Networking shouldn't mean walking into a crowded room and hoping you happen to meet the right person. At TechCrunch Founder Summit, presented by Fidelity Private Shares, founders and VCs have several ways to make the connections they build beyond the sessions more intentional. On November 4 at Boston's SoWa Power Station, get ready for a full day packed with meaningful networking opportunities, actionable insights, and connections that could change the trajectory of your idea and startup. Make game-changing connections, gain valuable insights, and get the advice you need to propel your idea and startup forward. Grab your pass now to save up to $100 and get a second pass free before doors open. The connections aren't limited to one lounge. Roundtables create smaller, topic-driven conversations. Breakout sessions are where on-stage panels address questions from those in the room. The Expo Hall brings attendees and partners together throughout the day. The closing reception gives founders, investors, and operators time to continue conversations without rushing to another session....

This week featured a robust lineup of large rounds, led by manufacturing startup Re:Build, which closed on $2.1 billion, and predictions marketplace Kalshi, which picked up another $1 billion. Other sectors in which startups drew significant rounds included construction automation, biotech, batteries and enterprise AI. 1. Re:Build, $2.1B, manufacturing: Re:Build, a manufacturing startup that partners with industrial companies and innovators from the product design phase to large-scale production, secured $2.1 billion in new funding. General Catalyst and JPMorganChase led the financing for the 6-year-old, Framingham, Massachusetts-based company. 2. Kalshi, $1B, predictions marketplace: Predictions marketplace Kalshi announced a $1 billion Series G financing led by Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital. The round set a $40 billion post-money valuation for New York-based Kalshi, which says its business' annualized trading volume now exceeds $1 trillion. 3. Bedrock Robotics, $600M, construction tech: San Francisco-based Bedrock Robotics, a developer of autonomous systems for heavy equipment used in construction, raised $600 million in Series C funding led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital. The round brings Bedrock's total funding to nearly $1 billion and sets a post-money valuation of $4.1 billion....

AI infrastructure company Runware is making news again, just months after unveiling the Sonic Inference Pod, a modular data center built in a factory and shipped to customers ready to install. Now the company has bigger plans. It told TechCrunch it wants to build a factory that assembles these pods on a production line, as if they were cars. Flaviu Radulescu, co-founder and CEO of Runware, told TechCrunch that the company plans to scale production at its Romania-based factory to 30 megawatts of data center capacity per day by 2028, or nearly 1 gigawatt per month. That's a whole lot of capacity: At that pace, Runware would produce roughly as much in a year as the entire U.S. was expected to add in data center power this year, about 10 gigawatts. But it also reflects an industrywide push to deploy data centers faster and more efficiently. Nvidia announced, for example, the Vera Rubin AI factories and the DSX POD earlier this year. Both are also meant to make it faster and easier for companies to build their own AI data centers. The difference with Runware, though, is that it says it has actually built a factory rather than just designed the infrastructure that would let others build one....

' Hey, Linas here! Every day, I break down 3 stories shaping the future of FinTech & Artificial Intelligence - plus the money movements and trends worth tracking. First time here' 400k+ FinTech and AI leaders get this daily. Join them: The 11 requests cover space access, the US robot supply chain, data center equipment, financing for physical AI, government benefits verification, city permitting, air-gapped AI, owned and vertical foundation models, AI-backed expert services and models that write well. Read together, they make one argument. Intelligence is getting cheap. Steel, magnets, transformers, permits, verified data, capital and trust are not. YC is betting that the next cycle's biggest companies will be built where AI runs into those constraints. The money already agrees. AI took $102B of the $159B in global venture funding in Q3 2026 (see below), and hyperscalers are on track to spend about $1T on capex this year. The openings YC describes sit in the gaps around the companies raising $1 billion rounds: the actuator a humanoid maker can no longer import, or the Medicaid renewal a state can't process by hand. Several of those gaps come with deadlines attached, and the first arrives in January 2027....