Startups
Companies to watch, momentum, milestones.
- OpenMed released clinical-data skills for coding agents on August 21st
OpenMed founder Maziyar Panahi's portable skills cover de-identification, entity extraction and FHIR export; deployers still own privacy controls and clinical review.
- Startup Spotlight: Solva builds claims AI that checks policy terms against evidence
Solva's founders Herman Baverud Olsson, Linus Malmen and Sorena Amini bring insurance, fintech and regulated-business experience to its claims platform.
- Startup Spotlight: Albacore's drone submarines move from prototypes to a reported Navy contract
CEO Dante Vaisbort and co-founder John Huddleston say Ghostfin's range and modular design are meant to support production beyond one-off prototypes.
- Startup Spotlight: Acrely pivoted to home-services calls and found six customers in two weeks
Childhood friends Alek Stefanov and Derek Armfield built a call-handling agent after home-services businesses approached them; acrely.ai now redirects to a broader product branded Lupitor.
- Death Clock founder scrapped four years of code after Most Days stalled
Brent Franson says he shut down the mental-health app in late 2024 and made a clean break; the pivot followed a 2019 acquisition of his earlier company by WeWork.
- PNOE plans an eight-minute, self-serve metabolic test for gyms
Co-founder and CEO Apostolos Atsalakis plans to launch a redesigned, self-administered breath analyzer on October 1st, shifting PNOE's model beyond staff-run testing.
- Rob Waters turned down Google's six-figure job offer to build Kanawai AI
After Google laid him off in November 2025, Rob Waters declined a new six-figure role and estimated six figures in unvested stock to build Kanawai AI.
- Startup Spotlight: Bravi raises $1.8M to make manufacturers' product rules answerable by AI
Bravi connects catalogs, pricing and business systems to technical answers and quotes. Its founders say it serves about 20 companies; customer outcomes and revenue remain undisclosed.
- Startup Spotlight: Cuckoo Labs builds live translation around technical vocabulary
Founders Gunwoo Kim and Yong Hee Lee are adapting real-time interpretation with company documents and internal terminology.
- Startup Spotlight: Petrarch is turning industrial records into frontier AI training data
Petrarch says it has transacted construction plans, autonomous-driving recordings and codebases; buyers, dataset volumes and transaction values remain undisclosed.
- MyOme makes whole-genome analysis available worldwide on Oracle Cloud
Co-founder Matt Rabinowitz is pairing MyOme's predictive genomic platform with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle PartnerNetwork, using Oracle's ecosystem and Marketplace to reach healthcare organizations.
- Muju Earth brings a seed-sized soil aerator to TechCrunch Disrupt
Co-founder Ifeoluwa Afolayan designed Aeropod to work during planting, avoiding a separate pass of heavy machinery; paid U.K. field trials are planned for fall 2026.
- Startup Spotlight: Tugce Bulut builds Eloquent AI to automate bank workflows without APIs
Bulut brings Streetbees experience to Eloquent AI's financial-operations pitch; its $500K ARR and 96% automation figures remain company claims.
- Robot.com adds ads to Grubhub deal spanning 20-plus campuses
Founder Felipe Chavez Cortes is extending a delivery business he built from campus routes into a broader robot-services and media operation.
- Langmack and Slater launched a second Soar, this one for flight booking
Their May launch put an AI flight-booking service under the name Stanley Virgint had given his AI travel companion. Soar Flights was still publicly using the Soar name on September 25th.
- Neko Health opens its first U.S. clinic after a $700M round
Daniel Ek's health startup is charging $499 for a one-hour scan at its SoHo clinic, its first location outside Europe.
- Nexterity packs a four-bolt pipefitting robot into a Pelican case
Founder Lindsey Elliott drew the design from refinery work; the startup is selling managed field service rather than asking plants to buy the robot.
- C5R is building physical labs for AI models that still struggle with experiments
Founder Michael Akilian says the company formed five months ago to move AI out of virtual research and into biology, chemistry and materials science labs.
- Feather Robotics sells $30,000 robots and lets developers bring their own AI
Co-founder Hoa Duc Mai says the platform gives robotics developers a working machine to build on; TechCrunch reports more than $1 million in revenue.
- Startup Spotlight: Riveter turns Abby Grills' manual research into a live data API
After selling customer spreadsheets by hand, Abby Grills and CTO Cody Watters built Riveter's agents to search, extract and structure live web data, now available through ChatGPT and Codex.
- Cerebionics builds an EEG command channel for robots and drones
Founder Agnessa Pedersen is developing a portable, non-invasive interface for higher-level machine commands. Scaling it will depend on software and reducing calibration.
- Paradromics' first BCI user generates real-time speech as trial adds personal devices
Founder Matt Angle's decade-long effort is moving from neural recordings toward daily communication, though Connexus remains investigational and human evidence is early.
- Bun answers Meta's Muse merch pitch with a fake cease-and-desist
The JavaScript project's X account mocked up a trademark notice after Alexandr Wang asked users whether Meta should sell Muse merchandise.
- Anduril wins $2.2M in XPRIZE wildfire awards for autonomous response
Palmer Luckey's defense company took first place after June field tests in Alaska, where teams had to detect and suppress controlled fires without disturbing decoys.