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The 'Stoic' Startup CEO You've Never Heard Of With $1 Billion In Smartphone Sales
Nothing founder Carl Pei is bringing his industrial-looking phones to the U.S. market. He knows cracking the market will take a historically-inspired…
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Alex Konrad
Data: A Handful Of Big Startups Are Sucking Up A Third Of All VC Dollars
New quarterly funding data from Crunchbase shows that just 11 mostly-AI companies raising $1 billion-plus rounds account for 1/3 of all startup funding…
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Alex Konrad
9
What OpenAI Researcher Salaries Tell Us About The AI Talent Battle
Top research talent can command $10 million-plus yearly salaries to switch teams like it's the NBA. Upstarts obtained OpenAI's salary bands as part of a…
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Alex Konrad
Meet The 'Quantified Dog': How Startups Like Fi, Loyal And Ollie Are Pushing Pet Tech Forward
A new wave of pet tech startups are bringing deep tech and science sensibilities to the "quantified dog," from longevity drugs to sleep tracking. Sorry…
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Alex Konrad
3

June 2025

Scoop: 3 Ex-OpenAI Staffers Raise $20M For New Startup Applied Compute
The reinforcement learning startup, founded by Rhythm Garg, Linden Li and Yash Patil, is valued at $100 million pre-launch -- and has already received…
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Alex Konrad
How Old-School PowerPoint Decks Pushed Hebbia To Buy A Fellow Startup
AI startup Hebbia's first acquisition is of FlashDocs, which generates PowerPoint presentations from a prompt. CEO George Sivulka tells Upstarts it…
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Alex Konrad
Vibe Check: Meet The Sequoia-Backed Startup Building Tests For AI Code
Skyramp is emerging from stealth with $10 million in funding and design partners like Box and Intel. Can its automated testing improve AI-generated…
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Alex Konrad
'Alien Intelligence': poolside's Founders On The AI Model Race And Where VCs Are Misleading Startups
Jason Warner and Eiso Kant think they can still win the AI model race at poolside. They tell Upstarts how -- and why VCs are giving AI founders some bad…
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Alex Konrad
4
Browserbase Raises $40M To Help AI Agents Work With Websites
The 16-month-old infrastructure startup behind 'headless browsers' is now valued at $300 million and claims more than 1,000 customers. Now it's…
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Alex Konrad
5 Startup Lessons From London Tech Week
Upstarts Media spoke to founders and funders across London to learn what opportunities, and challenges, face startups locally versus in the Bay Area.
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Alex Konrad
1
This Founder Turned An Art Project Into A Slop-Free AI Canvas For Creatives
Weber Wong co-founded FLORA as an interface for creatives to leverage the best of AI models in their work, without the "slop". He's now raised $6.5…
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Alex Konrad
2
Scoop: Early Airtable Backer Max Gazor Is Leaving CRV To Launch Solo Fund
The four-time Midas List investor behind Airtable's Series A is one of the most entrenched startup investors to join a recent trend of VC departures.
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Alex Konrad
2
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