<p>On Monday, Google announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund, a new initiative that seeks to invest in startups that are building with the latest AI tools from Google DeepMind, the company’s AI R&amp;D lab.&nbsp; The fund will back startups from seed to late stage and will offer varying degrees of support, including allowing [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Whoop has backed down, somewhat, from the controversial upgrade plans around its Whoop 5.0 fitness tracker. When the company first announced Whoop 5.0 this week, it said members who wanted the new device could either extend their subscriptions by 12 months or pay a one-time upgrade fee of $49 ($79 for the model with EKG [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Billy Evans, partner of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is working on a new startup that seeks to deliver “human health optimization” through blood testing, according to The New York Times. The Times reportedly spoke to two investors pitched on the startup, called Haemanthus, and also viewed some of Haemanthus’ marketing materials. In those materials, the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>We’re thrilled to announce that Ellen Chisa, partner at Boldstart Ventures, will be joining us at TechCrunch All Stage 2025 for an energizing conversation about investing in enterprise startups from day one. She’s one of the standout voices shaping this year’s lineup of founders, funders, and operators gathering July 15 in Boston’s SoWa Power Station, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Being a founder often feels like you’re building the plane midflight. You&#8217;re juggling fundraising, product-market fit, marketing strategy, hiring — while quietly wondering if you’re even doing it right. TechCrunch AllStage 2025, which is happening on July 15 at the SoWa Power Station in Boston, is built to answer those questions. Whether you’re pitching VCs, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Manus AI is one of the hottest AI agent startups around, recently raising $75 million at a half-billion-dollar valuation in a round led by Benchmark. But two unnamed sources told Semafor that the investment is now under review by the U.S. Treasury Department over its compliance with 2023 restrictions on investing in Chinese companies. Benchmark’s [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The U.S. Department of Labor has dropped its investigation into Scale AI’s compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), according to a source directly familiar with the matter.&nbsp; The FLSA is a federal law that regulates misclassification of employees as independent contractors and unpaid wages. TechCrunch first reported that Scale was the subject of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>For the first time, the FDA has just approved a device that lets people screen for cervical cancer from home. Known as the Teal Wand, from the company Teal Health, the prescription device lets patients self-collect samples and mail them to a lab to receive the same testing as would be done at a doctor’s [&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. This week was busy for startups: While there were no IPOs of note, there were other exits and even unusual liquidity events, as well as a significant [&hellip;]</p>

<p>HR tech startup Rippling has raised a $450 million Series G round at a $16.8 billion valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. It is also conducting a $200 million tender offer to give current and former employees some liquidity. The equity raise marks a big jump in valuation from a year ago. In April 2024, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Applications are almost closed, and you have until 11:59 p.m. PT tonight to reserve your exhibitor table at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, our premiere industry event that’s happening at UC Berkeley&#8217;s Zellerbach Hall on June 5. Imagine walking into a room filled with 1,200+ investors, founders, enterprise leaders, and journalists — all hunting for the next [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Sankaet Pathak’s last startup, fintech Synapse, filed for bankruptcy in 2024 amid issues with partner Evolve Bank &amp; Trust. Tens of millions of dollars in deposits made by consumers, mostly customers of fintechs that worked with Synapse, remain unaccounted for. Yet according to The Information, Pathak is reportedly moving full steam ahead on attempts to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Social media startup Fizz is suing grocery delivery giant Instacart and party planning app Partiful for trademark infringement, the company announced on Thursday. Earlier this week, Instacart launched a new drinks and snack delivery app for parties called Fizz and announced that Partiful had integrated Fizz directly into its platform. Founded in 2020, Fizz is a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It took seven years of hard work for Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of sales automation startup Clay, to see the company&#8217;s product finally take off in 2022. Since then, the startup has experienced explosive growth, reached a valuation exceeding a billion dollars, and expanded its employee count from low double digits to over 150. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Tech giants like to boast about trillion-parameter AI models that require massive and expensive GPU clusters. But Fastino is taking a different approach. The Palo Alto-based startup says it has invented a new kind of AI model architecture that’s intentionally small and task-specific. The models are so small they’re trained with low-end gaming GPUs worth [&hellip;]</p>

<p>During his junior year study abroad, Max Morganroth, traveled to 30 countries, primarily flying in business and first class. His jet-setting was funded almost entirely by airline points he collected through strategic credit card applications and miles redemptions. Morganroth told TechCrunch that just about everyone he knew was &#8220;begging&#8221; him to teach them how to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A group of investors are considering a plan to inject another $30 million into BluSmart in a bid to revive the Indian cab-hailing startup, which abruptly halted operations last month, TechCrunch has learned. The proposal from these existing investors has a catch: It&#8217;s contingent on BluSmart co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi agreeing to resign. The proposed [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Enterprise workflow management platform ServiceNow on Wednesday announced its second AI-related acquisition this year. ServiceNow said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Data.World, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform. Austin, Texas-based Data.World was founded in 2015 and previously raised more than $130 million in venture financing from firms such as [&hellip;]</p>

<p>In February of 2024, equity management startup Carta revealed that it was getting into the startup winddown business with a new offering called Carta Conclusions. By December, the company had decided to “retire” that offering, according to a blog post. And now, SimpleClosure, a startup that has described itself as “the Turbo Tax of shutting [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar has a new data startup called Wisdom AI. It offers an agentic data analyst that works with structured, unstructured, even “dirty” data.</p>