The gist: Travel demand appears to be holding up, but at the same time, investor appetite for travel tech startups has cooled. Even a wave of startups promising to improve travel with AI hasn’t managed to reverse the funding slowdown. We share what a review of Crunchbase data shows.
The gist: AI megarounds are masking a shrinking Series A market, leaving seed founders facing higher revenue expectations and longer timelines despite larger seed checks. To improve their chances, MGV's Marc Schröder says, founders should size their seed funding around Series A milestones.
The gist: Numeracle, a McLean, Virginia-based company that verifies businesses and links their identities to the phone numbers they use to contact customers, has raised $28 million from Edison Partners to help businesses whose calls are incorrectly labeled as spam or blocked by phone carriers.
The gist: Revenue growth does not guarantee a larger exit, as declining valuation multiples can outweigh operating gains and reduce enterprise value. Guest author Itay Sagie suggests that founders and boards should track valuation alongside financial performance, model the effects of delaying a sale, and begin M&A preparation wh
The gist: After living as a monk while managing Graves’ disease, a former Facebook engineer left Big Tech to pursue meaningful work, eventually founding government software startup FSH Technologies which aims to improve processes such as school food services and public records management through the use of artificial intelligenc
The gist: Slingshot Insurance, a Minneapolis-based AI-native embedded insurance startup, is emerging from stealth with $27 million in a seed funding round co-led by Rally Ventures and Skyward Group, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
The gist: Crunchbase News spoke with James Kim, partner at Reach Capital, about how Reach’s education roots inform its broader strategy, what it saw in AI detection company GPTZero, and why some of its best investments initially divided its own team. We also discussed how ownership stakes and secondary transactions have shaped t
The gist: All told, fintech startups raised $10.6 billion globally in the third quarter of 2026, down 28.4% from $14.9 billion in Q2 2026 and 21.4% from $13.5 billion in Q3 2025.
The gist: A continued boom in late-stage and growth funding combined with a surge in seed-stage funding helped buoy venture investment in Latin America for the third quarter of 2026, Crunchbase data shows.
The gist: New York-based Chariot Claims has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Silverton Partners to help consumers pursue claims over alleged privacy violations, hidden fees and subscriptions that are difficult to cancel.
The gist: In this Crunchbase News exclusive, we spoke to Marklo AI founder Jessica Herrin about her solution to the marketing problems she encountered when building earlier startups, and how a group of investors, led by Forerunner, are backing that early experience with a $5 million seed funding round.
The gist: In a recent interview with Crunchbase News, Brendan Wallace, founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Fifth Wall, discussed the AI shift, why proptech funding totals may overlook some of the sector’s biggest investments, what it all means for founders, and the housing problems he believes still need solving.
The gist: AI companies can build durable moats by embedding their products in essential customer workflows, explains tech adviser Itay Sagie, who shares why founders should prioritize measurable customer dependence, while investors and acquirers should assess how integrations, trusted relationships and workflow access can streng
The gist: Gudea has raised $7 million in seed funding, co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures, to help companies anticipate which online narratives will go viral and understand who is driving them, the startup tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
The gist: The latest in our series of articles on venture funding to non-tech founders features a former magician's assistant and ballet dancer who's building cybersecurity software with $4.2 million in seed funding.
The gist: Some of the AI industry’s fastest-growing startups are becoming serial acquirers, buying smaller companies to fill product gaps, enter new markets and bring specialized teams in-house, a review of Crunchbase data shows. While AI giant OpenAI is by far the busiest of these buyers, well-funded startups in legal tech, cus
The gist: Homeward, a startup that helps homeowners buy before selling their existing homes or get cash offers for their properties, has raised a $120 million Series D round, Crunchbase News reports exclusively.
The gist: Although Oura has postponed its planned offering that could have raised as much as $2.2 billion, Anthropic is still making a move toward the public markets along with AI cloud provider Nscale and other companies lining up potential fourth-quarter listings.
The gist: Austin-based Tiny Health has raised $33 million in a Series B funding round led by B Capital to help it meet growing demand for its at-home microbiome tests.
The gist: In an interview with Crunchbase News, Sandhya Venkatachalam, founder and managing partner of Axiom Partners, discusses why she looks beyond familiar founder profiles, what makes an AI company durable, and how an early investment in Groq shaped her approach.
The gist: From January through August, U.S. tech layoffs reached at least 94,046, up 16.8% from 80,486 in the same period of 2025. Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, many of the cuts came as tech companies redirected spending toward AI and restructured operations to reduce costs.
The gist: Dextr AI is emerging from stealth with $6.7 million in seed funding to build agents that handle reservations, guest requests, staff coordination and other hotel tasks.
The gist: As AI agents gain access to enterprise data, systems and tools, they are emerging as a new class of active identity requiring specialized permissions, monitoring and governance, writes guest author Itay Sagie. He believes the market, and its M&A opportunities, will likely form around specific control points, making pre
The gist: Baselayer, an AI-powered startup that helps financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, has raised a $35 million M13-led Series A to expand its identity technology to AI agents.
The gist: In an interview with Crunchbase News, Van Espahbodi, general parter at Generational Partners, discusses how AI is changing hardware economics, why software investors are rushing into industrial technology, and what he believes many of them misunderstand about the sector.
The gist: Newly launched Skalar provides startups with capital to fund sales and marketing initiatives in a fairly straightforward, though somewhat unusual model which lets the startups pay it back out of the revenue generated by the customers acquired with that capital.
The gist: Startups across sales, marketing and customer management have raised $7.5 billion so far this year, according to Crunchbase data. The largest rounds span everything from advertising and customer data to sales software, e-commerce and customer support — reflecting just how many companies are still trying to build a bett
The gist: Iman Abuzeid left clinical medicine to tackle healthcare problems at scale, co-founding Incredible Health, a hiring platform that reverses traditional recruiting by having employers apply to healthcare professionals by combining her expertise with co-founder Rome Portlock’s technical skills the company uses AI agents t
The gist: In an interview with Crunchbase News, Sean Jacobsohn, a partner at venture firm Norwest, discusses where he still sees openings in the crowded market for finance software, how far companies should trust AI with accounting work, why HR startups may be better off attacking the secondary products of large platforms, and w
The gist: Paris-based generative AI startup Mistral AI said Tuesday that it has nearly doubled its valuation to more than $24 billion with a Samsung Electronics-led $3.5 billion Series D fundraise.
