<p>Time’s running out — 4 days left to save over $300 on Founder and Investor Passes for TechCrunch All Stage! Founders, accelerate your journey. Investors, fuel their success. Join us on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, Massachusetts, for TC All Stage, where 1,200 founders and VCs come together to scale from seed [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A fledgling open source startup that&#8217;s setting out to tackle API sprawl in the GraphQL ecosystem has secured the backing of e-commerce giant eBay. WunderGraph, as the company is called, today said it has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding to &#8220;scale its open source GraphQL federation.&#8221; Investors include eBay&#8217;s VC [&hellip;]</p>

<p>While you&#8217;re busy Ghibli-fying your images with ChatGPT&#8217;s new image-generation capabilities, OpenAI is out raising a ton more cash. The company is close to finalizing a new $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report noted that other funds, including the hedge fund Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious by-products of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on these deepfakes is already costing companies millions of dollars &#8212; not to mention the implications these could have on national security. A startup that&#8217;s built a toolset aimed at governments [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The clock is ticking — less than a week left until TechCrunch All Stage ticket prices go up! Save over $300 on founder and investor passes before March 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Founders, accelerate your path. Investors, empower their rise. On July 15, join 1,200 founders and VCs at SoWa Power Station in Boston, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It&#8217;s virtually impossible today to determine when a student&#8217;s writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another generative AI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. An AI edtech startup called Brisk has built a tool that could at least help teachers identify some of the telltale signs, and it&#8217;s now [&hellip;]</p>

<p>When Sam Weaver was vice president of product management at Unqork, he realized that the company needed a better way to manage its sprawling network of Kubernetes clusters &#8212; which are groups of computing nodes. When Unqork couldn&#8217;t find anything off the shelf, it assembled a 15-person team to build a Kubernetes management product. Despite [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The premiere founder conference brought to you by TechCrunch is heading back to Boston on July 15. TC All Stage 2025 (formerly known as Early Stage) is our tentpole East Coast event that promises an agenda full of founder knowledge — for all stages — that will be passed along to you. What’s more, if [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TechCrunch All Stage is returning to Boston, Massachusetts, on July 15 for a jam-packed day where founders — no matter what stage they&#8217;re in — will gain practical insights to fuel their startup growth. With a lineup of expert-led sessions, founders will leave with actionable strategies they can implement right away. Investors will also be [&hellip;]</p>

<p>We may not have an agreed-upon definition of AI &#8220;agent&#8221; yet, but a multitude of startups want to create &#8220;agentic&#8221; tools to automate various tasks online. One such firm, Browser Use, has attracted a ton of interest from developers and investors thanks to its solution that makes websites more &#8220;readable&#8221; for AI agents. Browser Use [&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. It&#8217;s rare to report on an 11-figure startup acquisition, let alone multiple high-value deals in a single week. And there are more subtle signs that things are [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Germany’s Munich Re has signed a definitive agreement to acquire digital insurance company Next Insurance for $2.6 billion, the firms announced on Thursday. Founded in 2016, Palo Alto-based Next Insurance is focused on providing insurance to small-to-medium-sized businesses. It was last valued at $2.5 billion in late 2023 when it raised $265 million. Next Insurance&#8217;s [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that&#8217;s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag was said to be nine figures, exceeding Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Social media site X’s valuation has bounced back to $44 billion, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Elon Musk purchased the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion back in 2022. However, a report from Bloomberg states that X has raised close to $1 billion from investors in a deal that [&hellip;]</p>

<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>