September 13, 2025

Y Combinator

Rippling raises $450M at a $16.8B valuation, reveals YC
HR techRipplingStartupsY Combinatoryc

Rippling raises $450M at a $16.8B valuation, reveals YC

HR tech startup Rippling has raised a $450 million Series G round at a $16.8 billion valuation, the company confirmed. It is also conducting a $200 million tender offer to give current and former employees some liquidity. The equity raise marks a big jump in valuation from a year ago. In April 2024, Rippling was

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Startup Vendease restructures employees’ salaries
Africaemployee salariesfood supplyStartupsVendeaseY Combinator

Startup Vendease restructures employees’ salaries

Y Combinator-backed Nigerian food procurement startup Vendease has changed its employee pay structure and is seeking fresh capital, TechCrunch has learned. This is after laying off 44% of its workforce — around 120 employees —last month, marking its second round of job cuts in five months. In the latest development, the startup has now replaced

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StartupsY Combinator

10 startups to watch from Y Combinator’s W25 Demo Day

One of Silicon Valley’s most storied startup accelerators, Y Combinator, held its Winter 2025 Demo Day on Wednesday, showcasing what its latest batch of 160 startups are cooking up. Some of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups — including Stripe, Airbnb, and Reddit — started out in a YC batch. Today, YC’s newer startups are focused

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Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act

Y Combinator, one of the world’s most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to openly support Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to crack open Big Tech’s market power. The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon,

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Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation

Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition

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Flower Labs launches a new service that automatically switches from local to cloud AI

Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client. What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that

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Y Combinator founders raising less money signal a ‘vibe shift,’ VC says

Silicon Valley has been captivated by the prospect of AI, not only as a productivity enhancer but also as a catalyst for creating successful companies with much leaner teams than in the past. Stories abound of AI startups quickly reaching tens of millions in revenue with headcount as low as 20 people. With less overhead,

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