Startups & Venture
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Exclusive: ‘We’re spending millions to stop threats that cost thousands’: Startup Furientis aims to revolutionize defense
Brody Franzen is showing me his missiles and his comically large American flag. His company Furientis, operates out of Lenny Kravitz’s old studio in Los Angeles. He puts his head next to two mach three (three times the speed of light) nose cones that are browned like toasted marshmallows. “That’s from the supersonic flow hitting
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Exclusive: Martha Stewart’s new AI startup wants to manage your home before things break
Martha Stewart is entering the AI-agent wars through the mudroom. It all started at Easter brunch on her farm, where Stewart met Kyle Rush—her neighbor and an AI engineer—and realized he was describing what she says she’d imagined for years: software that notices the leaky ceiling, expiring insurance policy, or too-high utility bills before the
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Greenboard raises $15.5 million to keep compliance from slowing down business in the AI era
Financial compliance can be a pretty dry affair—so much so that there are compelling business opportunities to be found for those who can help people to do less of it. One startup seizing on this opportunity is Greenboard, a platform for using AI to automate aspects of financial compliance, that has raised $15.5 million in
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Apple and Andreessen Horowitz alums raise $20 million to bring AI to ‘real economy’ businesses
AI is swiftly rewiring the way people work, but an outsize amount of this workplace revolution has so far been confined to Fortune 500-style companies. Ciridae has raised $20 million in seed funding on the promise of bringing AI to the many U.S. businesses that don’t hold quarterly earnings calls. The funding round was led
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Gusto’s path to $1 billion in revenue, milestone-by-milestone
After closing, a San Francisco flower market isn’t exactly idyllic. But in 2012, Eddie Kim and Tomer London, cofounders of HR software startup Gusto, were there to see Christina Stembel. The owner of Farmgirl Flowers, Stembel needed to hire her first employee and, accordingly, had to set up payroll for the first time. She’d been
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The ‘PayPal Mafia’ built a $1.5 billion fintech pioneer. The company they left behind is on life support
Nineteen years ago, in a Fortune cover storythat christened the group, the so-called “PayPal Mafia” gathered in San Francisco for a photo shoot. There were gold chains, tracksuits, Maker’s Mark, Sinatra singing through the Wurlitzer. Peter Thiel had a butler, Fortune’s Jeffrey O’Brien discovered—“holy cannoli”—while Max Levchin wore mismatched freebie shorts. Elon Musk skipped the
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Exclusive: AI grocery startup Vori raises $22 million to help independent retailers compete with Walmart and Amazon
Brandon Hill’s parents met and fell in love in an independent grocery store. Decades later, the startup founder is trying to make sure stores like that don’t get swallowed up by Walmart and Amazon. Hill is the cofounder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco company building “the self-driving operating system for supermarkets.” The company
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‘He wanted to be CEO’: Early OpenAI VC Vinod Khosla says Elon Musk’s bid for control led to the Sam Altman feud and his major investment
When Vinod Khosla sat down with Fortune‘s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in early March, he offered some key context for one of the most consequential tech trials in American history: Musk vs. Altman. “He wanted to be CEO,” Khosla said of Elon Musk on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. He explained the context around
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Exclusive: AI-powered recruiting startup Dex raises $5.3 million seed round
Paddy Lambros spent two and a half years advising roughly 100 European startups on hiring at the London-based venture capital firm Atomico. During that time, he kept coming back to the same observation: nearly every business problem at a young company could be traced to a hiring decision. “It was either not having the right
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A Mark Cuban-backed AI startup is helping families turn conversations with their elderly relatives into lasting memories
Charlie Greene, the cofounder and CEO of Remento, first learned about the importance of recording memories when his father, Don Greene, died during the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. A 10-year-old boy at the time of the terrorist attack, which resulted in his father’s plane crashing in Shanksville, Penn., the now 34-year-old