Posts by Liam Redmond
Small Business Grants for Women Reopen With $45K Each
Applications opened this week for a program worth watching, because H&R Block reopened its Fund Her Future grant for women-owned small businesses on September 1. Four recipients will each receive $45,000 in funding plus a full year of business services. Running a business is hard enough without spending your evenings guessing at payroll rules. That…
Read MoreAI Agent Security Draws $50M as AIR Exits Stealth
Six months after two former military cyber operators founded the company, AIR left stealth with a $50 million round led by Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks. Swish Ventures and Netz joined, with private investors drawn from the cybersecurity and AI industries. The speed of that raise will get the attention. However, the more useful detail for…
Read MoreFrom $300,000 EVs to dancing bots: The El Segundo firm sliding into Tesla’s slipstream
After its multibillion-dollar bid to become the next Tesla failed, El Segundo’s Faraday Future is pivoting to humanoid robots. The company says it is applying the expertise and infrastructure it gained through its electric vehicle journey to become a front-runner in the global robot race. Skeptics say they are still uncertain whether its robots, which…
Read More‘American Idol’ star Antonella Barba arrested for allegedly shoplifting from NJ Target
Former “American Idol” contestant Antonella Barba is accused of shoplifting from a Target store in New Jersey — as the singer finds herself in trouble with the law again. Barba, 39, of East Orange, was charged with stealing items worth less than $200 at the Target in the Seaview Square Shopping Center in Ocean Township…
Read MoreCEO Succession Planning: What Apple’s Handoff Shows
John Ternus becomes chief executive of Apple today, completing a transition the company announced back on April 20. Tim Cook moves to executive chair, and Art Levinson, previously chair of the board, becomes lead independent director on the same date. Most founders will never hand off a company this size, yet the choreography here is…
Read MoreVendor Lock In Bites as OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor
OpenAI said it will end Cursor’s direct access to its models on November 12, roughly two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion purchase of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, on August 14. The supplier ended the relationship because of who bought the customer, not because of anything the customer did. That is the detail founders…
Read MoreAI for Small Business Draws a $240M Bet on Owner
Owner raised $240 million in a Series D led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives on August 28, a round that values the company at $2.3 billion. Meritech, Redpoint, Headline and Benchmark partner Jack Altman also took part. If you run a small operation with no technology staff, this round is about you rather than about a…
Read MoreVenture Capital Funds: 5 Signals in a16z’s $1.1B Bet
Andreessen Horowitz announced the Machine Age Fund on August 28, a $1.1 billion vehicle aimed at founders building chips, memory, networking, systems software, power and the machines that push AI into the physical world. It is the first fund the firm has raised specifically for the hardware layer underneath every model you use. I used…
Read MoreNon Dilutive Funding: Lambda’s $926M Debt Lesson
Lambda, Inc. closed a $926 million senior secured term loan B facility on August 27, capital earmarked for GPU hardware that a customer has already committed to using. The San Francisco company first priced the facility on August 12, and Moody’s rated it Baa2. That rating is the detail worth sitting with. A lender studied…
Read MoreEmployee Background Check Startup Yardstik Raises $30M
A Minneapolis company that screens workers has raised fresh growth capital, and Yardstik closed a $30 million round led by Harbert Growth Partners on August 27. The financing lifts the total capital to $65 million and funds a push beyond the traditional employee background check into ongoing monitoring. For founders, the relevant detail is not…
Read MoreSmall Business Hiring Splits Sharply Across Industries
If your hiring feels harder than your neighbor’s, the numbers now back you up, because NFIB’s quarterly industry survey found optimism rising unevenly across four sectors. Construction, manufacturing, retail and services all improved from April. What they are experiencing on the ground, however, looks nothing alike. That gap is worth sitting with before you rewrite…
Read MoreSeed Funding: 5 Signals Behind Transfyr’s $25M Round
A brand new company just walked out of stealth with a check most Series A founders would envy, because Transfyr launched with $25 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst. Lux Capital, Breakout Ventures, Factory, Neo, SV Angel, MVP Ventures, Underscore VC and philanthropist Lyda Hill joined the round alongside a group of angels.…
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