startups
Few metrics thrill Silicon Valley investors more than surging annual recurring revenue (ARR). In the AI boom, however, VCs are increasingly skeptical of what that number actually represents.”The amount of VC-backed AI companies lying about their ARR publicly is absolutely unsettling,” Greg Isenberg, CEO of Late Checkout, wrote in a…
After years of investors shunning hardware, Silicon Valley is getting physical.Robotics has become one of the hottest bets in tech as investors look beyond software for the next wave of AI. Physical AI startups — companies building machines that can act in the real world — raised a record $16.3…
It’s a tough environment for a founder trying to build the next-generation Facebook.With more apps than ever and the mainstay social media giants dominating people’s screen time, the competition is fierce. Investors, meanwhile, are pining after flashy AI deals.There was a peak in venture capital investment in social startups in…
Tattoos, company logos, and deleted apologies — oh my.A Y Combinator-backed startup founder is in hot water after saying his company would offer job interviews to anyone who got a tattoo of its logo at a party in San Francisco last weekend.Jordan Zietz, the cofounder of the small AI automation…
Lilian Weng, a cofounder of the AI startup Thinking Machines Lab who stepped down this week, is rejoining OpenAI.The researcher will lead a team focused on accelerating internal research at the ChatGPT maker, as part of OpenAI’s bid to develop AI that can improve itself, a company spokesperson told Business…
