Allen Wang and Eric Liu, two UC Berkeley dropouts, think they can help college students find love using AI. Their dating startup, Ditto, leverages AI to match people based on the data users input into the service. It then plans the date for them. "We're bringing people back to in-real-life interactions," Wang, 23, told Business Insider. After users make a profile, they directly message Ditto's AI chatbot via text- no app required - about their type and dating preferences. On Wednesdays, users get a text about a potential match. After each date, Ditto follows up for feedback and uses that information as additional data for future matches.
I was a CFO myself for five years previously before going into venture [...] We had thousands and thousands of customers, and we would have several people in my team that were basically just replying to queries and chasing people all day.
"Smart people are burning out sifting through backlogs of unprioritized, low-value vulnerabilities, while the real critical pathways go unprotected," says Shlomie Liberow, founder and CEO of Aisy (and formerly head of hacker research and development at HackerOne). He doesn't see this changing for mid-tier and larger companies - partly because of the security industry itself. Each vulnerability tool competes with other vulnerability tools, and each one avoids the possibility of a competitor finding more issues than it does itself.
Rainbow Weather has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to push weather forecasting further into the short-term, high-precision territory it believes the industry still underserves. The Warsaw-based climate tech startup focuses on hyperlocal, minute-by-minute forecasts, zeroing in on what happens in the next few hours rather than days out. The round was backed by a syndicate of investors, including Yuri Gurski, founder of Flo Health, one of Europe's best-known consumer tech unicorns.
On Me, a digital gift card startup founded by former Google employees, is aiming to redefine the gift card industry with its mobile-first gifting platform that lets users purchase digital gift cards categorized by interests rather than being restricted to specific retailers. The company on Thursday said it had raised $6 million in a seed funding round, which it will use to expand its gift categories to include things like horseback riding lessons, wine tastings, and theme park trips.
CEO George Cheng and CTO Dylan Nguyen cofounded Code Four, which is police radio lingo to indicate that a situation is under control. They say their technology reduces paperwork, allowing officers to spend more time in the field. The startup uses AI to generate reports from bodycam footage that can be used in court or for record-keeping purposes. Code Four can also redact footage and reports for records requests and generate transcriptions and summaries from video interviews and security footage.
Three years ago, Luminal co-founder Joe Fioti was working on chip design at Intel when he came to a realization. While he was working on making the best chips he could, the more important bottleneck was in software. "You can make the best hardware on earth, but if it's hard for developers to use, they're just not going to use it," he told me.
Liquid - $7.6M Seed Liquid, a perp DEX aggregator that routes and executes futures trades across multiple exchanges, has raised $7.6M in Seed funding led by Paradigm. Founded by Franklyn Wang in 2025, Liquid has now raised a total of $7.6M in reported equity funding. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, both 23, are turning heads with Phia, their AI fashion app that's drawing interest from investors andtrendsetters. Phia, an AI-powered shopping assistant, went live in April and said it has since amassed over 600,000 users. The free app and browser extension compare prices on fashion items across around 40,000 linked sites to help users find deals. It's the pair's first business, and it's making waves with investors.
Traditional AI breaks when faced with new, high-stakes situations without data. Astut gives organisations a way to make confident, transparent decisions when precedent doesn't exist. This funding will allow us to strengthen our partnerships in defence, energy, retail and finance, and embed our technology into partner platforms so it can reach those who need it most. Our creative AI is radical - an
Wonder, which launched in April, said the funding was led by Atomico, alongside existing backers LocalGlobe and Blackbird. Other investors included Adobe Ventures, Upside Ventures - a VC firm launched by the UK YouTube group Sidemen - and Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of the creative AI company Freepik. Also participating were Nigel Morris, a former Dentsu executive, and Erik Huggers, chairman of EveryoneTV and former Vevo CEO. All in, Wonder has raised $15 million.
Estuary, the right-time AI data platform that alleviates bottlenecks, has raised $17M in Series A funding led by M13. Founded by David Yaffe and John Graettinger in 2019, Estuary has now raised a total of $24M in reported equity funding.
AI startup Zingage has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to help bring healthcare inside the home - a shift it says will occur over the next decade. The two-year-old startup is developing an AI-powered scheduling and operations product for home healthcare agencies, which send caregivers into people's homes for aid - as opposed to a hospital or long-term facility.
But that's part of the story of how Polakof's new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai got off the ground last year. Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugary, Flai is one of a number of startups trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of buying, selling, or servicing a car at a dealership.
Identity and access management (IAM) provider Descope has announced raising $35 million in a seed funding extension that brings the total raised by the company to $88 million. The cash infusion came from existing investors Cerca Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Notable Capital, Triventures, and Unusual Ventures. Founded in 2022, the Los Altos, California-based startup landed a large $53 million seed funding round in 2023, aiming to disrupt the customer identity and authentication market.
This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings. AI INFRASTRUCTURE Modal Labs, a serverless platform for AI, data, and ML teams, has raised $87M in Series B funding led by Lux Capital. Founded by Akshat Bubna and Erik Bernhardsson in 2021, Modal Labs has now raised a total of $110M in reported equity funding. REACH NYC TECH LEADERS AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders.
Rocket.new, an Indian startup building an AI-powered app development platform, has raised $15 million in a seed round led by Salesforce Ventures to take on viral vibe-coding rivals like Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt by letting users build full, production-ready apps from natural-language prompts rather than just quick prototypes. Accel and Together Fund joined Salesforce Ventures in the all-equity seed round, which comes only three months after Rocket.new launched its platform in beta in June.
The idea for Keplar was conceived in 2023 when Dhruv Guliani (above right), previously an engineer at Google, where he worked on speech and voice AI models, and machine learning engineer William Wen, participated in the South Park Commons founder fellowship program. The duo spoke with market researchers and brand managers and realized that the tools these professionals rely on - written surveys and interviews conducted by humans - can now be replaced by conversational AI.
Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they homed in on their startup idea. Their big takeaway: the work was often more cargo logistics than cutting-edge science. "We're Amazon warehouse workers with PhDs," one astronaut said. If an experiment takes two hours on station, the person continued, the first ninety minutes are spent just moving around cargo and preparing tools.
Scalekit 's authentication stack, purpose-built for agentic apps, is tailored for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, allowing security teams to easily add an OAuth 2.1 authorization server. According to the startup, its solution enables developers to rapidly add an encrypted token vault, along with a tool-calling layer, so that AI agents can act on a user's behalf in popular services such as Gmail, HubSpot, Notion, and Slack.
Two former Google DeepMind researchers who worked on the company's Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold protein structure prediction AI as well as its AlphaEvolve code generation system have launched a new company, with the mission of democratizing access to advanced algorithms. The company, which is called Hiverge, emerged from stealth today with $5 million in seed funding, led by Flying Fish Ventures with participation from Ahren Innovation Capital and Alpha Intelligence Capital.
Y Combinator startup Eloquent AI has raised $7.4 million in seed funding to provide AI-fueled customer service in the financial services industry. The startup says its AI product can help with complex, regulated workflows, such as onboarding new customers and unfreezing bank cards. Eloquent was cofounded by Tugce Bulut, who previously cofounded market research startup Streetbees. Bulut left the company two years ago. Last month it went into administration and laid off all staff.
It's because of the talent war that was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I used to work at Meta, and I speak with my former colleagues often about this. When I heard about their compensation packages, I was shocked - it's really in the tens of millions range. But it shows that in this age, AI researchers who make the best models and stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money.
