<p>Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers&#8217; approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there&#8217;s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Aletiq raised a €6 million funding round led by Point Nine a few months ago (around $6.5 million at current exchange rates). The French startup is announcing the funding round today. Aletiq has been developing product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturing industrial companies working in aerospace, automotive, electronics, luxury, and more. When you think [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Factorial, the Barcelona-based “unicorn” startup that provides an all-in-one HR platform in the cloud for small and medium businesses, has picked up a non-dilutive (no equity) $120 million from General Catalyst — money it says it&#8217;ll invest in one specific area: “go-to-market”, or GTM, the umbrella term used for the wider expenses associated with sales [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Critical Venture Partners is betting that young founders plucked fresh from universities can solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.</p>

<p>The new fund aims to restore nature to reverse biodiversity loss and emissions from land use.</p>

<p>AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the&nbsp;vast majority&nbsp;of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman&nbsp;recently claimed&nbsp;that a quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. Sensing an opportunity, VCs are rushing to back startups developing [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Rather than trying to beat Chinese companies, Coreshell attempting an end run, swapping graphite for its specially coated silicon.</p>

<p>So-called &#8220;vibe coding&#8221; with LLM-driven tools like Cursor Composer — a term coined by renowned computer scientist Andrej Karpathy &#8212; describes a hands-off approach to writing code using GenAI models, and it has really taken off recently. According to Y Combinator, one-quarter of the startups in its latest batch relies on AI to generate 95% [&hellip;]</p>

<p>U.S. president Donald Trump’s wide-ranging tariff hikes are already resulting in growth forecasts being cut amid an uncertain public mood — all of which will inevitably impact the technology sector. On Tuesday, however, food e-commerce startup GrubMarket seemed impervious to these macroeconomic concerns: it announced a new equity round of $50 million at a post-money [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TechCrunch All Stage (formerly Early Stage) returns to Boston on July 15, and the agenda for our tentpole East Coast founder event is almost complete. We’re excited to share this sneak peek at some of the fantastic speakers and sessions we have on tap.&nbsp; For builders who are just starting on their founder journey, our [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Driving the consideration is the growing concern over power demand growth from data centers, which could double by 2029.</p>

<p>Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don&#8217;t exist. That&#8217;s according to Colin Zima, the CEO of Omni, a business intelligence (BI) platform that aims to help organizations simplify how they [&hellip;]</p>

<p>AI-powered image generators, which are at the center of a number of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, are frequently trained on massive amounts of data from public websites. Most of these companies argue that&nbsp;fair use doctrine&nbsp;shields their data-scraping and training practices. But many copyright holders disagree.&nbsp; That&#8217;s why some startups and firms developing image generators [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A huge chunk of online traffic now comes from bots, both good and bad — but AI is boosting the latter. From DDoS attacks to scraping, there’s a renewed barrage of threats that companies have to deal with. According to cybersecurity entrepreneur Nikita Rozenberg, the impact is more severe for SMBs. “The main difference is [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A recurring theme in Europe&#8217;s tech world is that the region needs its own Google or Microsoft. Now comes the launch of a new fund to support this initiative. Project Europe &#8212; a new fund for founders &#8220;solving hard problems with technical solutions&#8221; &#8212; says it has initially pulled together $10 million from 128 different [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Strong and smart security operations teams are at the heart of any cybersecurity strategy, and today a startup that builds tooling to help keep them on their toes is announcing some funding on the back of a lot of growth. Pentera — which has built a system that launches simulations of network attacks to stress [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Scimplify has raised $40 million in a new equity round backed by Accel to expand its presence in the U.S. and enter new markets.</p>

<p>The banking-as-a-service space took a hit last year when Synapse collapsed. But that hasn’t stopped BaaS startup Synctera from raising another $15 million in funding, it tells TechCrunch exclusively. Synctera works to provide companies “of all shapes and sizes with everything they need to launch and operate fintech and embedded banking products,” including: accounts, cards, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Worth, a company focused on helping fintechs, banks, and enterprises underwrite small and medium-sized businesses more easily, has raised $20 million in a seed funding round, the startup tells TechCrunch exclusively. It’s a large seed round, especially these days when capital is harder to come by. But the founders’ history may have something to do [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Enterprises these days can choose from hundreds of apps and services available to secure their networks, data, and assets — nearly as many more to help them manage all the alerts and extra work that those security apps generate. But what if you could build your own apps, customized to your own workloads, to simplify [&hellip;]</p>