Startups & Venture
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SpaceX’s next-gen rocket is the key to its sky-high valuation, early investor says: ‘Starship also enables all kinds of frontier markets’
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing for the biggest IPO in history, and its next-generation Starship vehicle may be the key to its sky-high valuation. At 408 feet tall, the fully reusable Starship V3 looms higher than any previous version. It can carry a payload of up to 100 metric tons, a significant increase from the…
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Musk may already be a trillionaire while these SpaceX employees and investors will hit multibillion-dollar jackpots after blockbuster IPO
The biggest initial public offering of all time will deliver massive windfalls for Elon Musk, other SpaceX employee, and investors. In fact, shares aren’t even public yet, but Musk may have already become the world’s first trillionaire. Based on how SpaceX has traded recently on private markets, Barron’s calculated the CEO’s 6.4 billion shares are…
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Inside the fraud-ripe feeding frenzy to snag Anthropic shares while the company remains private
A feeding frenzy in the animal kingdom is, at its core, vicious competition. The idiom “feeding frenzy” gained prominence in the mid-century, first primarily to describe the behavior of sharks frenetically ripping into large schools of fish. It’s chaotic, ruthless, and triggered by the perception of abundance. And I suspect the phrase gained popularity both…
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Meet the brothers who turned a homegrown AI agent into a $12 million bet on the future of work — in six weeks
Lazer Cohen, 41, had spent 15 years building other people’s companies. His younger brother Gavriel, 36, had spent a decade writing code. Together, they’d quietly bet on each other — their parents included, having invested in the brothers’ earlier AI marketing agency venture before NanoClaw existed. When Gavriel sat down on Jan. 29 and wrote…
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The AI boom is pulling Europe’s hottest startups to the U.S.—whether they planned to move or not
Carl Fritjofsson, who has run Stockholm, Sweden-based Creandum’s San Francisco office since 2016, says the timeline for European founders to cross the pond is compressing at a pace he’s never seen. “There is more demand in the U.S. today than there is in Europe,” he told Fortune. “Especially if you’re selling towards enterprises with some…
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AI agents are saving California’s favorite cheese. Here’s how Salesforce brought Petaluma Creamery back from the dead
Larry Peter has as much personality as the cheeses that once made Julia Child melt. He once sold cheese out of a woodshed he built next to a schoolhouse he bought from Sonoma High School for a dollar and now he owns a 113-year-old facility — three city blocks in the heart of Sonoma County…
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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…