Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users
Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.
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Mercor is in talks for a $20B valuation
A new $20 billion valuation would be a giant step up from the $10 billion valuation it reached in October.
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Charles Hudson shares the common mistakes he’s seen after investing in 500+ startups
In this week’s episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen talks with Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson about the headwinds facing early-stage founders today and the most common mistakes founders should avoid in order to get funded.
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AI | Fundraising | Startups
An AI agent startup just let its agent run its $100M fundraise
Lyzr, a startup that builds AI agents for enterprises, used its own AI agent to raise a $100 million round — proof, evidently, that the product actually works.
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Hugging Face’s CEO on why companies are done renting their AI
Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start […]
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Oratomic raises $300M to build a viable quantum computer that needs only 20K qubits
The massive round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
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Phia accused of ‘cookie stuffing,’ taking affiliate credit on purchases it didn’t earn
Phia, the shopping startup founded by Bill Gates’ daughter, Phoebe, and her friend Sophia Kianni is under fire for a practice known as “cookie stuffing,” which helped the product receive commissions and credit for sales it did not actually generate, per a Bloomberg investigation.
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Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation
The company is raising at least $75 million, led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors.
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Pinwheel launches a retro-inspired landline phone for kids
Kid-friendly tech company Pinwheel announced the launch of a new landline phone designed to let children stay connected without the distractions of a smartphone.
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DeepSeek reportedly in talks to raise $1.5B, then IPO
DeepSeek, the Chinese large language model developer, is said to be preparing for a 2027 IPO debut as it also looks to raise around $1.5 billion in new funds at a $71 billion valuation.
