All posts tagged: founded

Former Tesla exec and Heron Power CEO Drew Baglino has founded a heat pump startup

Former Tesla exec and Heron Power CEO Drew Baglino has founded a heat pump startup

Published by skeptic

Former Tesla executive Drew Baglino has quietly founded a heat pump startup, TechCrunch has learned. This is the second company founded by Baglino in the two years since he left Tesla. Sources confirmed the existence of the startup, called Sadi Thermal Machines, and TechCrunch has reviewed company filings in Delaware and California. Sadi was formed in June 2025 and shares its Scotts Valley, California, headquarters with Heron Power, a startup also founded by Baglino, that sells solid-state transformers, according to company filings. The name of the company is an apparent reference to Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, a pioneering French physicist whose work formed the foundation of modern thermodynamics, including the internal combustion engine and the heat pump. Little is known about Sadi Thermal Machines, however, it appears to employ several Tesla alumni, according to a review of LinkedIn and a source familiar with the startup. TechCrunch was unable to reach Baglino or the PR firm that represents Heron Power. This article will be updated if they respond. Before founding Heron Power and Sadi Thermal Machines, …

As Teens, They Founded a Billion-Dollar Startup. Now They Want to Shape the Future.

As Teens, They Founded a Billion-Dollar Startup. Now They Want to Shape the Future.

Published by Sam Flores

I met the three cofounders for lunch on Friday in the inner sanctum of Jeff Klein’s San Vicente, the members-only club in the West Village. (The club is generally restricted to guests 18 and older, but seems to have made an exception for the now 17-year-old cofounder and chief technology officer John Kessler.) Koh, the 21-year-old president of the company, is the most brash and outspoken member of the trio. He compares starting a business to “gladiatorial combat” and genuinely believes that if someone were to say he had to join the NBA in order to save his mother’s life, “I would be on the fucking All-Star team next year.” Cam Fink, 20, with an elusive accent acquired in the 17 different cities where he spent his childhood, is Koh’s more reserved and erudite counterpart. He reminisces about his teenage years, when he had time to read 100 books a year; fluently cites philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre; and even name-drops several deep cuts from the Vanity Fair archive, like Brian McNally’s 2008 “Letter From Saigon” …

Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the human context they’re missing

Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the human context they’re missing

Published by skeptic

AI agents are expected to soon start making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans. But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the full context required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve. Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to discern whether a person’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government records all belong to the same human being. To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build Nyne, a startup aiming to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand humans across their entire digital footprint. On Friday, Nyne announced it raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with participation from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense. While it may seem that Nyne is tackling an issue …

African defensetech Terra Industries, founded by two Gen Zers, raises additional M in a month

African defensetech Terra Industries, founded by two Gen Zers, raises additional $22M in a month

Published by skeptic

Just one month after raising $11.75 million in a round led by Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, African defensetech Terra Industries announced that it’s raised an additional $22 million in funding, led by Lux Capital. Nathan Nwachuku, 22, and Maxwell Maduka, 24, launched Terra Industries in 2024 to design infrastructure and autonomous systems to help African nations monitor and respond to threats.  Terrorism remains one of the biggest threats in Africa, but much of the security intelligence on which its nations rely on come from Russia, China, or the West. In January, CEO Nwachuku said his goal was to build “Africa’s first defense prime, to build autonomous defense systems and other systems to protect our critical infrastructure and resources from armed attacks.”  At the time, Terra had just won its first federal contract. The company has government and commercial clients, and Nwachuku said Terra had already generated more than $2.5 million in commercial revenue and was protecting assets valued at around $11 billion.  He said this extension round came fast due to “strong momentum.” Other investors in …

Valentino Garavani, fashion designer who founded Valentino, dies at 93

Valentino Garavani, fashion designer who founded Valentino, dies at 93

Published by Sam Flores

Valentino Garavani, in 1968. PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES Flame-red gowns designed for divas, a glamorous and flattering aesthetic for golden occasions, a host of jet-set muses and the lifestyle to match: these are some of the images that will endure from Valentino Garavani, the founder of the Valentino fashion house, and his half-century in haute couture. The designer passed away in Rome on January 19, at the age of 93. Throughout his life, the ambition of this couturier, whose style evoked the films of Luchino Visconti, remained unchanged: to adorn women without seeking to upend their wardrobes. By his own admission, Garavani was not a revolutionary. Nevertheless, he created a recognizable style grounded in fluid lines, rich colors, floral motifs, pleats, ruffles and sheer fabrics, all imbued with a distinctive romantic and neoclassical spirit. Garavani came from Voghera, a town in Lombardy, where he was born on May 11, 1932. He arrived in Paris at the very beginning of the 1950s and studied at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, …

AI video startup, Higgsfield, founded by ex-Snap exec, lands .3B valuation

AI video startup, Higgsfield, founded by ex-Snap exec, lands $1.3B valuation

Published by skeptic

Through an extension to its previous $50 million Series A round that closed in September, AI video generation startup Higgsfield has sold another $80 million worth of stock, bringing its total Series A to $130 million. The company says it has now hit a $1.3 billion valuation. Higgsfield offers a tool that allows consumers, creators, and social media teams to create and edit AI-generated videos. The company was founded by Alex Mashrabov, former head of Generative AI at Snap, who landed at the company after it bought his previous startup, AI Factory, in 2020 for $166 million. Mashrabov was a co-founder of AI Factory. Five months after Higgsfield launched its tool, it touted 11 million users and said it was a platform of choice for content creators. Nine months in, it has now reached over 15 million users and is on a $200 million annual revenue run rate, with that figure doubling from a $100 million trajectory in about two months, it says. The startup believes this puts it in rarified growth terrain, outpacing companies …