StrictlyVC’s Insider series kicks off 2025 on Thursday night, April 30, at the elegant Sentro Filipino Cultural Center in San Francisco, and we’re thrilled to be doing it alongside our generous partner for the evening, TDK Ventures. (Thank you, team TDK.)

We're still putting the program together, but we're very excited about one of our confirmed speakers: Campbell Brown — the award-winning journalist and television anchor, former head of global media partnerships at Meta, and now founder of Forum AI, a company tackling one of the hardest problems in the industry: holding AI systems accountable by stress-testing them for bias and bringing human editorial judgment to bear on the highest-stakes decisions these models face. (She has a lot to say about this.) The nights are always equal parts smart and fun, as many of you already know. More on the night soon but seating is limited, so don't wait.

Also! While we have you — it looks like StrictlyVC is heading to Athens in late May. If you’re interested in partnering with us this year (in L.A. or New York, for example), reach out to our colleagues at TechCrunch at [email protected]; we’d love to talk to you.

More soon. 🎉

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of its workforce as the company pours hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure and executives expect AI tools to allow smaller teams to do the same work. Reuters has more here.

Following the recent exit of xAI co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang, leaving only two of its original eleven founders, Elon Musk tweeted that the company “was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” It has hired Cursor engineers Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg to rebuild its technical bench, particularly in AI coding tools. TechCrunch has more here.

The Trump administration is set to receive about $10 billion from investors including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX as a fee tied to the deal transferring control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from ByteDance to a new American entity, an unusual arrangement for a government-brokered transaction. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Sponsored by Affinity — The State of AI in Investing 

Private capital firms are moving from exploring AI to actively using it, and investors need to keep pace. Join Affinity for a discussion with BlackRock and OpenAI experts as they explore where AI is showing up in enterprise workflows, how it's expanding deal team capabilities, and what signals matter most. Watch on demand to learn how to better evaluate opportunities and stay ahead in today's evolving market. Watch on demand →

By Julie Bort

It’s been a whirlwind for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen. 

About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open source, secure alternative to the AI agent-building sensation OpenClaw, after he built it in a weekend coding binge. That post went viral.  

“I sat down on the couch in my sweatpants,” Cohen told TechCrunch, “and just basically melted into [it] the whole weekend, probably almost 48 hours straight.”  

About three weeks ago, an X post praising NanoClaw from famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy went viral.  

About a week ago, Cohen closed down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy had translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people building new versions off the project), and over 50 contributors. He’s already added hundreds of updates to his project with hundreds more in the queue. 

Now Cohen has announced a deal with Docker — the company that essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on, and counts millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers — to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw. 

It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services like market research, go-to-market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI agents.  

Monteris Medical, a 27-year-old company based in Minnetonka, MN, that has built a robotically controlled MR-guided laser system for minimally invasive brain surgery, raised a $28 million Series E round co-led by previous investors InnovaHealth Partners and Birchview Capital, with OSF Ventures, the Colorado University Healthcare Innovation Fund, and prior backer Madryn Asset Management also participating. MassDevice has more here.

Carefam, a three-year-old New York startup that uses AI chatbots to automate recruiting, scheduling, and communication with doctors, nurses, and other clinicians for hospitals and healthcare providers, raised a $10.5 million round led by Pitango HealthTech. The company has raised a total of $14.5 million. CTech has more here.

Freestyle, a four-year-old Los Angeles startup that makes disposable diapers designed to improve airflow and reduce skin irritation in infants, raised a $10 million Series A round led by Silas Capital, with ECP Growth also taking part. Nonwovens Industry has more here.

Ezra, a one-year-old San Francisco startup whose platform organizes deal data and automates credit analysis and due diligence for asset-backed financing, raised an $8 million seed round led by Congruent Ventures, with Planeteer, Wireframe, KDX, Stepchange, and Leap Forward also contributing. More here.

Tower, a one-year-old Berlin startup that is building a platform to test, deploy, and run production data pipelines built with AI coding assistants, raised $6.4 million in pre-seed and seed funding. DIG Ventures led the pre-seed financing, while Speedinvest was the lead investor for the seed round. Other backers included Flyer One Ventures, Roosh Ventures, Celero Ventures, and Angel Invest. Tech Funding News has more here.

Delfos Energy, a nine-year-old Barcelona startup whose software helps renewable energy companies track the performance of solar power plants, raised a $3.4 million seed extension. Investors included Vox Capital and COPEL as well as previous investors Headline, Contrarian Ventures, DOMO VC, and EDP Ventures. Tech Funding News has more here.

Nyne, a three-year-old San Francisco startup that provides data that helps AI agents connect and interpret people’s public digital footprints across the internet, raised a $5.3 million seed round co-led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons. TechCrunch has more here.

Fidelity  — Your Pitch Isn’t the Only Thing Investors Are Evaluating.  

Investors don’t just listen to what you say—they look at how your company operates. Is ownership clear? Do your numbers match your story? Can you answer follow-up questions without digging through spreadsheets? The Fundraise-Ready Startup Kit equips founders with the materials investors expect to see, before pressure is on. Because confidence in the room doesn’t come from slides. It comes from preparation. 

New York-based Coefficient Capital, founded in 2018 and focused on consumer and retail brands, said this week that it just closed its newest fund with $290 million in capital commitments, bringing its assets under management to over $800 million. More here.

SpaceX is considering an unusual IPO structure that would divide responsibilities among a larger group of banks, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, and JPMorgan, as the company prepares for an offering that could raise tens of billions of dollars. The Information has more here.

Travis Kalanick has launched Atoms, a robotics company that will absorb his ghost kitchen business CloudKitchens and build specialized industrial robots for sectors including food, mining, and transportation, with plans to acquire autonomous mining vehicle startup Pronto. TechCrunch has more here.

Speaking of Travis Kalanick, The Information is reporting that he is returning to self-driving vehicles with major backing from Uber and has told people he wants to roll out autonomous technology more aggressively than Waymo. The Information has more here.

Never one to keep his own counsel, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC that advances in AI will weaken the economic power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the influence of “vocationally trained, working class, often male voters.” HuffPost has more here.

Digg has laid off a sizable portion of its staff and pulled its app from the App Store as the Kevin Rose-led reboot struggles with bot spam and competition from entrenched rivals, though the company says it will continue rebuilding with a smaller team. TechCrunch has more here.

Before they were fired, internal investigators at Binance reportedly found that more than $1 billion in crypto flowed through accounts on the exchange to wallets tied to sanctioned Iranian groups, including transfers linked to two Chinese VIP traders and a suspected Iranian gold smuggler. Fortune has more here.

Jurors in a landmark case accusing Meta and Google-owned YouTube of designing social media platforms that addict children heard closing arguments Thursday in a bellwether trial that could shape thousands of similar lawsuits. The Associated Press has more here.

Experts are increasingly worried that AI chatbots may be doing more than nudging vulnerable users toward suicide — that by feeding or amplifying paranoid and delusional thinking, they could be helping to catalyze mass violence as well. TechCrunch has more here.

Larry David has a new series.

Team Italy has turned espresso into a dugout ritual during the World Baseball Classic, with captain Vinnie Pasquantino leading players who sip shots between innings and celebrate big moments with coffee as the team advances. The Athletic has more here.

In a riveting piece of detective work, Reuters reports that it has identified Banksy as Robin Gunningham, a Bristol-born artist whose name appears in previously undisclosed U.S. police and court records tied to a 2000 New York graffiti arrest. The pub says he later adopted the legal name David Jones in order to throw reporters off his trail.

Stick a fork in it: the Tesla Diner is done.

Va-va-voom. Ferrari has unveiled the Amalfi Spider, a convertible version of its entry-level Amalfi supercar that keeps the coupe’s 631 hp twin-turbo V-8 but adds a folding soft top that opens in 13.5 seconds at speeds of up to 37 mph.

UK Quantum – Accelerating healthcare prevention 

The UK’s National Health Service is already placing quantum at the centre of its preventative healthcare strategy. By 2030, the UK aspires to use quantum sensing to improve early diagnosis and treatment, from cancer screening to enhanced MRI scanning. Quantum sensors can detect extremely faint biological signals such as trace biomarkers or subtle neural activity that conventional devices overlook, enabling earlier and more reliable diagnoses. As the tech becomes smaller, more robust and affordable, point-of-care testing outside specialist facilities becomes realistic. 

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