Julie Bort

MyFitnessPal acquired AI calorie-counting startup Cal AI, founded by two 19-year-old high school friends who built a 15 million download app generating $30 million in annual revenue in under two years.

“Author of "MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI"”

Databricks raised $1 billion at a $100 billion-plus valuation nine months after its $10 billion raise, reaching $4 billion ARR, fueled by rising adoption of AI-generated databases.

“Author of "Databricks confirms new $100B valuation on $4B ARR" in TechCrunch”

Cohere raised $500M at a $6.8B valuation with participation from AMD, Nvidia, and Salesforce, positioning itself as the security-first enterprise LLM alternative to consumer-focused AI models.

“Author of "Cohere hits a $6.8B valuation as investors AMD, Nvidia, and Salesforce double down" in TechCrunch”

Anthropic has acquired Vercept, an AI startup that built Vy, a computer-use agent tool, as part of its strategy to scale AI agent capabilities following its earlier acquisition of coding agent engine Bun.

“Author of "Vercept Acquisition by Anthropic" in TechCrunch”

OpenAI's former sales leader Aliisa Rosenthal joins Acrew Capital as GP, bringing insights that enterprise AI startups can build defensible moats through specialization and persistent context management rather than competing with foundation model makers.

“Author of "OpenAI's Former Sales Leader Joins VC Firm Acrew: OpenAI Taught Her Where Startups Can Build a 'Moat" in TechCrunch”

While tech executives like Nadella promote AI as a human augmentation tool, research suggests the actual job displacement impact remains uncertain and may differ significantly from industry claims.

“Author of "Do Layoffs Really Prove AI Replacement?"”

Google released a reimagined Gemini Deep Research agent powered by Gemini 3 Pro that allows developers to embed advanced research capabilities into their own applications through a new Interactions API, positioning the company for an agentic AI era.

“Author of "This Is What Agentic AI Actually Looks Like"”

OpenAI has secured approximately $1 trillion in infrastructure and chip deals in 2025 including partnerships with Nvidia ($100B investment), AMD (stock exchange), Oracle ($500B Stargate + $300B cloud), and SoftBank, with CEO Sam Altman signaling more major deals are forthcoming.

“Author of "Even after Stargate, Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD, OpenAI has more big deals coming soon, Sam Altman says" in TechCrunch”

AMD has structured an unusual deal where OpenAI receives up to 160 million AMD stock warrants to pay for billions in GPU purchases, effectively using AMD's own stock appreciation to finance the customer's purchases.

“Author of "Wall Street analysts explain how AMD's own stock will pay for OpenAI's billions in chip purchases" in TechCrunch”

Periodic Labs, founded by former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers, raised $300M in seed funding to automate scientific discovery by building AI scientists and autonomous laboratories that conduct physical experiments to discover new materials like superconductors.

“Author of "Former OpenAI and DeepMind Researchers Raise Whopping $300M Seed to Automate Science" in TechCrunch”

Cohere raised $100M in funding extension, reaching a $7B valuation, and partnered with AMD to run its Command AI models on AMD Instinct GPUs as it positions itself in the enterprise AI sovereignty market.

“Author of "Cohere's $7B Valuation" in TechCrunch”

Sam Altman questions whether social media posts praising OpenAI's Codex are written by humans or bots, highlighting how humans increasingly mimic LLM communication patterns and platforms incentivize engagement through astroturfing.

“Author of "What if your favourite Reddit thread is just AI talking to AI?"”

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong mandated AI coding assistant adoption for all engineers and fired those who refused to onboard GitHub Copilot and Cursor, treating AI competency as a non-negotiable job requirement.

“Author of "Coinbase CEO: Use AI or Get Fired"”

Sam Altman is co-founding brain-to-computer interface startup Merge Labs valued at $850 million with potential funding from OpenAI's ventures team, positioning it to compete directly with Elon Musk's Neuralink.

“Author of "The Brain Chip Beef You Didn't Know You Needed"”