"I'll binge the entire series with you." "I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink." "I'll never bail on dinner plans."
Now, investors want in on that same bet: Telo announced Tuesday it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by designer Yves Béhar and Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning (who are also Telo co-founders), with additional investment from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and early stage funds like TO VC, E12 Ventures, and Neo.
With so much going on in the city's thriving ecosystem, it is easy to miss some of the happenings in the space. We keep you abreast of the things that you may have missed in NYC Tech News for the week ending 9/20 including the NYC startup fundings, NYC startup exits, and NYC startup events featuring news for eighteen companies including Chestnut Carbon, Tabs, GreenLite, and much, much more. Chestnut Carbon - $90M Series B Extension Carbon Removal Chestnut Carbon, a developer of carbon removal solutions, has raised $90M as a Series B extension led by CPP Investments.
Instead, the thing that could make or break a product's success, they advised, is your team. "The people that you build with, who you're at the office until 1 a.m. with-even, it comes down to the summer intern you have. The people that you choose to build with every single day, whether that's your incredible co-founder, like I have Sophia-that's what's actually going to define, you know, whether the product succeeds,"
The startup was founded by Alhussein Fawzi and Bernardino Romera-Paredes, who worked on Google's coding agent, AlphaEvolve, during its early stages, along with Hamza Fawzi, a University of Cambridge professor. "What really differentiates companies is the algorithms they use under the hood," Alhussein Fawzi, the CEO of Hiverge, told Business Insider. "And so what we are doing at Hiverge is designing smart algorithms that go beyond existing algorithms - automatically."
Gill's prediction has come true: developers are now regularly using AI coding assistants to generate code, but the output is often buggy, forcing engineers to spend a lot of time on corrections. CodeRabbit can help catch some of the errors. The business has been growing 20% a month and is now making more than $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to Gill.
At the heart of Nothing's plans is AI. Pei said the company is "building the foundations for the future" on a focused "AI OS" to deliver a "hyper-personalized experience." However, it's unclear if Nothing's operating system ambitions are built on top of Android like Nothing OS. We've reached out for clarification. This "AI-native platform" will run hardware in widespread use today like smartphones, headphones, and smart watches, Pei said,
Parento addresses this critical gap by providing the first-ever insurance product specifically designed for paid parental leave, offering companies a three-in-one solution that combines customized insurance coverage, streamlined leave management, and personalized parent coaching. The platform serves both birthing and non-birthing parents, achieving a remarkable 95% return-to-work rate compared to the industry standard of 60%. With its comprehensive approach, Parento helps employers control expenses while supporting employees through one of life's most significant transitions, targeting the $43B total addressable market for parental leave solutions.
Our goal is to reduce emissions, promote healthy soils and help farmers improve yields," said Nicolas Pinkowski, co-founder and chief executive officer. "There's a lot of concern right now in the US about chemicals in and on foods. More and more people care not just about getting enough calories every day, but about making sure what they eat is healthy and safe.
As AI is increasingly helping hackers to launch mass-scale email attacks, former Google security leaders have joined forces to build autonomous AI agents that aim to stop phishing, malware, and business email compromise threats before they ever reach user inboxes. That is the mission behind AegisAI, a new email security startup that has just emerged from stealth with $13 million in seed funding co-led by Accel and Foundation Capital.
The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report takes us on a trip across various ecosystems in the US, highlighting some of the notable funding activity in the various markets that we track. The notable startup funding rounds for the week ending 9/5/25 featuring funding details for Lead, Lendistry, and Baseten, and seventeen other deals representing $14.4B (not a typo) in new funding that you need to know about.
"Today's browsers weren't built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era," Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. "Together, we'll create an AI-powered browser optimized for the many SaaS applications living in tabs - one that knowledge workers will love to use every day," he added.
Amogh Chaturvedi is running on little sleep but plenty of conviction at 6 a.m. He's groggy, apologetic for rescheduling, and still reeling from a recent scare involving a family member and an electric scooter. Within minutes, though, the 20-year-old Stanford dropout snaps into focus, walking me through how he and his co-founders sold one startup at 19, landed in Y Combinator, and raised $5 million for their next company, Human Behavior.
"Solo.io is a cloud connectivity company. Its main cloud products are Gloo Gateway, a cloud-native API gateway built on Envoy, and Gloo Mesh, which aims to simplify Istio service mesh management for Kubernetes. And, of course, there are the inevitable AI-related products. When we spoke to Levine, Solo.io had just announced an MCP gateway for kgateway (described by the company as "the ecosystem's most mature and widely deployed cloud-native API gateway"). Most recently, the company announced that it had donated agentgateway to the Linux Foundation."
The tool works across documents from contracts to slide decks, offering translations in over 120 languages while keeping every table, chart, image, and layout intact. Founder Daphne Tay said she came up with the idea after spending "countless hours" at Bain reformatting translated documents for international projects. "I was doing exactly what our clients do now - copying and pasting text from translation tools, fixing formatting, and losing hours that should have been spent on actual consulting work," she said.
A nearby school's carpool line was constantly blocking the parking lot of one of Aurelian's hair salon clients. The salon owner called the city's non-emergency line and was put on hold for 45 minutes before reaching a dispatcher. "She called me into her office afterwards, and was like, 'Max, do you want to help me out?'" Keenan told TechCrunch. When he started to research how municipal non-emergency response call centers work,
Mako, a startup co-founded by Cornell Tech assistant professor Mohamed Abdelfattah, has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to tackle one of artificial intelligence's most pressing infrastructure challenges: optimizing the computing efficiency of graphics processing units, or GPUs. The $8.5 million round was led by M13, with participation from Neo, Flybridge, and others. The company plans to use the funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate product development.
General Fusion, a Canadian nuclear fusion energy startup, announced today that it had been thrown a lifeline in the form of $22 million in fresh funding. The company had laid off at least 25% of its employees in May in a bid to shore up its stretched finances. At the same time, CEO Greg Twinney wrote an open letter pleading for funding. The additional cash will give General Fusion some breathing room, though not much.
Nominal plugs into a company's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and helps CFOs and controllers automate tasks to reduce manual work and errors.
