Techstars, a nearly 20-year-old startup accelerator, announced new terms for startups that enter its three-month program. The organization will now invest $220,000, which is $100,000 more than it offered previously, in companies starting with its fall 2025 batch.
The capital will be divided into two components. The group is offering companies $20,000 in exchange for 5% ownership in the business. Startups will also receive $200,000 in the form of an uncapped SAFE note with a “most favored nation” clause. Put more simply, Techstars percentage ownership of its $200,000 SAFE will depend on the company’s subsequent valuations. For example, if the startup’s next financing “prices” it at $10 million, Techstars will receive 2% equity on the SAFE component for a total of 7% ownership.
Techstars’ new terms now closely mirror those of Y Combinator. The famed Silicon Valley accelerator increased its funding to startups three years ago by adding a $375,000 SAFE note to its standard deal of $125,000 for 7% of the startup’s equity.
So, which accelerator is offering a better deal for startups? The answer largely depends on the company’s capital needs. Compared to Techstars, startups going through YC get more than double the funding but give up more equity.
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Geoff Ralston, well-known in the startup community for his years at Y Combinator, is back in the formal investing ring, he announced Thursday.
His new fund is called Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund, or SAIF, which is both an explanation of its thesis and a play on words.
Ralston is specifically looking for startups that “enhance AI safety, security, and responsible deployment,” as his fund’s website describes. He plans to write $100,000 checks as a SAFE, “pun intended,” he says, with a $10 million cap. A SAFE is, of course, the invest now/price later pre-seed investment tool pioneered by Y Combinator (it stands for simple agreement for future equity).
While most VCs these days are looking to invest in AI startups, Ralston’s take is a bit more focused on the idea of safe AI, even though he admits the concept is a bit broad.
“The vast majority of AI projects out in the world today are using the technology to solve problems or create efficiencies or create new capabilities. They are not necessarily intrinsically unsafe, but safety is not their primary concern,” Ralston tells TechCrunch. “I intend to fund startups whose primary objective is safe AI — as I have (very broadly) defined it.”
That list includes startups focused on improving the safety of AI, like those that clarify an AI’s decision-making process or benchmark AI safety. It includes products that protect intellectual property, those that ensure an AI conforms to compliance requirements, fight disinformation, and detect AI-generated attacks. He also wants to invest in functional AI tools with built-in safety in mind, such as better AI forecasting tools and AI-enabled business negotiation tools that won’t reveal corporate secrets to outsiders.
This might sound like a list of AI startups that many VCs are pursuing, but there are areas Ralston says he won’t back. One example is fully autonomous weapons.
“There are certainly uses of AI which would (will) be unsafe: using the technology to create bioweapons, to manage conventional weapons without a human in the loop, etc.,” he explained.
In fact, he’d like to fund “weapon safety systems” that could detect or prevent attacks from AI weapons.
This is an interesting contrarian viewpoint from many of today’s defense tech founders and VCs. As TechCrunch has previously reported, some of the people building AI weapons have increasingly been floating the idea that such weapons would be better operating without a human.
Still, all things AI is a crowded field for VCs these days. That’s where Ralston hopes his YC connections could give him an advantage. Ralston departed YC in 2022, after three years as president (succeeded by Garry Tan) and over a decade as an adviser.
Ralston plans to offer mentoring of the kind he did at the storied startup accelerator and has promised to coach them through how to apply to YC. And he’s offering to help them tap into his considerable investor network.
Ralston declined to say how big this fund is, how many startups he intends to back, or who his LP backers are.
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Chatbot Arena, the crowdsourced benchmarking project major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, is forming a company called Arena Intelligence Inc., reports Bloomberg.
In a blog post published Thursday, Chatbot Arena said that the company will “give [it] the resources to improve [its platform] significantly over what it is today.” The team also pledged to continue to provide neutral testing grounds for AI not influenced by outside interests.
Founded in 2023, Chatbot Arena has become something of an AI industry obsession. Primarily run by UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers, Chatbot Arena has partnered with companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make flagship models available for its community to evaluate.
Chatbot Arena was previously funded through a combination of grants and donations, including from Google’s Kaggle data science platform, Andreessen Horowitz, and Together AI. The organization’s fledgling company hasn’t disclosed any potential new backers yet — nor has it decided on a business model.
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