Austin-based hardware-testing AI startup Nominal raised a $240 million Series C round at a $3 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners. The deal triples the valuation Nominal reached just eight months earlier with a $155 million Series B extension at $1 billion, led by Founders Fund's Trae Stephens. The four-year-old company says it now serves 80 commercial and government customers, including Anduril, and recently won a $71.2 million Air Force STRATFI contract.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-11-09
OpenAI's venture capital arm and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund have invested in Coherence Neuro, a startup building a brain implant to detect and treat cancer, as part of a $45 million seed funding round. Coherence CEO Ben Woodington said the investment reflects growing alignment between AI labs and brain-computer interface developers, who view neural data as a valuable new data source for training models.
wired.com
· 2026-10-21
Expense management startup Ramp announced a $1.85 billion funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, and Avenir Growth, valuing the company at $60 billion. Ramp says its annualized revenue has topped $2 billion, up from $1.5 billion in June, with 85,000 customers and over $275 billion in annualized purchase volume, up 175% year over year.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-15
A commentary responds to a New York Times op-ed by Sharon Weinberger, tied to her book 'Valley of Death,' which argues Silicon Valley's countercultural, idealistic image was always a myth and its current embrace of defense contracts and authoritarian-friendly politics is simply market adaptation, not a shift in values. The author counters with a personal anecdote from a 2015 Founders Fund retreat, contrasting computing pioneer Alan Kay's idealistic legacy with venture capitalist Peter Thiel's dismissiveness toward him, suggesting the two cultures have long coexisted rather than one being a false front for the other.
wired.com
· 2026-09-25
Startup Fortell, founded by Matthew de Jonge, has raised $163 million from investors including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The company is developing hearing aids that use AI to identify important sounds in real time and suppress background noise, rather than simply amplifying everything at once as most current devices do. De Jonge discussed the six-year effort behind the product on TechCrunch's Equity podcast.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-16
Defense startup Covenant announced it has emerged from stealth mode with $250 million raised across three funding rounds, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed. The company opened a 105,000-square-foot factory in Dallas to build its Anthem long-range cruise missiles, aiming to produce 1,000 units in the first year starting in early 2027 and scaling to 5,000 annually.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-09
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