🕶️ Startups Competing with NASA’s Best Tech

Six bullets of updates

1. 🏀 NBA tests Sportiq smart basketball, embedding AI to track player performance.

2.  🚧 Musk’s influence on federal projects grows, with key infrastructure decisions tied to his companies and close allies.

3. 🔤 OpenAI unveils new logo and typeface, shifting to a minimalist sans-serif look as part of a broader brand update.

4. 🚗 Waymo and Uber expand partnership, bringing more autonomous rides to Phoenix as robotaxis scale up.

5. 💰 Deel offloads $300M in secondary sale, bringing General Catalyst on board as a new investor.

6. 🎤 Chris Anderson steps down from TED after 23 years, leaving behind a platform that redefined idea-sharing.

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🛰️ Space startups merge to build next-gen telescopes

Two space startups have joined forces to create the next generation of telescopes, aiming to push deep-space observation to new heights. The yet-to-be-named entity combines cutting-edge optical tech with AI-driven image processing, promising sharper cosmic insights than ever before. The move isn’t just about seeing further—it’s about giving researchers real-time access to higher-resolution data, a major win for astrophysics.

Mergers in space aren’t new (just ask black holes), but this deal signals a shift toward consolidation in the industry, where funding struggles have pushed smaller players to team up. The new powerhouse aims to compete with NASA-backed projects and commercial giants like SpaceX.

If all goes well, their new telescope could help answer humanity’s biggest questions—like Are we alone? and Why does my WiFi still suck in 2025?

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Startup Events and Deadlines

1. Founder Coffee Meet | February 7 | NYC

2. Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator | Deadline: Feb 11 | NYC

3. Techstars New York City Accelerator | Deadline: Feb 11 | NYC

4. Y Combinator | Deadline: Feb 11 | Silicon Valley

5. EdTech | Deadline: Feb 11 | France

6. Crash Course in Financial Modeling | Feb 13 | Online

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These companies just raised money

1. 🤖 European AI startups raised $8B in 2024, defying downturn fears as investors double down on the sector.

2. 🍒 Cherry Ventures launches $500M fund, backing early-stage startups—but will it be enough in a tough market?

3. 🚀 Hitachi Ventures launches $400M fund, targeting fusion energy, AI, and deep-tech bets for the future

4. 💰 Cashfree bags $53M led by Krafton, hitting a $700M valuation as it scales payment solutions in India.

5. 🥦 Dietitian startups Berry Street & Fay raise $50M each, riding the GLP-1 boom as demand for nutrition support surges.

6. 👗 Archive lands $30M to tackle fashion waste, scaling online resales to keep clothing out of landfills.

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💻 LogicStar’s Plan to Automate App Maintenance

Maintaining software can be boring, expensive, and—let’s be honest—a nightmare for developers. Enter LogicStar, a startup building AI agents to automate app maintenance, promising to cut costs and eliminate the tedious bug-fixing grind. Their AI aims to detect, diagnose, and even fix software issues in real time, meaning devs could spend less time debugging and more time pretending to work while scrolling Reddit.

But can AI truly replace human engineers in keeping apps alive? With AI-generated code already breaking production environments, some devs are skeptical. Still, as companies scramble to cut costs, LogicStar is betting that AI-powered software maintenance will be the next big wave—or at least a decent way to avoid that 2 a.m. “urgent bug fix” Slack message.

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Why Grammarly Shouldn’t Exist… But it’s a $13B Empire

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