Good hype for fusion, bad buzz for YC | TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.

Hype can be good or bad. This week, we’ve seen startups on both sides of that fence — and being on the good side warranted large funding rounds.

Most interesting startup stories from the week

As the week comes to a close, it is time to tally the merits and demerits.

Sparkle points: A peer-reviewed journal highlighted plans from German startup Proxima Fusion, lending new credibility to its concept and design for a working fusion power plant that can operate reliably and continuously.

Oops points: Y Combinator deleted its posts about the demo from YC W25 company Optifye.ai after it went viral, and not in a good way. The startup claims to be building “Al performance monitoring for factory workers,” but others called it “sweatshops-as-a-service.”

Breakthrough points: Palo Alto-based startup Inception claims to have developed a diffusion-based large language model (DLM). Diffusion models that already exist are mainly used to create images, video, and audio, while Inception hopes to compete with LLMs.

Most interesting VC and funding news this week

This week, several startups secured funding rounds that were notably large for their respective stages, and there are new funds ready to be deployed at the growth stage.

Record round: Israeli startup Quantum Machines secured one of the biggest funding rounds a quantum computing company raised to date with its $170 million Series C led by PSG Equity with participation from Intel Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners, and existing investors.

Full circle: Shop Circle, which makes an app suite for e-commerce, raised a $60 million Series B round that also financed the acquisition of Aiden, an AI-powered “guided-selling” software maker.

Magic arms: Polish startup Nomagic, which makes robotic arms for logistics operations, raised a $44 million Series B led by the VC arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It plans to use some of the funding to reach customers in North America.

Magic touch: Taktile, a New York-based startup that helps fintechs build automated decision-making workflows, closed a $54 million Series B led by Balderton Capital with participation from Index Ventures, Tiger Global, YC, Prosus Ventures, and Visionaries Club. 

Idea relay: Relay raised a $35 million Series A round led by London-based VC Plural to bring the “asset-free” last-mile parcel delivery model from Asia to Europe, in an approach that also reduces energy consumption and relies on e-bikes.

Loved: Lovable, a fast-growing app-building AI platform coming out of Sweden, secured $15 million in a pre-Series A round led by Creandum. It also said it reached $17 million in annual recurring revenue after scaling to 30,000 paying customers with only $2 million spent.

European growth: Private equity firm Thoma Bravo closed an inaugural $1.9 billion European fund to deepen its presence in the region and take fresh equity stakes in midsized software companies across the continent.

Cambridge growth: Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), a British fund that invests exclusively in the ecosystem around the University of Cambridge, launched a $126 million opportunity fund.

Last but not least

This week marked the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This spurred a wave of Ukrainian dual-use and defense tech startups innovating on and off the battlefield, and TechCrunch rounded up several of them here.

Last week’s newsletter included an error; Augury first achieved unicorn status in 2021.