News
What's moving, in brief.
Funding, startups and women in business – short, dated, and honest about where each item came from. Every item is rewritten in our own words, with a link back to the original report.
Berlin VC firm Auxxo closes second fund at €33.3M for female-led startups
Auxxo has finished raising its Female Catalyst Fund II at €33.3 million, well above its first fund, and is launching a platform to help women find co-founders.
Capital F closes $17M debut fund to back the "female economy"
Founders Margaret Coblentz and Dawn Dobras closed a $17 million first fund aimed at women's health, digital commerce and AI tools, with women making up most of the fund's own backers.
Presentation startup Gamma buys design startup Lica to build an AI research lab
Gamma has acquired Lica, a small design startup founded by two women that turned screenshots and recordings into branded marketing videos, folding its team into a new research effort on AI-generated design.
AI agents quietly erased 10,000 marketing jobs
A new tally finds roughly 10,000 marketing roles have disappeared as agencies hand first drafts, reports and junior copywriting work to AI agents instead of new hires.
SpaceX closes its $60 billion purchase of AI coding tool Cursor
SpaceX has finalized its all-stock acquisition of Cursor maker Anysphere, now the largest venture-backed startup acquisition on record, folding the coding tool into a new SpaceXAI division.
Gen Z employees are asking for more office time, not less
New survey data complicates the assumption that younger workers want to stay remote, showing Gen Z is now more likely than older generations to want to be in the office.
Bumble drops the feature that built its brand as it fights for relevance
CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is retiring Bumble's "women message first" rule and the swipe itself, betting on AI-driven matchmaking to win back users lost to Tinder and Hinge.
Ex-Salesforce exec raises $20M to fix enterprise AI's deployment problem
Efrat Rapoport, whose earlier startup Bonobo AI was acquired by Salesforce, has raised a $20 million pre-seed round for June, which scans legacy business systems to auto-build AI agent workflows.
New EU AI rules mean your chatbot has to admit it is a chatbot
A fresh set of transparency requirements under the EU AI Act took effect this month, and they catch far more startups than the headline rules for high-risk systems ever did.
Creator partnerships just became a core line item, not an experiment
Brands are folding influencer marketing into their core strategy rather than treating it as a side test, with most marketers expecting creator budgets to grow sharply this year.
Appeals court keeps the $100k H-1B fee blocked, for now
The First Circuit refused to let the Trump administration reinstate its $100,000 H-1B filing fee while a coalition of states appeals a lower court ruling that struck the fee down.
GlossGenius hits unicorn status, rebrands as Genius AI
Twin sisters Danielle and Leah Cohen-Shohet raised $44 million at a $1.15 billion valuation and are expanding their salon-booking platform into an AI operations tool for all service businesses.
Canva's Melanie Perkins moves ahead on plan to give away most of her fortune
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins and co-founder Cliff Obrecht have launched the Global Goals Platform through their Canva Foundation, another step toward giving away roughly 30% of their stake in the $42 billion company.
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab ships its first public AI model
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati released Inkling, an open-weight model built around her thesis that AI should extend human judgment rather than replace it.
ETH Zurich spinout raises €4.5M to fix AI data centers' laser bottleneck
Aylight, co-founded and led by CEO Bahareh Marzban, raised a €4.5 million pre-seed round to build chip-scale lasers that could ease a growing hardware shortage in AI infrastructure.
Nearly 90 startups crossed the billion-dollar mark in the first half of the year
AI-driven investor enthusiasm pushed close to ninety startups to unicorn status in just six months, a pace that spans well beyond pure AI companies into healthcare, space and robotics.
Engineering jobs are holding up better than almost any other tech role
New hiring data shows engineering roles have shrunk far less than the rest of tech during the industry's contraction, a pattern researchers attribute to AI creating more work rather than less.
21-year-old Stanford grad raises $11M for a hormone-tracking wearable
Jenny Duan closed an $11.6 million seed round for Clair Health the same week she graduated, building a wristband that tracks hormones continuously without blood draws.
Melinda French Gates commits $215M more to women's health
Pivotal founder Melinda French Gates is directing new funding toward reproductive care, menopause and maternal mental health, bringing her total women's-health giving to $600 million.
Anthropic builds a version of Claude for the corner store, not just the enterprise
Anthropic launched a small-business-focused suite of Claude tools covering bookkeeping, ad creation and everyday admin, aiming at a market that has largely sat outside the AI adoption wave so far.