<p>Foundation Capital has come a long way since it was forced to scale down its fund size from $750 million in 2008 to $282 million (its sixth main fund) in 2013. On Tuesday, the 30-year-old firm announced that it raised a $600 million eleventh flagship fund, which is 20% larger than the predecessor $500 million [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Chinese ride-hail firm Didi is on the hunt for fresh funds for its autonomous vehicle technology unit that could value it at $5 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Investor interest in self-driving cars is high in China on the backs of IPOs from WeRide and Pony AI, which have a market capitalization of $4.7 billion [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Cross-border trade could become significantly more challenging with the wave of new tariffs getting introduced across different markets. Today, in a timely piece of news, a London-founded startup called Swap — which is building tools for e-commerce companies to better navigate the cross-border trading world — is announcing $40 million in funding to expand. Iconiq [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these &#8220;agents&#8221; differently from others, but the general idea is, they&#8217;re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists Jerry Liu and [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Despite clouds of uncertainty looming over the economy and geopolitics, people still want to travel. To meet that demand, Mews, an Amsterdam-founded &#8220;unicorn&#8221; building an SaaS platform for hotel management, has raised a fresh $75 million. The funding is coming at a crossroads in the travel industry. From one direction, the positive signals: Analysts at [&hellip;]</p>

<p>While Venmo or Splitwise are effectively &#8220;debt collector&#8221; tools, which require one person to pay a full bill and then request funds from others, neither have cracked bill-splitting at the moment of payment. European startup Cino, which has come up with just such a product, has now raised €3.5 million in a seed-funding round led [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Big Tech companies aren’t sleeping on quantum chips: Amazon Web Services introduced Ocelot; Microsoft, Majorana; and Google, Willow. But although all of these can be considered to be breakthroughs, quantum startups often focus on more practical advancements — and they are making progress. Founded in 2020, Dutch startup QuantWare is one of these, which claims [&hellip;]</p>

<p>HackerPulse builds dashboards of information pulled from engineering tools to show how and where engineers spend their time.</p>

<p>The software supply chain is notoriously porous: A reported 81% of codebases contain high- or critical-risk open source vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability can have a far-reaching impact on the wider software supply chain, as evidenced by the likes of the Log4Shell exploit that saw millions of applications exposed to potential remote code execution hacks via [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Since its founding in 2021, OpenAI Startup Fund has invested in over a dozen startups, including many of the hottest startups in AI. </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. Hype can be good or bad. This week, we&#8217;ve seen startups on both sides of that fence — and being on the good side warranted large funding [&hellip;]</p>

<p>When it comes to AI software, you can build something clever, but that&#8217;s not always the same as building something that is secure. With so much software now getting written by AI, having a window into its security can be a challenge. That’s the premise of Archipelo, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that is today [&hellip;]</p>

<p>AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value out of AI isn&#8217;t as easy as throwing any AI application at any workflow. It can be hard for enterprises to figure out which AI applications help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem. Workhelix is [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The boom in e-commerce post-pandemic meant shops moved online. However, some merchants ended up with dozens of separate app providers to accommodate everything from supply chains, to inventory, to marketing. The founders of Shop Circle realized this and either built or bought many such apps. The company has now raised $60 million in a Series [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on &#8220;diffusion&#8221; technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a &#8220;DLM&#8221; for short. The generative AI models receiving the most attention now can be broadly divided into two types: [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A new startup wants to help developers create customized, contextual coding assistants that can connect with any model and integrate seamlessly with their development environments. Founded in June 2023 by CEO Ty Dunn and CTO Nate Sesti (pictured above), Y Combinator alum Continue has already garnered some 23,000 stars on GitHub and 11,000 Discord community [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Using generative AI to create software has been possibly the largest use case since it first appeared a couple years ago. But platforms like Cursor and Copilot are mostly confined to a world inhabited by trained engineers.&nbsp; Lovable, a Swedish AI startup, reached the front page of both Product Hunt and Hacker News last year [&hellip;]</p>

<p>When goods enter the U.S., they have to be declared to U.S. customs so the importer can be charged the proper taxes. That applies to everything from a consumer ordering clothes from a brand based overseas to every single item on a massive container ship. When it comes to commercial importing, filling out the necessary [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mitico thinks that it has found a way to slash the cost of carbon capture using a simple salt that’s been tweaked for industrial duty.</p>

<p>Quantum computing remains a holy grail in the world of technology. But thanks to some important breakthroughs in the last several months, investors are betting on promising startups in the space to make the concept of super-efficient, particle- and electron-based computing a reality. Now, Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that provides quantum control solutions to [&hellip;]</p>