Startup funding shatters all records in Q1

The record quarterly fundraise largely fueled four mega-deals into OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo. But it also indicates a generally hot market.

In just a couple weeks, StrictlyVC San Francisco brings leaders from TDK Ventures, Replit, and more together

The first StrictlyVC of the year will be coming to San Francisco before you know it.

There are still a few tickets available to join us and our stacked speaker lineup April 30, so register today!

Mercor says it was hit by cyberattack tied to compromise of open-source LiteLLM project

The AI recruiting startup confirmed a security incident after an extortion hacking crew took credit for stealing data from the company’s systems.

Toyota’s Woven Capital appoints new CIO and COO in push for finding the ‘future of mobility’

Woven Capital is the growth-stage venture capital arm of Toyota, focused on backing founders building in space, cybersecurity, and autonomous driving.

It’s not your imagination: AI seed startups are commanding higher valuations

Among the most recent Y Combinator cohort, many startups were commanding $40 million valuations. But with more money comes higher expectations.

Yupp shuts down after raising $33M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon

Less than a year after launching, with checks from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, crowdsourced AI model feedback startup Yupp is closing its business, the company said Tuesday.

Whoop’s valuation just tripled to $10 billion

The fitness tracking startup just closed a $575 million Series G with Cristiano Ronaldo and LeBron James among its investors. The obvious question looming over a round of this size at this valuation: Is an IPO coming?

Nomadic raises $8.4 million to wrangle the data pouring off autonomous vehicles

The company turns footage from robots into structured, searchable datasets with a deep learning model.

Exclusive: Runway launches $10M fund, Builders program to support early stage AI startups

Runway is launching a $10 million fund and startup program to back companies building with its AI video models, as it pushes toward interactive, real-time “video intelligence” applications.

The company behind ClassPass and Mindbody just got a lot bigger with a $7.5B merger

The merger is a sign that the fitness industry is continuing to move toward consolidation to compete at a larger scale. Recent moves include MyFitnessPal acquiring Cal AI, an AI calorie counting app, and Strava buying two apps: cycling app The Breakawa…