<p>“Agentic AI” is the concept of the moment. Developers big and small are rushing to build apps to leapfrog the heavy lifting needed to employ generative AI in specific contexts… and investors are rushing to fund the most interesting of these.&nbsp; In one of the latest examples, a startup out of Israel called Perfect — [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anthropic&#8217;s next funding round is reportedly growing larger. Anthropic, which makes the AI chatbot Claude, is finalizing a $3.5 billion fundraising round that values the company at $61.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Anthropic initially set out to raise $2 billion, but investors have now agreed to a larger tranche, per the WSJ. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Pre-Series A founders, this is your moment! If you’re ready to showcase your game-changing innovations on a global stage, the battlefield awaits. Applications for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 — the premier startup pitch competition — are officially OPEN. This is your shot to shine! Step onto the global stage and showcase your groundbreaking startup to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Cambium uses data on timber and lumber transactions in a bid to make salvage wood appealing to a range of companies.</p>

<p>Photo and video apps targeting young adults with social hooks are a dime a dozen these days, so those that show traction with 18-twentysomethings tend to catch the attention of investors looking for the next Instagram or TikTok. In the latest example, photo-sharing app Yope, which lets you share still images to private groups, says [&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. Startup life is a story of births and deaths. This week confirmed this, and it confirmed that unicorn rounds are not dead. Most interesting startup stories from [&hellip;]</p>

<p>AI Innovators, seize your moment! Have insights that could inspire 1,200 AI founders, investors, and enthusiasts eager to advance the future of AI? Take center stage, influence the AI conversation, and exchange ideas at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. We’re gathering top AI visionaries from the startup world to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Afore Capital, a firm that claims to be the largest dedicated pre-seed investor, was founded on the idea that the first check into a new startup should be larger than what most accelerators and early-stage investors were offering. When Afore raised its third $150 million fund in 2022, the firm wrote checks ranging from $1 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The list included Elon Musk’s xAI, as well as a good number of other AI startups.</p>

<p>The AI observability platform has raised $70 million in Series C funding.</p>

<p>Three founders who built out one of the bigger startups in risk management are scaling a new company to take on another pain point in the world of work. SmartSuite&#8216;s platform lets teams collaborate on projects, build automations around that work, and search and access work across larger libraries of data spanning a disparate number [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion — eight times its previous valuation, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Existing investors Benchmark and General Catalyst, as [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Codeium, an AI-powered coding startup, is raising a new round of funding at a $2.85 billion valuation, including fresh capital, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal.&nbsp; The round is being led by returning investor Kleiner Perkins, the people said. The new round comes just six months after Silicon Valley-based Codeium announced that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Fintech Varo has been hoping to raise a $55 million Series G round but has, so far, closed on $29 million to date, according to a recent SEC filing. Varo declined to comment on this new round but the fintech has raised just over $1 billion in funding since its 2015 inception, according to PitchBook.&nbsp;Fintech [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The demand for voice and speech recognition technologies is massive — and growing. An analysis by market research firm Markets and Markets found that the sector could be worth over $28.1 billion by 2027. There&#8217;s no shortage of vendors providing voice and speech recognition solutions, but some newer upstarts have managed to carve out niches. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and are estimated to use up to 12% by 2028. The majority of the energy that data centers suck up is used to help transfer data from chip to chip. A company called Hyperlume is looking to make that process more energy-efficient while also speeding it [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank focus on industrial robotics as key areas for future R&amp;D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware to identify when machines need repairs and what is wrong with them, has raised [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Creating corporate training videos for software is a time-consuming ordeal, especially if you&#8217;re an organization with a lot of software licenses. Training videos can help get employees up to speed, but they&#8217;re a big lift. They often take entire teams to produce. Tel Aviv-based entrepreneur Yoav Einav thought there might be an alternative, cheaper way [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, could be close to raising more than $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation — a higher valuation than reported just weeks ago. Bloomberg reports that VC firm Greenoaks Capital Partners is leading the deal and pledging to invest half a billion [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!&nbsp; This week we’re looking at some big valuation jumps, how Stripe is eyeing another shareholder sale, a colorful conversation with an early-stage VC, and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here. The big [&hellip;]</p>