All, hope you enjoy your weekend. Please note that we aren’t publishing Monday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. See you back here Tuesday. :) | | Top News | According to reporting from WIRED, Thinking Machines Lab cofounder and former CTO Barret Zoph was confronted last summer over an alleged workplace relationship that leaders viewed as serious misconduct before leaving the startup and ultimately joining OpenAI amid a broader talent exodus. More here. | Speaking of OpenAI, the company will begin testing ads in ChatGPT with free and Go users in the U.S. in coming weeks and expects to generate low billions of dollars in ads in 2026, according to a report in The Financial Times. TechCrunch has more here. | | |
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| By Dominic-Madori Davis | It took Rebecca Yu seven days to vibe code her dining app. She was tired of the decision fatigue that comes from people in a group chat not being able to decide where to eat. | Armed with determination, Claude, and ChatGPT, Yu decided to just build a dining app from scratch — one that would recommend restaurants to her and her friends based on their shared interests. | “Once vibe-coding apps emerged, I started hearing about people with no tech backgrounds successfully building their own apps,” she told TechCrunch. “When I had a week off before school started, I decided it was the perfect time to finally build my application.” | So, she created the web app Where2Eat to help her and her friends find a place to eat. | Yu is part of the growing trend of people who, due to rapid advancements in AI technology, can easily build their own apps for personal use. Most are coding web applications, though they are also increasingly vibe coding mobile apps intended to run only on their own personal phones and devices. Some who are already registered as Apple developers are leaving their personal apps in beta on TestFlight. | It is a new era of app creation that is sometimes called micro apps, personal apps, or fleeting apps because they are intended to be used only by the creator (or the creator plus a select few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for wide distribution or sale. | For example, founder Jordi Amat told TechCrunch that he built a fleeting web gaming app for his family to play over the holidays and simply shut it down once the vacation was over. | Then there’s Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, who is building a podcast translation web app for personal use. Interestingly enough, Darrell Etherington, a former TechCrunch writer, now a vice president at SBS Comms, is also building his own personal podcast translation app. “A lot of people I know are using Claude Code, Replit, Bolt, and Lovable to build apps for specific use cases,” he said. | | | Massive Fundings | ClickHouse, a four-year-old Palo Alto startup that builds real-time analytics and data infrastructure for analytics and AI workloads, raised a $400 million Series D at a $15 billion post-money valuation, more than double its valuation less than a year ago. The deal was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with additional participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price Associates, and WCM Investment Management. More here. | ElevenLabs, a four-year-old London and New York startup that builds voice synthesis software, is reportedly seeking to raise hundreds of millions at an $11 billion post-money valuation, almost twice the price of the secondary it raised just four months ago. The Financial Times has the scoop here. | Hydrosat, an eight-year-old startup based in Washington, DC, that operates thermal infrared satellites and sells imagery and data products for water-resource management, agriculture, and national security, raised a $60 million Series B co-led by Hartree Partners, Subutai Capital Partners, and Space 4 Earth, with Truffle Capital, Luxembourg Future Fund, OTB Ventures, Blue Bear Capital, Statkraft Ventures, Cultivation Capital, and Santa Barbara Venture Partners also piling on. More here. | | Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings | Holywater, a six-year-old Kyiv startup that operates microdrama streaming apps focused on romance, thrillers, and genre fiction, raised a $22 million round led by Horizon Capital, with Endeavor Capital and Wheelhouse also participating. The Hollywood Reporter has more here. | Karman Industries, a one-year-old Los Angeles startup that builds modular thermal infrastructure for giga-scale AI data centers, raised a $20 million Series A led by Riot Ventures, with Sunflower Capital, Space VC, Wonder Ventures, and Pat Gelsinger also taking part. The company has raised a total of $30+ million. More here. | Otto Sport AI, a one-year-old Minneapolis startup that builds youth sports management software for clubs, leagues, and tournaments, raised a $16.5 million seed round co-led by Mamba Growth Equity and Rally Ventures. Sports Business Journal has more here. | | Smaller Fundings | AlphaLum, a company based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that develops holographic display optics and ultra-low-power sensing for AR smart glasses, raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Vsquared Ventures. Tech Funding News has more here. | Modeinspect, a two-year-old Prague and San Francisco startup that builds software letting designers edit live products directly in production like developers edit code, raised a $3.4 million seed round led by Partech and including Credo Ventures and Angelinvest. The company has raised a total of $4.2 million. Tech Funding News has more here. | Musical AI, a three-year-old Los Angeles startup that builds attribution technology to ensure rightsholders and musicians are paid when their work contributes to AI-generated tracks, raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Heavybit, with BDC and Build Ventures also contributing. Music Ally has more here. | RouteSense, a one-year-old Salt Lake City startup that helps merchants, acquirers, and processors monitor payment account performance and route transactions to the best-performing merchant accounts in real-time, raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Redbud VC, with FOVC, Cultivation Capital, Service Provider Capital, and the University of Missouri AACE Fund also joining in. Pulse 2.0 has more here. | Slips, a five-year-old Los Angeles startup that runs a peer-to-peer betting platform matching wagers directly between users, raised a $3.5 million seed round. Las Olas Capital and Sunset Bay Capital were the co-leads. Pulse 2.0 has more here. | Transition Metal Solutions, a three-year-old Berkeley startup that uses prebiotic-style chemical additives to boost microbial copper recovery, raised a $6 million seed round led by Transition Ventures, with SOSV, Climate Capital, and Dolby Family Ventures also stepping up. TechCrunch has more here. | | |
Inside CES 2026: AI goes physical | CES 2026 showed AI moving from the cloud into the physical world. From robotics and autonomous vehicles to AI PCs, wearables, and smart devices, physical AI and edge AI took center stage. In a new wrap-up blog, Arm highlights the key takeaways from CES 2026 and explains why real-time, power-efficient compute is essential as AI increasingly runs locally across devices and systems. | Read the CES 2026 takeaways | | New Funds | Niko Bonatsos, who just left General Catalyst after 15 years (where he backed companies like Discord and Mercor), is teaming up with entrepreneur Michael Fertik to raise between $250 million and $300 million for a new venture capital firm. Fertik, who previously founded Heroic Ventures and was an early investor in Cursor, is winding down that fund to join forces with Bonatsos on this new venture, which will focus on writing checks for early-stage startups across various industries, with a particular emphasis on AI. The firm will be called Verdict Capital, says Bloomberg, which has more here. | | Exits | Cloudflare is acquiring Human Native, a two-year-old London startup that operates an AI data marketplace managing transactions between developers and content creators, as the internet infrastructure company expands its push to build tools for paid data access between AI developers and content creators. Terms were not disclosed. CNBC has more here. | | Going Public | SpyGlass Pharma, a seven-year-old startup based in Aliso Viejo, CA, that develops long-acting drug delivery systems for chronic eye conditions, has filed for a proposed Nasdaq IPO with Jefferies, Leerink Partners, Citigroup, and Stifel as underwriters. SpyGlass’s VC backers include Sands Capital, NEA, RA Capital, Vensana Capital, Samsara BioCapital, and Vertex Ventures. More here. | | People | In response to Elon Musk‘s use of recently unsealed court documents to attack OpenAI on X, OpenAI has launched a public relations offensive of its own, publishing a blog post accusing Musk of cherry-picking evidence and claiming he once pushed for full control of the company and suggested that AGI should ultimately be controlled by his children. Business Insider has more here. | In a conversation with The New York Times, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos defended the company’s $83 billion offer for Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV business, promised to preserve theatrical releases with 45-day windows, and explained why he is confident that Trump administration regulators will approve the transaction. More here. | Are we the last people to learn that YouTube gadget reviewer Marques Brownlee is also a professional ultimate frisbee player? ESPN has more here. (H/T interns) | | Post-Its | |
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