In 2023, higher egg prices provided an opportunity for alternative protein companies to show they could compete with traditional egg manufacturers. A year later, prices have calmed down, […]
Profluent, spurred by Salesforce research and backed by Jeff Dean, uses AI to discover medicines
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI. A research […]
Startups Weekly: What goes up must come down
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every […]
World Fund closes first €300M climate tech fund, seeking to follow-on and backing hardware
After a three-year fund-raise, World Fund has finally closed a €300 million first fund, €50 million short of it’s target in 2021, but still a considerable number given […]
Pitch Deck Teardown: SuperScale’s $5.4M Series A deck
There are two industries that make a ton of money but they’re traditionally largely ignored by venture capital — movies and gaming. That comes as a bit of […]
Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’
The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from […]
As European dynamism gathers momentum, Elaia and partners double down with new deep tech fund
Deep tech is on the rise in Europe, fueled in part by the match between AI and a local flavor of math excellence. But it’s also benefiting from […]
Pitch Deck Teardown: Astek Diagnostics’s $2M seed deck
Astek Diagnostics closed a $2 million round for its urine diagnostics system, despite the fact that raising money for medtech isn’t for the faint of heart. The company’s […]
This Swedish startup wants to reduce the cost, and controversy, around stem cells production
With the news yesterday that “mini organs” have been grown for the first time using human stem cells, this futuristic area of bio-medicine is clearly accelerating by leaps […]
Francine Bennett uses data science to make AI more responsible
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed […]