Startups Weekly: A brighter outlook, but don’t get carried away

Summary

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Startup news this week was fairly routine — in a good way: Aside from a minor kerfuffle between Y Combinator and Google, there was no headline-grabbing drama. Just steady progress and business as usual. Most interesting startup stories from the week With IPO plans, acquisitions, and new launches, this week offers genuine reasons for optimism and bullishness. But don’t get carried away, either: We’re not ready for Theranos 2.0. Interesting filing: Digital consumer bank Chime publicly filed for an IPO this week. Among other numbers, the paperwork revealed it paid around $33 million to the Dallas Mavericks as part of its marketing efforts. Neon lights: Databricks is planning to spend around $1 billion to acquire Neon, a startup building an open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, with hopes that their combined offerings will let customers more efficiently deploy AI agents (whatever those are). Catching the worm: Savings and investment startup Acorns acquired EarlyBird, an investment gifting platform for families, for an undisclosed amount. EarlyBird will shut down, and its co-founders will help build out Acorns Early, the startup’s smart money app for kids. Bridging gaps: AutoUnify, the latest startup coming out of Porsche’s partnership with venture studio UP.Labs, hopes to become the Plaid of automotive retail with an API that bridges the communication gap between dealerships and service shops on one side and manufacturers and software vendors on the other. Friend or foe: Google launched its AI Futures Fund, a new initiative seeking to invest in AI startups that use DeepMind’s tools. Also this week, Y Combinator released a brief accusing Google of being a “monopolist” that has “stunted” the U.S. startup ecosystem. Dual use: British startup Vertical Aerospace is working on a hybrid-electric eVTOL aircraft that ...