All posts tagged: Accel

Bengaluru food delivery startup Swish raises M, its third round in 18 months

Bengaluru food delivery startup Swish raises $38M, its third round in 18 months

Published by skeptic

Swish, a Bengaluru-based food delivery startup, has raised $38 million in a new funding round, as the 18-month-old company continues to draw investor interest for its 10-minute fresh food delivery service. The Series B round, led by Hara Global and Bain Capital Ventures, also saw participation from Accel, Stride Ventures, and Alteria Capital. It values Swish at $139 million post-money, more than double its valuation a year ago, and brings total funding to $54 million. The funding comes as ultra-fast food delivery remains a challenging business to sustain in India. Larger platforms such as Swiggy, Zepto, and Zomato have in recent months scaled back or shut down their rapid-delivery experiments, citing operational complexity and cost pressures. Founded in 2024, Swish operates a full-stack business model, owning its kitchens, supply chain, and delivery network, and focusing on dense, hyperlocal clusters with delivery radii of around 1 kilometer. This gives Swish better economics, it says, compared to marketplace platforms that must rely on third-party restaurant commissions. The startup says it is now delivering about 20,000 orders a …

Google, Accel India accelerator choses 5 startups and none are ‘AI wrappers’

Google, Accel India accelerator choses 5 startups and none are ‘AI wrappers’

Published by skeptic

Many artificial intelligence startup ideas are still little more than superficial “wrappers” built on top of existing models. But as the AI model makers add more features, investors are wary of startups that could become so easily unnecessary. Case in point: when reviewing more 4,000 applications for the joint AI accelerator for India startups run by Google and venture firm Accel, “wrapper” ideas dominated. But none of them were among the five startups for the latest cohort, Accel partner Prayank Swaroop told TechCrunch (pictured above). Announced in November, the AI-focused Atoms program by Google and Accel aims to back early-stage startups building AI products linked to India. Startups selected for the latest cohort will receive up to $2 million in funding from Accel and Google’s AI Futures Fund, along with up to $350,000 in cloud and AI compute credits from Google, the firms said. Roughly 70% of the rejected applications were “wrappers” — startups that layered AI features such as chatbots on top of existing software but “were not reimagining new workflows using AI,” Swaroop …

Sapiom raises M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools

Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools

Published by skeptic

People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code. While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments. Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators. Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs. Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micro-payment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the …

Sources: Project SGLang spins out as RadixArk with 0M valuation as inference market explodes

Sources: Project SGLang spins out as RadixArk with $400M valuation as inference market explodes

Published by skeptic

A pattern is emerging in the AI infrastructure world: popular open source tools are transforming into venture-backed startups worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The latest example is RadixArk, the commercial company behind SGLang, an increasingly popular tool that helps AI models run faster and cheaper. RadixArk was recently valued at about $400 million in a funding round led by Accel, according to two people familiar with the matter, a notable amount for a startup that was only announced last August. TechCrunch could not confirm the size of the funding. The news comes as some of the team responsible for maintaining SGLang, which is used by companies like xAI and Cursor to accelerate AI model training, has transitioned to the recently launched commercial startup. RadixArk originated as SGLang in 2023 inside the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica. The startup previously raised angel capital from investors, including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, the people said. Ying Sheng, a key contributor to SGLang and a former engineer at xAI, left Elon Musk’s AI startup to …