An AI agent startup just let its agent run its $100 million fundraise

Lyzr, a startup that builds AI agents for enterprises, used its own AI agent to raise a $100 million round — proof, evidently, that the product actually works.

Charles Hudson shares the common mistakes he’s seen after investing in 500+ startups

In this week’s episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen talks with Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson about the headwinds facing early-stage founders today and the most common mistakes founders should avoid in order to get funded. 

Mercor is in talks for a $20B valuation

A new $20 billion valuation would be a giant step up from the $10 billion valuation it reached in October.

Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users

Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on Github by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.

Nandan Nilekani leaves GP role at Fundamentum as it launches $200M third fund

Nilekani remains Fundamentum’s anchor investor as the firm expands its leadership team and targets AI and fintech startups in India.

Lovable reportedly in talks to double its valuation to $13.2B

The $300 million round is expected to be led by Menlo Ventures, Sifted reported.

With EU backing, QuantumDiamonds aims to speed up chip manufacturing

Like its U.S. counterpart, the European Chips Act aims to foster the semiconductor industry — in part thanks to state subsidies. One of the beneficiaries is QuantumDiamonds, a German startup that applies a novel approach to inspecting chips.

Why this CEO thinks video games make better training data than the internet

When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they’re less skilled at understanding how things…

Prime Intellect raises $130M Series A to help enterprises build their own AI agents

Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect’s goal is to give organizations capabilities to train their own agentic systems without relying on frontier AI labs.

These AI startups are growing revenue at faster and faster rates

There are a lot of fast-growing AI startups, but some are growing even faster, they say.