TechCrunch

OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.

TechCrunch spoke to investors to find the hottest startups in the Spring 2026 YC batch. Some of them commanded valuations of over $175 million, VCs said.

About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating — but, many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.

AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.

Plaintiffs in the class action complaint allege Rivian falsely promised for years it would bring hands-free driving to its first-generation R1 vehicles.

Doomscrolling on social media is a very common problem and can feel like an endless loop of constantly losing track of time. Instead of tackling this issue with strict limits, a new mindful screen time app called Mivo Scrolling is trying to shake things up. Launched last month, Mivo doesn’t look super different from other … Read more

FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.

A data breach involving government-issued ID documents affects over three million people in Texas.

Karamo Brown, famous for his pep talks on Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” has jumped into the wellness and AI space with his new app, Kē. After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey—from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth—Brown wants to help others do the same.  Kē offers … Read more

Apple’s grip on iPhone app distribution is loosening in another major market: Brazil.

MapTap is a phone game that will make you feel smarter after you play it.

General Intuition is in talks to raise around $300 million at a roughly $2 billion valuation from backers including Jeff Bezos. The startup trains AI agents on spatial-temporal reasoning.

Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom.

Spotify is launching “Reserved,” a new system that will hold two concert tickets for an artist’s superfans before they’re on sale to the public.

Adobe is updating its Firefly AI assistant with new chops, and adding it to Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io.

Forget stickers, GIFs, and emoji reactions. Pixi is betting that the next evolution of messaging is interactive augmented reality (AR).

The company has identified at least 13 instances where its robotaxis drove into highway sections closed for construction.

Relativity Space—a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit—might just beat SpaceX to Mars.

Here’s what you need to do to get those pesky “write with Gemini” pop-ups to go away.

CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview that the situation is “unsustainable.”

Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist.

The former Sequoia Capital leader is filling an “existing vacancy” on SpaceX’s board, days after the company went public in the largest IPO ever.

Snap’s long-awaited smart glasses debut hasn’t exactly done wonders for the company’s stock.

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.  This tension between … Read more

A new FTC lawsuit reveals how sophisticated subscription app operators can allegedly use shell companies and payment infrastructure to stay active on app stores despite mounting consumer complaints.

French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.

Anthropic has joined the Frontier coalition, which received another $915M in pledges to fund carbon removal projects.

An alleged Russian-speaking group of cybercriminals is reportedly compromising and targeting several major companies that use Fortinet Firewalls and VPNs through previously known passwords.

Social media feeds are becoming more customizable as platforms like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok introduce tools that let users directly influence the algorithms powering their recommendations.

World models are the next big thing in AI beyond LLMs and, with this round, Odyssey has cemented itself as one of the startups to watch.