Former Sequoia partnerβs new startup uses AI to negotiate your calendar for you TechCrunch By: Marina Temkin 22 January 2026 at 21:29 Blockit, an AI agent that communicates directly with other calendars, has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Sequoia.
Voice AI engine and OpenAI partner LiveKit hits $1B valuation TechCrunch By: Marina Temkin 22 January 2026 at 17:44 The five-year-old-startup powers OpenAIβs ChatGPT voice mode and raised a $100 million round led by Index Ventures.
Inference startup Inferact lands $150M to commercialize vLLM TechCrunch By: Marina Temkin 22 January 2026 at 17:42 The seed round values the newly formed startup at $800 million.
Sources: Project SGLang spins out as RadixArk with $400M valuation as inference market explodes TechCrunch By: Marina Temkin 21 January 2026 at 18:24 SGLang, which originated as an open source research project at Ion Stoicaβs UC Berkeley lab, has raised capital from Accel.
Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits $15B valuation TechCrunch By: Marina Temkin 16 January 2026 at 17:05 The $400 million round was led by Dragoneer.
Parloa triples its valuation in 8 months to $3B with $350M raise TechCrunch By: Marina Temkin 15 January 2026 at 09:24 The massive round was led by existing investor General Catalyst, with participation from other returning backers.