<p>Hexa is trying something new. Instead of fostering startups from the ground up and incubating them for the first year or so, the Paris-based startup studio is acquiring a majority stake in Veevart, a vertical software-as-a-service company for museums that provides solutions for ticketing, fundraising, CRM, and collection management. Hexa is a familiar name in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Infinite Uptime, which offers predictive maintenance solutions for factories, has raised $35 million in a Series C round to expand its footprint in the U.S.</p>

<p>Cheaper, lighter, and denser: The trifecta defines an ideal battery. No one has devised a perfect cell quite yet, but one stealthy startup thinks it has found a new material that solves at least two of those challenges. Daqus Energy has been quietly operating for the past four months, refining a compound known as TAQ [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A few years ago, several startups with a specific focus on digital avatars appeared because of all the metaverse buzz. While that buzz died down, generative AI has given a new life to avatars as it is easier to spin up different virtual identities. Companies are trying out different use cases for avatars, including D-ID [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Sometimes problems are just that: problems. But often, they are also fodder. This week brought us a mix of startups facing adversity, sometimes of their own doing, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>ONE also announced the close of a new funding round.</p>

<p>Getting ghosted is never fun. Especially if you&#8217;re a founder seeking capital from investors. It’s similar to dating. You might be left wondering “Why is this person not getting back to me? Did I do something wrong?” Did the investor hate the product? Did they not care for me personally?” It’s enough to drive anyone [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Faireez, which aims to bring “5-star hotel-style housekeeping” to multifamily buildings, is emerging from stealth with $7.5 million in seed funding, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. Founded in 2023, New York-based Faireez’s goal is to make the cleaning services it offers as customized as possible. It offers a subscription model where each building is assigned [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in that effort is announcing a significant round of funding. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects — including assisting [&hellip;]</p>

<p>AI agents are marching across the world of IT, and on Thursday a startup called Crogl is debuting its contribution to the field: an autonomous assistant that helps cybersecurity researchers analyze daily network alerts to find and fix security incidents. The assistant — described by Crogl’s CEO and co-founder Monzy Merza as an “Iron Man [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The startup is betting that by simplifying stellarators, it can make fusion power cheaper and easier to maintain.</p>

<p>The war in Ukraine has brought drones to the forefront of modern warfare, creating a surge in demand for counter-drone systems. However, legacy solutions to counter drones, such as ground-based defense systems and cyber warfare, often come with a hefty price tag. For German startup Alpine Eagle, these solutions fall short: When now-ubiquitous $500 first-person-view [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anna Patterson has had a storied career in Silicon Valley. She founded three startups, including search engine upstarts Xift and Cuil, as well as recall.archive.org, which became the Internet Archive. She was the vice president of engineering at Google, and later started Gradient Ventures, an AI-focused seed fund. And she isn&#8217;t done building. Patterson told [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Flex, which offers personal finance software and payments infrastructure for business owners, has raised $25 million in equity funding while securing a $200 million credit facility, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The equity funds were raised at a valuation of “just under $250 million.” The company last raised a $20 million Series A announced in September [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Foreign exchange fluctuations can make or break a business that trades across borders, but keeping up and responding to the FX market can be tricky if you’re anything smaller than the world’s largest enterprises. Today, a startup called Grain is emerging from stealth with a product that it says will let finance teams at companies [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Darwinbox, a startup with Indian roots building a SaaS platform for hiring, onboarding, and employee administration, has raised $140 million to take on the likes of Rippling and Deel as it seeks to expand internationally, especially in the U.S. The funding is being co-led by KKR and Partners Group, and is a mix of primary [&hellip;]</p>

<p>EcoDataCenter (EDC), a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand.  The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Defense tech startup Epirus has raised a $250m Series D to expand its counter-drone solutions.</p>

<p>British startup Quantexa has made a name for itself over the years with its enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to fight money laundering and fraud. Today, the company said it has raised a fresh $175 million to double down on that business and move deeper into another hot area: helping organizations understand [&hellip;]</p>