is taking advantage of the momentum a little differently.
So in 2021 Airtree started seeking out alternative ways to get liquidity for some of their earliest stakes, Blair said.
Airtree got a 1.4x return on Fund I from this transaction alone and was able to maintain the majority of their original stake.
They aren’t wrong, and Blair acknowledges that when a company does eventually exit, Airtree makes less money off of it because of this strategy.
Patlytics, an AI-powered patent analytics platform, wants to help enterprises, IP professionals, and law firms speed up their patent workflows from discovery, analytics, comparisons, and prosecution to litigation.
The outfit recently launched its product, which is SOC-2 certified, and already serves some top-tier law firms and a few in-house legal counsels at enterprises as customers.
Its target users include IP law firms and companies with several patents.
“Protecting intellectual property remains a major priority and business requirement for information technology, physical product, and biotechnology companies.
Notably, the round also attracted a host of angel backers, including partners at premier law firms, Datadog President Amit Agarwal, Fiscal Note founder Tim Hwang, and Tapas Media founder Chang Kim.
“When we think about our nation’s IP and leadership globally, it’s synonymous with leadership in space,” Stricklan told me in an interview before the occasion.
To that end Space Workforce 2030 has started with the basics: collecting and understanding the data in order to establish a baseline.
Stricklan told me that thousands of teachers have signed on and they expect to see a lot of engagement next month.
They have different touchpoints to get to those that just don’t understand there could be a future for them in a STEM-related career.” Stricklan told me.
You can learn more about the Space Workforce 2030 effort here.
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent.
TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday.
“In response to economic conditions that have impacted companies’ hiring, we made the difficult and painful decision to reduce the size of our team.
This will allow us to operate more efficiently and ensure the long-term health of our business,” a Checkr spokesperson said in the statement.
The job cuts — which affected 32% of the company’s workforce — came nearly two years after Checkr announced the acquisition of Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and mid-sized businesses.
Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models?
News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.
Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.
Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.
Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps.
Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) plans to back up to 21 growth-stage companies across the continent after closing its first fund at $60 million.
The pan-African VC hit the milestone following fresh backing from Nigeria’s SCM Capital formerly Sterling Capital Markets Limited, and the only non-Japanese investor.
Verod-Kepple is the latest African VC to get capitalized, amid an ongoing investment downturn, allowing it to provide much-needed capital to series A and B startups even as local capital pools for growth-stage companies remain limited.
We think there’s still a need for more growth stage capital with locally based investors,” she said.
How VKAV makes investmentsThe VKAV fund backs startups that are building infrastructure for the digital economy, solving inefficiencies encountered by businesses, and market creators for the emerging consumer population.
Sprinto, a security compliance and risk platform, has raised a $20 million Series B round to build more automation into its compliance management platform and widen its customer base to include the wide gamut of companies that operate digitally but aren’t tech-first.
Sprinto is working to automate this aspect of security compliance management, which involves vendor risk management, vulnerability assessment, access control, evidence collection and other filing tasks.
Sprinto uses a mix of AI, GPTs and its own internal large language model to offer efficiencies in compliance management.
The market for automated compliance management solutions already has players such as Vanta and Drata, which Sprinto considers its key competitors.
However, Redekar said Sprinto primarily focuses on automating the entire compliance management process and helping businesses build trust.
The company has bought Searchlight, a startup and recruitment platform that uses artificial intelligence-based technology to source talent.
The plan will be to use Searchlight’s tech to build new AI products for Multiverse to expand its professional training services.
After that, the plan will be to wind down Searchlight’s recruitment services as they focus on Multiverse’s business.
Some people will use AI to speed up what they do; others will claim that AI is taking over certain jobs altogether.
“From the start, Anna and Kerry have been thoughtful about building Searchlight’s AI models to complement their vision,” Keith Rabois, who led the Series A, said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.
The tech world is incredibly focused on AI and its applications today, but artificial intelligence is hardly the only place where progress is being made.
If you want to get really into the weeds, pay attention to the progress that quantum computing is making, as made evident recently by an announcement from Microsoft and Quantinuum.
The pair of companies made what TechCrunch described as a “major breakthrough in quantum error correction,” which could make quantum computing systems far more usable than before.
The gist is that they encoded several physical qubits into a single logical qubit, which made it easier to detect and correct errors.
The error rate in quantum computing is a material issue to the technology’s performance, making the news that the two companies managed “run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error” pretty big news.
