Startups — Page 7
Companies to watch, momentum, milestones.
- Neuralink says it may have cracked calibration-free brain decoding
Co-founder DJ Seo calls it arguably BCI's hardest problem, but the claim is not a published technical result.
- Saronic breaks ground on its $3.2B autonomous shipyard in Brownsville
Saronic CEO Dino Mavrookas is turning the autonomous-vessel bet into a $3.2 billion Brownsville shipyard, with Navy programs and a 10,000-job projection attached.
- Mirai raises $500,000 to turn property addresses into neighborhood tours
CEO Caleb Lo says his mother's work as a real-estate agent showed him how buyers research a home's surroundings in disconnected tools.
- Startup Spotlight: Notion acquired ZeroEntropy after its reranker sped up search
Notion named Ghita Houir Alami to lead its Model Research team; ZeroEntropy said hosted products would be supported through September 4th before sunset.
- Relay says it raised $20M to test brand creative through creators
Kailash Sarma's launch post names Google, Point72 and a Reddit founder; a separate Relay website sells managed creator campaigns to local businesses.
- Neros says Pentagon ordered 14,000 drones for more than $100 million
The September 30th order follows Gauntlet II; Neros also says it received 800 extra drones after other suppliers missed Gauntlet I deadlines.
- Factory CEO accuses Cognition's new CRO of sharing confidential information
Chris Degnan says he resigned before joining Cognition; Factory investor Vinod Khosla publicly criticized CEO Matan Grinberg, despite backing both coding-agent rivals.
- Startup Spotlight: Roark turns failed voice calls into regression tests
James Zammit and Daniel Gauci Mizzi built a QA layer for voice agents; YC says Roark processed more than 10 million call minutes in a six-month period.
- Galileo Space launches an orbital-intelligence venture to fuse radio and optical data
CEO Kazi Farabi says the system is aimed at defense users; the company's stated first satellite launch window is late 2027 or early 2028.
- 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.