Tech
RJ Scaringe has raised more than $12B across three startups and investors still want more
Investors can’t seem to get enough of RJ Scaringe or his ideas.
In less than a decade, the serial entrepreneur best known for his EV company Rivian has raised more than $12.3 billion from venture capital firms, as well as from strategic and institutional investors for his three — and counting — startups. If the latest $400 million raise for his new venture Mind Robotics is an indicator, investors are still happily piling in.
Outsized raises for newly minted startups have become more common in recent years. But those hundred-million-plus seed rounds have generally been reserved for buzzy defense tech startups or AI companies founded by former OpenAI or Anthropic employees.
Those supersized seeds certainly weren’t flowing toward something as niche as an electric micromobility startup. And yet in 2025, Scaringe raised $105 million for exactly that — a startup called Also, which he founded that same year. The total has since surpassed $300 million, with DoorDash among its backers.
Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse and former chief growth officer at Rivian, has spent years watching and learning from Scaringe. His firm is now one of Scaringe’s biggest backers, leading rounds in both Also and Mind Robotics — Scaringe’s industrial AI and robotics startup that he also founded last year.
Storytelling and communication are one of his superpowers, according to Behl, who joined Rivian when the company had just a handful of employees.
“When RJ explains a certain issue, topic, opportunity, vision, he just has this very unique ability to communicate it so effectively, and it comes across so credible,” Behl said. “He’s not trying to undersell the difficulty or oversell the opportunity, and that’s an art.”
Scaringe isn’t the only serial entrepreneur to repeatedly attract massive amounts of capital, but founders who can raise billions across multiple ventures remain rare. A self-professed car enthusiast who earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT, Scaringe joins a small cadre of entrepreneurs that includes Tesla CEO and SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anduril and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, and Jack Dorsey, who founded Square (now called Block) and Twitter.
The difference, at least in the view of some investors TechCrunch spoke to, is that he is able to separate selling the idea from selling himself. “He is very comfortable and confident in his own personality, and he’s not trying to be an Elon,” Behl said, noting that many have tried to make the comparison over the years.
“It’s not about him,” another insider familiar with Scaringe’s companies told TechCrunch. “When you talk to him, he has enthusiasm about the product that is completely external.”
Of course, there is confidence and even a little ego, the same source mused, but “it doesn’t weigh on you.” The source also added that Scaringe has a unique ability to make you feel like the most special person in the room — a sentiment others echoed.
Giving that kind of undivided attention to an investor, supplier, or exec at a manufacturer is a challenge at the scale Scaringe is attempting. He is running three companies, often traveling between Palo Alto, Irvine, Rivian’s factory in Normal, Illinois, and a second factory soon to open in Georgia. And then there is family — Scaringe has three sons with his ex-wife.
Joe Fath, another partner at Eclipse, credits his open-mindedness and collaborative nature for helping him attract investment and juggle these connected, yet disparate businesses.
He noted that Scaringe also “has the rare combination of being a truly great engineer while also having an exceptional instinct for product design,” said Fath, who previously worked at a major Rivian backer, T. Rowe Price. “Very few founders can operate at that level technically while also understanding what resonates emotionally with customers — both consumers and commercial buyers. That combination is incredibly uncommon and has clearly been part of what makes Rivian’s products, and now Also and Mind’s, so differentiated.”
The pace of Scaringe’s fundraising over the past eight years is particularly notable and doesn’t seem to be slowing.
More than $11 billion, and by far the largest slice of VC and strategic capital, went into Rivian — most of it between 2018 and its blockbuster IPO in 2021. That’s a startling timeline, especially considering the company, initially called Mainstream Motors, had existed since 2009. For years, Rivian operated as a small, unknown entity until its breakout moment in late 2018 at the Los Angeles Auto Show, when it revealed prototypes of its all-electric R1T truck and R1S SUV.
The money soon flowed, and from every direction. In early 2019 and just a couple of months after that reveal, Rivian raised a $700 million funding round led by Amazon. U.S. automaker Ford would invest $500 million and make plans to collaborate on a since-scrapped future EV program. Cox Automotive contributed $350 million. Rivian would close out the year with a $1.3 billion round — its fourth in 2019 — led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, with additional participation from Amazon, Ford, and funds managed by BlackRock.
In July 2020, Rivian raised $2.5 billion and another $2.65 billion six months later. As whispers of an IPO got louder, Rivian closed another $2.5 billion private funding round led by Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, D1 Capital Partners, Ford Motor, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. Third Point, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Coatue also participated.
Then the IPO came. Rivian raised nearly $12 billion in gross proceeds after locking in $78 per share. Its market cap hit $100 billion when it debuted on Nasdaq in November 2021. Today, it stands at $18.2 billion, a significant comedown that also reflects the broader struggles of the EV sector.
The ability to raise that much capital, despite those headwinds, is exceptional. But Scaringe didn’t stop with Rivian. If anything, the pace has accelerated. Also and Mind Robotics have together raised more than $1.3 billion so far, with Mind Robotics moving especially fast: $115 million in its first year, $500 million in March, and another $400 million just this week.
Rivian also continues to land notable backers through high-profile deals like the $5.8 billion joint venture with Volkswagen Group and a robotaxi partnership valued at up to $1.25 billion with Uber.
“Now, the big question is, how much can he do?” Behl said. “That’s a question [that] already assumes that he’s reaching his limit. The thing is, he doesn’t look at it that way. His perspective is that there is huge value to be created, there is huge impact to be created, and I just have to do it.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Indian Uber rival Rapido raises $240M at $3B valuation
Indian ride-hailing company Rapido said on Friday it had raised $240 million in fresh funding at a $3 billion valuation to compete better in the country’s growing but challenging mobility market.
Led by Prosus, the equity round saw participation from existing investors, including WestBridge Capital and Accel. The round was part of a larger $730 million primary and secondary financing. Rapido was previously valued at $2.3 billion during a secondary transaction last year.
Rapido said the fresh capital would be used to increase its footprint in high-growth markets, strengthen its driver network, and invest in technology and platform efficiency.
“We are going deeper into markets where demand exists, but supply remains fragmented,” Rapido co-founder Aravind Sanka said in a statement. “We will sharpen our focus on strengthening supply, building technologies, and expanding our multimodal footprint, with far greater speed and intent.”
The funding round underlines continuing investor interest in India’s mobility sector despite persistent concerns about pricing pressures, regulation, and profitability.
Founded in 2015, Rapido operates in more than 400 cities and has spurred its growth by enabling ride-hailing for lower-cost and more flexible modes of transport such as motorbikes and auto-rickshaws in India’s congested, price-sensitive cities. The Bengaluru-based startup has been expanding to smaller towns, too.
The funding comes in the wake of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s visit to India, where the ride-hailing giant this week unveiled plans to expand its engineering and infrastructure operations via two new technology campuses and a local data center partnership. Uber earlier this year infused $330 million into its India subsidiary as it sought to strengthen its presence amid growing competition from local rivals like Ola, Rapido, and Namma Yatri.
Khosrowshahi said last year that Rapido had overtaken Ola as Uber’s biggest competitor in the country.
India is currently one of the world’s most challenging ride-hailing markets because of intense price competition, supply issues, high driver incentive costs, and evolving local regulations. Nevertheless, Rapido has rapidly expanded its market share, even entering the food delivery business through its subsidiary Ownly last year.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Osaurus brings both local and cloud AI models to your Mac
As AI models increasingly become commoditized, startups are racing to build the software layer that sits on top of them. One interesting entrant into this space is Osaurus, an open source, Apple-only LLM server that lets users move between different local AI models, either locally or in the cloud, while keeping their files and tools all on their own hardware.
Osaurus evolved out of the idea for a desktop AI companion, Dinoki, which Osaurus co-founder Terence Pae described as a sort of “AI-powered Clippy.” Dinoki’s customers had asked him why they should buy the app if they still had to pay for tokens — the usage units AI companies charge for processing prompts and generating responses.
That got Pae thinking more deeply about running AI locally.
“That’s how Osaurus started,” Pae, previously a software engineer at Tesla and Netflix, told TechCrunch over a call. The idea, he explained, was to try to run an AI assistant locally. “You can do pretty much everything on your Mac locally, like browsing your files, accessing your browser, accessing your system configurations. I figured this would be a great way to position Osaurus as a personal AI for individuals.”
Pae began building the tool in public as an open source project, adding features and fixing bugs along the way.
Today, Osaurus can flexibly connect with locally hosted AI models or cloud providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Users can freely choose which AI models they’re using and keep other aspects of the AI experience on their own hardware, like the models’ own memory, or their files and tools.
Given that different AI models have different strengths, the advantage of this system is that users can switch to the AI model that best fits their needs.
Such a structure makes Osaurus what’s called a “harness” — a control layer that connects different AI models, tools, and workflows through a single interface, similar to tools like OpenClaw or Hermes. However, the difference is that such tools are often aimed at developers who know their way around a terminal. And sometimes, like in the case of OpenClaw, they may pose security issues and holes to worry about.
Osaurus, meanwhile, presents an easy-to-use interface that consumers can use and addresses security concerns by running things in a hardware-isolated, virtual sandbox. This limits the AI to a certain scope, keeping your computer and data safe.
Of course, the practice of running AI models on your machine is still in its early days, given that it’s heavily resource-intensive and hardware-dependent. To run local models, your system will need at least 64GB of RAM. For running larger models, like DeepSeek v4, Pae recommends systems with about 128GB of RAM.
But Pae believes local AI’s needs will come down in time.
“I can see the potential of it, because the intelligence per wattage — which is like the metric for local AI — has been going up significantly. It’s on its own curve of innovation. Last year, local AI could barely finish sentences, but today it can actually run tools, write code, access your browser, and order stuff from Amazon … It’s just getting better and better,” he said.
Osaurus today can run MiniMax M2.5, Gemma 4, Qwen3.6, GPT-OSS, Llama, DeepSeek V4, and other models. It also supports Apple’s on-device foundation models, Liquid AI’s LFM family of on-device models, and in the cloud, it can connect to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI/Grok, Venice AI, OpenRouter, Ollama, and LM Studio.
As a full MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, you can give any MCP-compatible client access to your tools as well. Plus, it ships with over 20 native plug-ins for Mail, Calendar, Vision, macOS Use, XLSX, PPTX, Browser, Music, Git, Filesystem, Search, Fetch, and more.
More recently, Osaurus was updated to include voice capabilities as well.
Since the project went live nearly a year ago, it has been downloaded north of 112,000 times, according to its website. The app competes with other tools that let you run models locally, like Ollama, Msty, LM Studio, and others, but offers a differentiated feature set and presents itself as a more user-friendly option for non-developers, too.
Currently, Osaurus’ founders (who include co-founder Sam Yoo) are participating in the New York-based startup accelerator Alliance. They’re also thinking about next steps, which could see Osaurus being offered to businesses, like those in the legal space or in healthcare, where running local LLMs could address privacy concerns.
As the power of local AI models grows, the team believes it could lower the demand for AI data centers.
“We’re seeing this explosive growth in the AI space where [cloud AI providers] have to scale up using data centers and infrastructure, but we feel like people haven’t really seen the value of the local AI yet,” Pae said. “Instead of relying on the cloud, they can actually deploy a Mac Studio on-prem, and it should use substantially less power. You still have the capabilities of the cloud, but you will not be dependent on a data center to be able to run that AI,” he added.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Meridian Ventures launched a $35M fund with a focus on MBA-deferred founders
Meridian Ventures was born out of a shared experience: deferred MBAs. Now, founders Devon Gethers and Karlton Haney have raised a $35 million fund to back pre-seed and seed-stage companies started by people like them.
Gethers, 29, told TechCrunch the idea for a firm arose after he met Haney in Harvard’s MBA deferred admission program in 2020.
Gethers grew up in poverty in Washington State, studied behavioral science and finance at the University of Utah, then moved into private equity before launching a company of his own (which he later exited). Haney, meanwhile, grew up on a farm in Arkansas, raising chickens, birds, and “anything that flew,” Gethers said about his business partner.
Haney, 28, went on to study industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas and worked as an investor at the family office, the Stephens Group. The two came together in 2023 with the idea of launching a firm that backed people with MBAs, with a tilt toward those who had deferred.
“Our thesis is going against a bit of the grain, the rhetoric you hear in Silicon Valley that MBAs don’t make good founders,” Gethers said, referring to the belief that an MBA prepares students for corporate culture, not the flexible, free-wheeling world of Silicon Valley.
To prove their thesis, Gethers and Haney went out and cold-called prospective limited partners and knocked on doors until they raised $2.5 million as a proof-of-concept fund to back 45 companies.
The two headed off to Harvard Business School in summer 2023 and about a year into it, decided to try and raise their first institutional fund. The funding environment was tough, but the pair ended up raising an oversubscribed $35 million fund from LPs, including publicly traded banks, family offices, and Fortune 500 executives, Gethers said. They graduated from Harvard Business School in 2025.
This new fund will back founders building enterprise technology in the United States. Meridian is agnostic, Gethers said, noting that the firm has already invested in companies in fintech, logistics, healthcare, and of course, AI. The average check size will be $500,000 for pre-seed and $750,000 for seed, and the capital hopes to be deployed over the next three years.
“We saw an expanding gap between ambitious founders building frontier technologies and the capital required to help carry those ambitions forward,” Gethers said. “With this $35 million fund, our goal is to seal that gap.”
This piece was updated to clarify that the firm also backs those who have not deferred.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Angels select OF Jose Siri, option Bryce Teodosio
Eddie Murphy’s Classic, R-Rated Action Comedy On Netflix Is The First, And Best Of Its Kind
