Xreal, Google’s Smartglasses Partner, Thinks It Has Finally Mastered This Notoriously Tricky Industry
Xreal, a longtime Google partner, unveiled Project Aura, a new tethered smart‑glasses system that embeds OLED displays and a pocket‑sized processing puck. The company claims the device delivers high‑resolution video, hand‑tracked AR apps, and a seamless user experience for both consumers and professionals. While currently limited to developers, Xreal plans a commercial launch later this year and is eyeing an IPO before the end of 2026. CEO Chi Xu says the firm expects to break even next year as margins improve.
Nuclear Startup Deep Fission Says It’s Going Public, Again, and I Have Questions
Deep Fission announced a new Nasdaq IPO seeking $157 million at $24‑$26 per share, valuing the company at up to $1.66 billion. The startup previously completed a reverse merger with Surfside Acquisition, raising $30 million, but its shares never traded on the OTCQB....
Elon Musk Has Given up on Solar Power (on Earth)
Elon Musk’s latest SpaceX IPO filing reveals that his AI venture xAI will fund an additional $2.8 billion of natural‑gas‑turbine power for its data centers, while buying hundreds of Tesla Megapacks. The filing shows no material purchase of solar panels, signaling...
Smart Ring Maker Oura Files to Go Public
Finnish wearable maker Oura announced a confidential Form S‑1 filing as it prepares for an initial public offering. The company, known for its sleek smart ring that monitors sleep, activity and readiness, has sold 5.5 million units, more than double the 2.5 million...
Audio-Generation App Huxe, Founded by Former NotebookLM Developers, Shuts Down
Huxe, an AI‑powered podcast‑generation app founded by former NotebookLM engineers, announced it will shut down, removing the app from app stores and deleting user data after a brief grace period. The startup raised $4.6 million from investors including Conviction, Genius Ventures,...
Scammers Are Abusing an Internal Microsoft Account to Send Spam Links
Scammers have been exploiting a loophole in Microsoft’s internal email system to send spam from the legitimate notification address msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com. By creating new Microsoft‑online accounts that appear as genuine customers, they can dispatch phishing messages that mimic official alerts. The...
Beauty Booking Startup Fresha Hits $1 Billion Valuation with KKR Backing
London‑based beauty and wellness booking platform Fresha has secured an $80 million investment from KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth fund, pushing its valuation past $1 billion. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $285 million. Fresha now serves more than 140,000...
Truecaller Gets Into the eSIM Business to Diversify Its Revenue Streams
Caller ID app Truecaller has entered the eSIM market, offering travel data packs from 1 GB for a week up to 20 GB for a month. The service launches in 29 countries, partnering with Telna and Telness Tech, but notably excludes India...
General Catalyst Just Led a $63M Bet on India’s Travel Payments Market
Indian fintech Scapia raised $63 million in an all‑equity round led by US venture firm General Catalyst, pushing its post‑money valuation above $500 million—more than double its April 2025 level. The financing arrives as global fintech deal flow slows, with India’s Q1 2026 fintech...
Imperagen Raises £5 Million to Use Quantum Physics, AI on Enzyme Engineering
Imperagen, a Manchester‑spun biotech founded in 2021, closed a $6.7 million seed round led by PXN Ventures, bringing total funding to $11.42 million. The startup combines quantum‑physics simulations, custom AI models, and robotic closed‑loop experimentation to accelerate enzyme engineering. It aims to...
Google Just Declared Itself a Contender in AI Design at IO 2026
Google unveiled Pics, an AI‑powered design and image‑generation app built into Google Workspace, at its I/O 2026 conference. The tool lets users create social media graphics, invitations, and marketing visuals from text prompts and edit individual elements via Gemini and...
You Can Now Talk to Your Gmail Inbox, as Seen at Google IO 2026
Google unveiled Gmail Live at I/O 2026, extending its AI Inbox with Gemini‑powered conversational search. Users can ask natural‑language questions—by typing or speaking—to pull details like flight numbers, hotel rooms, or school events directly from their email threads. The feature initially...
Mach Industries Just Spent $50M to Solve a Major Defense Tech Problem
Mach Industries has acquired solid‑rocket‑motor startup Exquadrum for $50 million, rebranding it as Mach Energetics. The purchase gives Mach direct control of a critical, supply‑constrained component for unmanned systems and adds a 70,000‑square‑foot Victorville facility and 85 staff. With the domestic...
Kin Health Raises $9M to Build an AI Notetaker for Patients
Kin Health announced a $9 million seed round led by Maveron to launch a patient‑focused AI notetaker. The free app records doctor visits, transcribes the conversation, and delivers a concise summary with actionable next steps. Built by former GoodRx executives, the...
Amazon’s New Alexa+ Powered Feature Can Generate Podcast Episodes
Amazon unveiled Alexa Podcasts, an Alexa+ feature that generates AI‑driven podcast episodes on demand for U.S. users. By simply naming a topic, the system researches, scripts, and narrates a custom episode, allowing listeners to adjust length, tone, and focus. The...
For Eclipse, the $2.5B Cerebras Win Is Just the Start of Realizing Its Physical-World Thesis
Eclipse Ventures’ early $6.5 million Series A bet on Cerebras Systems has culminated in a $2.5 billion IPO windfall, delivering a 17‑fold return on its total $147 million investment. The firm’s broader thesis—digitizing the physical world—has gained traction as hardware‑focused startups raised nearly $15 billion...
A Hotel Check-In System Left a Million Passports and Driver’s Licenses Open for Anyone to See
A misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket used by Tabiq, the hotel check‑in platform from Japan’s startup Reqrea, exposed over 1 million passports, driver’s licenses and selfie verification photos to the public web. Security researcher Anurag Sen discovered the open bucket and alerted...
Silicon Valley’s Vacationland Needs a New Energy Provider Just as AI Is Driving Prices Up
Lake Tahoe’s power supply faces a critical transition as Liberty Utilities’ agreement with NV Energy expires in May 2027. The termination coincides with a surge in AI‑driven data‑center demand, which Bloomberg estimates at over 22 gigawatts—roughly 40 times the mountain town’s...
Tesla Reveals Two Robotaxi Crashes Involving Teleoperators
Tesla disclosed two low‑speed robotaxi crashes in Austin where remote teleoperators took control after the onboard safety monitor requested help. One incident sent the vehicle up a curb into a metal fence; the other caused a nine‑mph scrape against a...
OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Personal Finance, Will Let You Connect Bank Accounts
OpenAI has rolled out a preview of personal‑finance tools for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the United States, allowing users to link accounts through Plaid and view dashboards of spending, subscriptions, and portfolio performance. The feature supports connections to more than 12,000...
Power Prices Are up 76% on America’s Biggest Grid, and a Watchdog Is Pointing Fingers
Wholesale electricity prices on the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid, jumped 76% over the past year, reaching $136.53 per megawatt‑hour from $77.78. Monitoring Analytics, an independent market watchdog, attributes the surge primarily to soaring demand from data centers, especially...
Meridian Ventures Launched a $35M Fund with a Focus on MBA-Deferred Founders
Meridian Ventures, founded by Harvard deferred-MBA students Devon Gethers and Karlton Haney, closed a $35 million first institutional fund aimed at pre‑seed and seed startups led by MBA‑trained founders. The oversubscribed round attracted public‑bank investors, family offices and Fortune 500 executives, and...
Spotify to Adopt Apple’s New Video Podcast Tech, Offering Creators Easier Cross-Platform Distribution
Spotify announced it will adopt Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video technology, enabling its hosted shows to distribute and monetize video podcasts on Apple Podcasts without any technical changes. The move promises adaptive streaming that adjusts video quality in real...
A Spyware Investigator Exposed Russian Government Hackers Trying to Hijack Signal Accounts
Security researcher Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, who leads Amnesty International’s Security Lab, was targeted by a sophisticated phishing campaign that pretended to be Signal support. The attack was part of a larger operation that has affected more than 13,500 Signal users, using...
Wirestock Raises $23M to Supply Creative Multi-Modal Data to AI Labs
Wirestock, once a stock‑photo distribution platform, has pivoted to become an AI‑training data provider and announced a $23 million Series A round led by Nava Ventures. The company now curates multi‑modal datasets—including images, video, design assets, and 3D content—from more than 700,000...
Dessn Raises $6M for Its Production Focused Design Tool
Design startup Dessn announced a $6 million Series A led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks and N49P. The company’s cloud‑based tool lets designers work directly on live production codebases, eliminating local setup and simplifying hand‑off to developers. Early adopters such...
AI Is Turning Connected Cars Into Pothole-Finding Machines
Fleet‑management firm Samsara has launched Ground Intelligence, an AI‑driven service that turns its network of camera‑equipped trucks into mobile pothole sensors. By analyzing video feeds, the system identifies pothole size, severity and deterioration rate, then surfaces the data on a...
Spotify’s Launches a Wrapped-Style Recap of Your Entire Listening History
Spotify is rolling out a limited‑time, 20th‑anniversary feature that lets users explore their entire listening history, from the date they joined to the first song they ever streamed. The recap also generates a personalized playlist of the top 120 tracks,...
AI Voice Startup Vapi Hits $500M Valuation After Winning Amazon Ring over 40 Rivals
AI voice startup Vapi secured a full‑scale deployment with Amazon Ring, routing 100 % of the company’s inbound calls through its platform. The win helped Vapi close a $50 million Series B round, lifting its post‑money valuation to roughly $500 million. Vapi now processes...
Amazon Launches 30-Minute Delivery Across the U.S.
Amazon unveiled “Amazon Now,” a 30‑minute delivery service available in ten U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Dallas‑Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Seattle, with plans to expand to tens of millions of customers by year‑end. The offering covers thousands of items—from fresh groceries to...
Thinking Machines Wants to Build an AI that Actually Listens While It Talks
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, unveiled a research preview of "interaction models" that enable full‑duplex AI communication. The prototype, TML‑Interaction‑Small, can listen and generate a response simultaneously, achieving a 0.40‑second latency comparable to natural human...
Get Ready for the Whisper-Filled Office of the Future
The Wall Street Journal highlights a growing trend toward voice‑first workspaces as dictation apps like Wispr become mainstream. Executives such as Gusto co‑founder Edward Kim envision offices sounding like sales floors, while AI entrepreneur Mollie Amkraut Mueller notes the personal...
Uber Has Always Wanted to Be More than a Ride; Now It Has Reason to Hurry
Uber announced that U.S. riders can now book hotels directly in the Uber app through a partnership with Expedia, giving access to over 700,000 properties worldwide. Uber One members – the $9.99‑a‑month subscription – receive a rotating 20% discount on...
We’re Feeling Cynical About xAI’s Big Deal with Anthropic
Anthropic has taken over the entire compute capacity of xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, effectively turning the facility into a dedicated cloud for its enterprise AI products. The arrangement signals a strategic shift for xAI, now renting out...
The Instax Wide 400 Builds on Instant Photography’s Simplicity and Stretches It, Literally
Fujifilm’s Instax Wide 400 retails for $175 and prints 62 × 99 mm photos, roughly twice the size of Mini frames. The camera is a pure point‑and‑shoot device with automatic flash, focus and exposure, and it includes a close‑up lens attachment and a four‑speed...
Nvidia Has Already Committed $40B to Equity AI Deals This Year
Nvidia has committed more than $40 billion to equity investments in AI companies during the first months of 2026, according to CNBC. The bulk of the sum—$30 billion—targets OpenAI, while the remaining funds cover multi‑billion‑dollar stakes in firms such as Corning ($3.2 billion)...
Laid-Off Oracle Workers Tried to Negotiate Better Severance. Oracle Said No.
Oracle announced layoffs affecting an estimated 20,000‑30,000 employees on March 31, offering a severance package of four weeks’ pay plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks, and one month of COBRA. The company did not accelerate...
San Francisco’s Housing Market Has Lost Its Mind
San Francisco’s ultra‑luxury market is seeing unprecedented price spikes, with a six‑bedroom Cow Hollow home selling for $15 million—nearly double its $7.95 million list price—and a Presidio Heights property fetching $8.2 million, also about double asking. Redfin data shows luxury sales rose 22%...
Prime Video Follows Netflix and Disney by Adding a TikTok-Like ‘Clips’ Feed in Its App
Amazon announced a new short‑form video feed called “Clips” within the Prime Video app, debuting in the United States. The vertical, TikTok‑style carousel showcases brief snippets of Prime shows to entice viewers to add titles to their watchlist, share them,...
Intel’s Comeback Story Is Even Wilder than It Seems
Intel’s stock has rocketed 490% over the past year, reflecting Wall Street’s confidence in a potential turnaround. CEO Lip‑Bu Tan, who assumed the role in March 2025, has focused on high‑profile external deals—securing a sweetheart agreement with the U.S. government,...
Porsche Shutters E-Bike, Battery, Software Subsidiaries as Part of Company Overhaul
Porsche announced the closure of three subsidiaries—Cellforce Group, eBike Performance, and Cetitec—affecting more than 500 employees. The move follows a sharp drop in sales across North America, China, and Europe, prompting a strategic refocus on its core automotive business. Porsche...
Mother Ventures Is Looking at Moms as the ‘Economic Engine’
Mother Ventures, led by serial entrepreneur Allison Stern, closed a $10 million debut fund dedicated to startups that serve mothers, a demographic that accounts for 85% of U.S. household purchases and wields roughly $2.4 trillion in spending power. Since its inception two...
Poland Says Hackers Breached Water Treatment Plants, and the US Is Facing the Same Threat
Poland’s Internal Security Agency disclosed that hackers breached five water‑treatment plants, potentially gaining control of industrial equipment and endangering water safety. The agency linked the attacks to Russian intelligence activity, though it did not confirm the perpetrators. Similar incidents have...
US Defense Contractor Who Sold Hacking Tools to Russian Broker Ordered to Pay $10M to Former Employers
Former L3Harris executive Peter Williams was ordered to pay $10 million in restitution, on top of a prior $1.3 million judgment, after stealing and selling advanced hacking tools to Russian broker Operation Zero. Williams, an Australian‑born former intelligence officer, exploited his full access to...
How Anthropic’s Mythos Has Rewritten Firefox’s Approach to Cybersecurity
Anthropic’s Mythos model, released in April 2026, has become a core tool for Mozilla’s Firefox security team, surfacing thousands of high‑severity bugs, including dormant vulnerabilities dating back over a decade. In April alone, Firefox shipped 423 bug fixes—an order‑of‑magnitude jump...
Police Arrest SMS Blaster Crew that Sent Malicious Messages to Thousands Across Toronto
Toronto police arrested three men and filed 44 charges for operating the country’s first known SMS blaster. The device spoofed cellular towers, hijacking 2G connections to flood tens of thousands of phones with phishing‑laden texts. Authorities say the operation disrupted...
Exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Get in Front of 10,000 Decision-Makers Before Space Runs Out
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will convene more than 10,000 founders, investors and operators in San Francisco from October 13‑15, and offers a limited number of 6‑foot exhibit tables. For $12,500, exhibitors receive a fully branded booth, five all‑access passes, lead‑capture tools, and extensive TechCrunch...
China’s Moonshot AI Raises $2B at $20B Valuation as Demand for Open Source AI Skyrockets
Moonshot AI, the Beijing‑based lab behind the Kimi series of open‑weight large language models, raised roughly $2 billion in a new financing round, pushing its valuation to $20 billion. The round was led by Meituan’s venture arm Long‑Z Investment and included Tsinghua...
Spotify Wants to Become the Home for AI-Generated Personal Audio
Spotify has launched a beta command‑line interface that lets developers use AI code models to generate personal podcasts and upload them directly to their own Spotify library. The tool works with OpenAI Codex, Anthropic Claude Code, and OpenClaw, requiring a...
Lucid Motors Doesn’t Know How Many EVs It Will Build This Year
Lucid Motors announced it can no longer confirm how many electric vehicles it will produce or sell in 2026, pulling its earlier guidance of 25,000‑27,000 units. The shift follows a CEO transition and a 12% workforce reduction that will cost...