Startups & Venture
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Exclusive: Fleek, an online marketplace connecting vintage clothing wholesalers and retailers, raises $25 million in new funding
Abhi Arora, like many people, liked to buy vintage clothes. But he had never given too much thought to exactly how they arrived in second-hand shops. Then one day, Arora’s favorite vintage clothing shop near Brick Lane, in London’s East End, announced it was closing. Surprised, Arora asked the shop owner why. She told him…
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The $1.2 billion startup that wants to become Amazon Prime for savings
In 2022, Hussein Fazal flew 200 of his employees to Las Vegas to cash a $200 check at a payday loan shop. He then asked them to buy a week of groceries for a family on what was left so they could understand their customers’ experience. His company, Super.com was worth approximately $700 million at…
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David Senra, your favorite billionaire’s favorite podcaster, has turned down every acquisition offer. Here’s why
David Senra told me he’s unmanageable. Despite that, he’s managed to build a wildly profitable podcast business and has turned down every offer to buy it. Founders, Senra’s original podcast, launched in September 2016. He’s always run it alone—no full-time employees, two subcontractors handling clips and thumbnails—and turned it into a business generating millions of…
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How David Senra built the podcast the world’s most powerful CEOs can’t stop listening to
David Senra will tell you he doesn’t care if you listen to his podcast. And he means it. For five and a half years after he launched Founders in 2016, almost nobody did listen. He read one business biography per week—hard copy, with a pen and a six-inch ruler and a stack of Post-its— photographed…
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The defense tech boom has become a bubble—or it will be soon
Drones, missiles, and warships were, for a long time, deemed uninvestable in Silicon Valley—or, at minimum, contentious. Consider 2018: Googlers were storming out over their company’s involvement in the AI military initiative Project Maven, and Anduril was the anomaly, a multi-million defense-focused startup soon to be headlined as “the most controversial startup” in tech. VCs…
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Eli Lilly just placed a $40 million bet on the next injectable boom
Eli Lilly just wrote a $40 million check to cure baldness. The pharma giant behind Zepbound and Mounjaro—which made the injectable culturally normal for millions of Americans—led a $100 million stock offering in Absci, a generative AI drug company. Adage, BVF Partners, Columbia Threadneedle, Invus and Redmile also participated. Absci used AI to design ABS-201,…
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Why BlackRock, Nvidia, and Temasek are betting billions on quantum computing
For four decades, quantum computing was all about theory. Now it’s all about term sheets. VC investment in quantum computing hit $3.9 billion across 125 deals in 2025—the highest annual total ever recorded, per a new PitchBook report. Q3 2025 alone clocked $1.6 billion—more than any full year before 2021. And early 2026 is keeping…
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Exclusive: A former Apple engineer thinks AI infrastructure is built for the wrong future. Investors just gave him $80 million to fix it
For months, Kleiner Perkins partner Aditya Naganath had been mulling over his investing thesis that the next wave of AI wasn’t going to be a chatbot—it was going to be software that does the work autonomously, for hours at a time, across thousands of tasks at once. The trouble was, nobody had built the plumbing…
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Exclusive: Taktile raises $110 million from Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global to automate high-stakes financial decisions
Banks and insurance companies spend billions of dollars to employ staff to screen risky transactions, process claims, and onboard new customers. If these decisions go awry, there can be serious consequences. The AI startup Taktile aims to automate even these risky calls, and one of the largest financial institutions has decided to back the company.…
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Exclusive: Seltz, a startup rebuilding web search for AI agents, raises $12.5 million in seed funding
The rise of AI has rekindled the long-dormant search wars. Chatbots and AI agents need to surface timely, relevant information about news and all kinds of products and services. AI startup Seltz is among the players lining up to take on Google, betting that AI agents and chatbots demand a new kind of search engine.…