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    Elizabeth Holmes’s Partner Has a New Blood-Testing Start-Up

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    Billy Evans has two children with the Theranos founder, who is in prison for fraud. He’s now trying to raise money for a testing company that promises “human health optimization.”Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. In the meantime, her partner is starting one of his own.Billy Evans, who has two children with Ms. Holmes, is trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics” and “a radically new approach to health testing,” according to marketing materials reviewed by The New York Times.If that sounds familiar, it’s because Theranos similarly aimed to revolutionize diagnostic testing. The Silicon Valley start-up captured the world’s attention by claiming, falsely as it turned out, to have developed a blood-testing device that could run a slew of complex lab tests from a mere finger prick.Mr. Evans’s company is named Haemanthus, which is a flower also known as the blood lily. It plans to begin with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans, according to two investors pitched on the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had agreed to keep the plans secret. Mr. Evans’s marketing materials, which lay out hopes to eventually raise more than $50 million, say the ultimate goal is nothing short of “human health optimization.”The Haemanthus testing device.HaemanthusA photo provided to potential investors of the start-up’s prototype bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Theranos’s infamous blood-testing machine, variously known as the Edison or miniLab. The device that Mr. Evans’s company is developing is a rectangular contraption with a door, a digital display screen and what the investor materials describe as tunable lasers inside.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      CoreWeave Scales Back Ambition for Its I.P.O.

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      The company, which originally expected its shares to be priced between $47 and $55, will ask for $40 a share in a sign of stock market uncertainty.When CoreWeave, the cloud computing company vying to become the first major artificial intelligence start-up to go public, filed paperwork for a public listing earlier this month, it was a mark of optimism in an otherwise rocky market for I.P.O.s.But now that optimism has faded as the New Jersey-based CoreWeave significantly reduced the size and value of its offering on Thursday. The company is now expected to price its shares at $40 when it begins trading on Friday, according to the company, down from recent estimates in filings that its shares would be priced at $47 to $55 a share.Initially expected to raise around $4 billion at a $35 billion valuation, the company seeks to raise $1.5 billion in its offering Friday and would be valued at $19 billion.The reduced offering is a sign of a slumping stock market clouded by uncertainty around inflation and President Trump’s tariffs. And it reflects broader concerns around the development of A.I. in a slowing economy, as stock in Nvidia, the prized chip maker that is an investor in and supplier for CoreWeave, has fallen 7 percent since Wednesday.“It has been a brutal time for markets in general,” said Samuel Kerr, the head equity capital market analyst at the financial insight firm Mergermarket. “It shows you that there is very little appetite to put forward this kind of risk transaction at the moment.”While CoreWeave will be the first major A.I. company to go public, it is not a true litmus test for A.I. offerings, which will fall to the industry’s start-up standard bearers like OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of chatbots popular with millions of users.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups

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      Tech start-ups typically raised huge sums to hire armies of workers and grow fast. Now artificial intelligence tools are making workers more productive and spurring tales of “tiny team” success.Almost every day, Grant Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money. Some have even sent him and his co-founders personalized gift baskets.Mr. Lee, 41, would normally be flattered. In the past, a fast-growing start-up like Gamma, the artificial intelligence start-up he helped establish in 2020, would have constantly looked out for more funding.But like many young start-ups in Silicon Valley today, Gamma is pursuing a different strategy. It is using artificial intelligence tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research.That means Gamma, which makes software that lets people create presentations and websites, has no need for more cash, Mr. Lee said. His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable.“If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees,” Mr. Lee said. “We get a chance to rethink that, basically rewrite the playbook.”The old Silicon Valley model dictated that start-ups should raise a huge sum of money from venture capital investors and spend it hiring an army of employees to scale up fast. Profits would come much later. Until then, head count and fund-raising were badges of honor among founders, who philosophized that bigger was better.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      HP to Buy Humane, Maker of the Ai Pin, for $116 Million

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      Humane, which marketed its Ai Pin as the next big thing after smartphones, had raised $240 million from investors, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. The pin will be discontinued.Humane, the ambitious start-up behind the Ai Pin device that aimed to one day replace smartphones, agreed to sell parts of its business to HP for $116 million, the companies said on Tuesday.HP said it planned to acquire Humane’s “A.I. capabilities,” including its software platform, intellectual property, patents and some employees. The Ai Pin will be shut down, Humane said in a message to customers.The deal caps a downfall for the high-flying start-up, which heavily promoted the $699 pin with ads, a TED Talk and at Paris Fashion Week with supermodels. Humane raised $240 million in funding from high-profile investors, including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and his counterpart at OpenAI, Sam Altman, valuing the company at $850 million before it released a product.Humane was created by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, husband-and-wife founders who previously worked at Apple. The pair envisioned a wearable device that people would clip to their clothes and interact with using voice commands and a laser display projected onto their hand. The idea was to cut down on time spent staring at smartphone screens.Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri at Humane’s office in San Francisco in 2023.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesBut the Ai Pin, which began shipping to customers last spring, was a flop.Reviewers criticized the product, with the A.I. software often giving wrong answers or taking a long time to respond, while the pin’s batteries sometimes overheated. Humane had hoped to sell 100,000 pins in its first year but got only around 10,000 orders. At one point, the company told customers to stop using their charging cases because of the fire risk.Last year, Humane hired an investment bank to sell itself, while also seeking new funding. The start-up sought a sale price of more than $1 billion.On Tuesday, a letter posted to Humane’s website said that the pins would no longer work at the end of this month and that customer data would be deleted. “Our business priorities have shifted,” the letter said.HP, which sells an estimated 53 million PCs a year, has said it wants to add A.I. capabilities to its laptops to make them more useful. Last year, HP worked with Microsoft to develop a line of A.I. computers called Copilot+ PCs.In its announcement, HP said it would use Humane’s technology to become a more “experience-led company.” Humane’s workers will be part of a new innovation lab called HP IQ, which will focus on “building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services.” Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno will join the company, as will the majority of the start-up’s employees, an HP spokeswoman said.“We are investing and innovating aggressively in new A.I.-powered capabilities and software,” said Enrique Lores, president and chief executive of HP, during a call with analysts in November. “We will focus on delivering a cutting-edge A.I.-powered tech.” More

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      They’ve Been Waiting Years to Go Public. They’re Still Waiting.

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      Some tech companies are delaying or pulling their listing plans as the Trump administration’s tariff announcements and other changes cause market volatility and uncertainty.Turo, a car rental start-up in San Francisco, has been trying to go public since 2021. But a volatile stock market in early 2022 delayed its listing. Since then, the company has waited for the right moment.Last week, Turo pulled its listing entirely. “Now is not the right time,” Andre Haddad, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.For months, investors have eagerly anticipated a wave of initial public offerings, spurred by President Trump’s new administration. Since his election victory in November, which ended a tumultuous campaign season, Corporate America and Wall Street have heralded the start of a pro-business, anti-regulation period. The stock market soared ahead of an expected bonanza of deal making.But the administration’s tariff announcements and rapid-fire regulatory changes have created uncertainty and volatility. Worsening inflation has set off market jitters. And the emergence of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek last month caused investors to question their optimistic bets on U.S. tech, leading to a drastic sell-off among A.I.-related stocks.All that has affected initial public offerings. “The calendar just went from fully booked to being wide open in a span of like three weeks,” said Phil Haslett, a founder of EquityZen, a site that helps private companies and their employees sell their stock.So far this year, the pace of public offerings is ahead of last year’s, with companies raising $6.6 billion from listings, up 14 percent compared with this time last year, according to Renaissance Capital, which manages I.P.O.-focused exchange traded funds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Trump Jr. Joining a Venture Capital Firm

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      The firm, 1789 Capital, invests in products and companies aimed at conservative audiences.The eldest son of President-elect Donald J. Trump will not be a member of his father’s administration — he is joining a venture capital firm.Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd of a few hundred donors on Sunday that he was joining 1789 Capital, a firm whose investments include Tucker Carlson’s media company. Mr. Trump was speaking at a conference held by the Rockbridge Network, a network, co-founded by Vice President-elect JD Vance, of tech-friendly Republican donors who are supportive of Mr. Trump.Chris Buskirk, the leader of Rockbridge, asked the younger Mr. Trump on Sunday evening if he had plans to join his father’s administration. He responded that he would be joining as a partner at 1789 Capital, according to two people with knowledge of his remarks.The firm focuses on investing in companies and products popular with conservative audiences. Its other partners and backers, in addition to Mr. Buskirk, include the investor Omeed Malik, along with Rebekah Mercer, a prominent Republican donor, both of whom were at Rockbridge’s event in Las Vegas this week.Mr. Buskirk was interviewing Mr. Trump as part of a fireside chat at the fall meeting of the Rockbridge group — the session was titled “Inaugurating the Next American Golden Age.”Mr. Trump has a business background as a longtime real estate executive at the Trump Organization. He has recently also displayed an interest in the crypto industry, and he has emerged as a liaison between his father and the tech community. He also was an investor in PublicSquare, an online marketplace for conservatives.Mr. Trump will most likely still play some role in his father’s political operation. He has said he wants to make sure that his father is surrounded by true loyalists during his second administration. More

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      Physical Intelligence, a Specialist in Robot A.I., Raises $400 Million

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      The start-up raised $400 million in a funding round with investments from the likes of Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital and OpenAI.Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence start-up seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, plans to announce on Monday that it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors.The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, and the venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond.The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments. That’s significantly more than the $70 million that the start-up, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing.The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks.“What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” said Karol Hausman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.”It’s a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in A.I. models that can interpret visual data.Among the company’s co-founders are Mr. Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, an investor and former executive at the payments giant Stripe.In a paper published last week, Physical Intelligence showed how its software — called π0, or pi-zero — enabled robots to fold laundry, clear a table, flatten a box and more.“It’s a true generalist,” Mr. Hausman said. Physical Intelligence executives said that its software was closer to GPT-1, the first model published for chatbots by OpenAI, than to the more advanced brains that power ChatGPT.Mr. Groom said that it was hard to predict the rate of progress: A ChatGPT-style breakthrough “could be far sooner than we expect, or it could definitely be far out.”The field of robotics A.I. is getting crowded, with players including Skild, which is also working on general-purpose robot A.I.; Figure AI, whose backers include OpenAI and Mr. Bezos; and Covariant, which focuses on industrial applications.Amazon has a vested interest in the industry, and has been adding more robots in its operations as it seeks to drive down costs and get orders to customers faster. Tesla also has major A.I. ambitions, with Elon Musk recently saying that the company’s humanoid robot would be “the biggest product ever of any kind.” More

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      Women Entrepreneurs Are Hitting a Funding Wall

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      For women starting new businesses, early funding from venture capital firms led by other women is vital. But few are large enough to lead subsequent rounds of financing.When Oriana Papin-Zoghbi was looking for venture capital funding to develop a new type of test for ovarian cancer, she found her pitch did best with women investors. “They were able to resonate with the problem we are trying to solve,” she said.Avestria Ventures, a fund focused on women-founded start-ups, led an early investment of $5 million in Ms. Papin-Zoghbi’s company, AOA Dx. And two years later, Good Growth Capital, a firm founded by women, led an additional $17 million investment.Ms. Papin-Zoghbi expects raising the next round of funding to be more difficult. Medical devices are expensive to develop, and AOA Dx is looking for an additional $30 million to bring its first product to market. “Most women-led funds cannot lead a round that size,” she said.More than 100 women-led venture capital funds, many specifically focused on investing in companies started by women, have been founded in the last decade, a trend that has contributed to a gain in fund-raising by women who are just starting their businesses. Female-founded start-ups received 7 percent of pre-seed and seed funding, the earliest funding a start-up raises, in 2023, up from 5 percent in 2015, according to the data platform Crunchbase.But women-led funds tend to be small, limiting their influence to early funding rounds. More mature companies led by women have not seen the same increase in funding. For women-founded businesses seeking investments past a Series B round, typically the third funding round, the share of venture capital dollars contracted to 1 percent from 2 percent over the same period, according to Crunchbase.Founders like Ms. Papin-Zoghbi are hitting — or fear hitting — a funding wall, an obstacle they say has been heightened by a rollback in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a general downturn in start-up investing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Start-Up Investors Push Back Against Venture Capital’s Bigger-Is-Better Mantra

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      A small but vocal group is forming new funds and taking new approaches to counter the swell of money into venture capital in recent years.After nearly 10 years running his own venture capital firm, Nick Chirls decided to call it quits this year.His firm, Notation Capital, had raised three funds and invested in more than 100 companies. But Mr. Chirls said he had become disillusioned as venture capital grew from a collection of small partnerships into an industry dominated by firms that managed enormous sums.The focus on accumulating and deploying as much money as possible “completely dehumanized the entire business,” he said.Instead, Mr. Chirls is starting a new kind of firm. From the outside, the endeavor, Asylum Ventures, looks like his old firm, with a $55 million venture fund that will invest in very young tech companies. But the approach is set to be very different, making fewer investments over a longer period in companies that will not need to raise increasingly large funding rounds, he said.Mr. Chirls and his partners, Jonathan Wu and Mackenzie Regent, are part of a small but vocal group of start-up investors who are pushing back against venture capital’s changing scope and priorities. Venture capital investing has traditionally involved small groups of financiers who backed very young, very risky companies that couldn’t obtain traditional loans. The sums invested were often small.But that changed in recent years as investors poured billions of dollars into unproven start-ups with little diligence and investment firms expanded rapidly into new strategies and geographies. Last year, venture capital managed $1.1 trillion, up from $297 billion in 2013, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More