<p>Affiniti founders Aaron Bai and Sahil Phadnis are building the kind of expense management software for main street small businesses that tech startups have enjoyed for years.</p>

<p>Cairo-based Sylndr has raised $15.7 million as it expands beyond online used car sales into auto financing, servicing, and tools for dealers. Development Partners International’s Nclude Fund led the round. The company, which operates in Egypt’s fast-growing but underdigitized vehicle market, said the latest round includes both fresh equity and previously unannounced seed financing. Sylndr [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees, after a previous attempt to hire one didn&#8217;t go as planned.</p>

<p>AI startup Cohere has acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating certain kinds of high-level market research. Sully Omar, one of the founders of Ottogrid, announced the deal Friday in a post on X. He didn&#8217;t disclose the terms. Ottogrid will sunset its product, according to Omar, but will give customers [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The funding round arrives as tech companies and utilities are struggling to secure power for data centers.</p>

<p>Roughly a month after Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based startup developing AI tools for video creation, said it secured $43 million in new funding, the company has raised more, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing, submitted Thursday, reveals that Moonvalley actually landed (so far) around $53 million total from a group of 14 unnamed [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TechCrunch is joining forces with VivaTech, Europe&#8217;s biggest startup and tech event, to select startups for the prestigious VivaTech Innovation of the Year at VivaTech 2025. This partnership will highlight exceptional creativity, technological ingenuity, and industry-transforming potential among exhibiting startups. The VivaTech Innovation of the Year Award acknowledges and celebrates exhibiting startups at VivaTech 2025 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The morning after Elon Musk&#8217;s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company&#8217;s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer &#8220;Rahul Ligma.&#8221;&nbsp; His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. While he never worked for X, he is actually very much a techy. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The Series B was led by General Catalyst, with Andreessen Horowitz, Regents of the University of California, Google Ventures, and Accel also investing.</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 news this week was fairly routine — in a good way: Aside from a minor kerfuffle between Y Combinator and Google, there was no headline-grabbing drama. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Pronto, which provides cleaning, laundry and home services within 10 minutes, has raised $2M at a $12.5M valuation.</p>

<p>Savings and investing startup Acorns has acquired EarlyBird, an investment gifting platform for families, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the acquisition, EarlyBird will shut down, and all customer accounts will officially close on June 23. Customers&#8217; funds will be returned to the bank [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Enterprises want access to new software and AI tools but can&#8217;t risk sending their sensitive data out to a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Tensor9 looks to help software companies land more enterprise customers by helping them deploy their software directly into a customer&#8217;s tech stack. Tensor9 converts a software vendor&#8217;s code into the format needed [&hellip;]</p>

<p>At long last, digital consumer bank Chime has moved forward with its IPO by filing its S-1 paperwork Tuesday. Chime had reportedly filed confidential S-1 paperwork back in December. S-1 filings typically reveal all kinds of information, covering financial, legal, and other risk factors. But Chime’s S-1 documents still have a lot of blank spaces. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI&#8217;s, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s most successful early-backed portfolio companies. The OpenAI Startup Fund is an OpenAI-associated fund to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Fabled startup investor and accelerator Y Combinator has some choice words for Google in an amicus brief it just submitted in the U.S.&#8217;s monopoly case against the search giant. In the brief, YC charged that Google is a “monopolist” that has &#8220;stunted&#8221; the U.S. startup ecosystem by making VC firms like itself hesitate to fund [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, scaled, and then successfully sold mobile auto repair service startup RepairSmith to AutoNation, he was plagued by a persistent problem.&nbsp; The automotive retail industry has a communication problem. And it&#8217;s an expensive one. Thousands of dealerships and mechanic shops — each one with an array of software systems — [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Melbourne O&#8217;Banion co-founded insurtech Bestow with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 after struggling to secure his own life insurance policy. His goal was to make it easier for people to obtain life insurance and make the process more tech-enabled. Initially, Bestow operated as a direct-to-consumer insurance provider &#8212; selling, underwriting, and servicing life insurance policies. In [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Hungry to learn more about Anthropic, directly from Anthropic? You aren&#8217;t alone if so, which is why we&#8217;re so delighted to announce that Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan is joining the main stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley&#8217;s Zellerbach Hall. And TechCrunch Sessions: AI is right around [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Rep. Gerald Connolly, ranking member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, has initiated an investigation into whether expense management startup Ramp is receiving preferential treatment in its bid for a $25 million government contract. Connolly sent a letter to General Services Administration (GSA) Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian demanding information and documents related to the GSA’s [&hellip;]</p>