Startups don’t need to go viral to win customers
Getting initial customers as a startup can be one of the most grueling challenges in business. Even when companies manage to snag some early interest, there’s no guarantee those customers…
VCs, Superhuman Mail founder share red flags about product-market fit
Product-market fit — when a startup’s product sells well — has become even harder to find in this AI era. Despite startups achieving record-fast growth, not all customers are sticky…
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 roundtables: Go deeper on the challenges founders are solving right now
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 is coming to SoWa Power Station in Boston on November 4, bringing founders, investors, and operators together for a full day of candid conversations, practical sessions,…
Carta and NewView partner, hoping to entice more startups to let employees sell shares early
Startups are staying private longer leaving employees, who typically take a portion of their compensation as stock they can’t sell, with little hope of early liquidity. An increasing number of…
From Toast to Bessemer: Who founders will hear from at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026
Building a startup means making decisions before you have all the answers. When should you scale? How do you know you really have product-market fit? What does it take to…
Agent cloud startup Daytona hits $1B valuation backed by FirstMark and a who’s who of angels
In Brief Posted: 9:26 AM PDT · October 23, 2026 Image Credits:Daytona / CEO Ivan Burazin flanked by chief architect Goran Draganić (left) and CTO Vedran Jukic Daytona Platforms announced…
Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear
Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Andruil’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. That idea, on…
OpenAI working on new $30B raise at $1.25T valuation ahead of IPO
In Brief Posted: 3:08 PM PDT · October 22, 2026 Image Credits:Darrell Etherington with files from Getty under license OpenAI is reportedly close to securing another mega round of private…
The secret to fast startup growth isn’t early sales, top names in tech say
The AI era has changed how fast startups can grow. Startups can grow so fast that they hit high annual recurring revenue (ARR) numbers, only to crash and burn a…
Former OpenAI science lead launches Warp Science to automate wet labs with robots
Former OpenAI science lead Kevin Weil has launched Warp Sciences, a new AI startup focused on automating lab work for drug discovery. The company, which trains robots to make and…