TechCrunch

OpenAI moves beyond ChatGPT in India with a Pine Labs deal targeting enterprise payments and AI-driven commerce.

The deal comes nearly five years after Etsy purchased Depop for $1.62 billion, at a time when secondhand clothing apps were gaining traction during the pandemic.

The Def Con hacking conference banned hackers Pablos Holman and Vincenzo Iozzo, as well as former MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, from attending the annual conference after their reported connections with Jeffrey Epstein.

Startup founders are being pushed to move faster than ever, using AI while facing tighter funding, rising infrastructure costs, and more pressure to show real traction early. Cloud credits, access to GPUs, and foundation models have made it easier to get started, but those early infrastructure choices can have unforeseen consequences once startups move beyond []

Social network Bluesky now offers private messaging by integrating the startup Germ's E2E encrypted messenger natively in its app.

SeatGeek announced on Wednesday a new integration with Spotify, bringing a seamless ticket-buying experience for Spotify users. Now, when Spotify users browse an artists page or upcoming tour dates, they will see ticket links powered by SeatGeek for concerts at these participating venues, allowing for a streamlined purchase process. Currently, the integration is available for []

Amazon said Blue Jay's core tech will be used for other robotics projects and the employees who worked on it were moved to other projects.

Mastodon is looking to grow its open source, decentralized social network with new features aimed at creators.

The Figure data breach allowed hackers to steal customer names, dates of birth, physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.

The smartphone is available for preorder now with shipments starting March 5. It comes in Lavender, Berry, Fog, and Obsidian.

The feature will require customers to buy both versions of the title, but at a discounted price.

X's new immersive video player is designed to offer a more mobile-friendly experience, optimized especially for portrait-oriented videos.

Users will be able to use text, images, and videos as a reference to generate music.

The revenue milestone comes as Snap has added additional paid offerings outside of its core Snapchat+ subscription over the past year to diversify its revenue streams.

Kana, a new AI marketing startup from the founders of Rapt and Krux, has raised $15 million to build customizable, agent-based marketing tools.

Though crowded, the identity management market seems eager for new solutions, and Venice is finding traction.

Microsoft said the bug meant that its Copilot AI chatbot was reading and summarizing paying customers' confidential emails, bypassing data protection policies.

OpenAI says its India education partnerships aim to reach more than 100,000 students, faculty and staff over the next year.

The partnership will see the two companies exploring how World Labs models can work alongside Autodesks tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases.

The creative company's monthly active users increased 20%, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools.

The company is using edge models that take up only megabytes of space, can run on most phones with existing processors, and can work offline.

Tesla alumni Drew Baglino raises a large round to build a giga-scale factory, this time at his own startup.

The new lineup includes 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models; a text-to-speech model; a speech-to-text model; and a vision model to parse documents.

The startup is making solid-state transformers capable of intelligently aggregating power from a number of different sources before sending it to data center racks.

The decision comes a month after Tesla discontinued Autopilot, its basic driver-assistance system.

Amnesty International says it found evidence that a government customer of Intellexa, a sanctioned surveillance vendor, used its Predator spyware against a prominent journalist in Angola.

Jack Altman and Benchmark announced today that he would be joining the firm as a general partner.

A combination of 3D-printed Lego-like parts, Formula 1 thinking, and a bounty program will help the company hit that target. The team, led by Tesla veteran Alan Clarke, is obsessed with efficiency.

An internal research study at Meta found that parental supervision may not help teens regulate their social media, and teens with trauma are more inclined to overuse social media.

As the AI hardware space heats up, the iPhone maker has multiple smart products in development.

Thrive Capital just raised $10 billion for its new fund-- nearly double the size of its last fund.

By bringing an enhanced video podcasts viewing experience to its app, Apple is aiming to keep users from turning to rival platforms to watch their favorite shows.

Three U.S.-based AI companies raised rounds larger than $1 billion so far in 2026 with 14 others raising rounds of $100 million or more.

India is ramping up shared AI compute, adding 20,000 GPUs as part of a broader push to attract global AI investment.

Snapchat will let creators set their monthly subscription price.

Indian vibe-coding platform Emergent was launched just eight months ago, and it now says it's generating annual recurring revenue of more than $100 million, thanks to surging demand by small businesses and non-technical users.

SpendRule, launched last summer, is an AI-powered platform that helps healthcare systems track their spending.

Adani's plan targets up to 5 gigawatts of capacity, with data centers planned alongside partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and Flipkart.

The feature allows users to cancel eligible bookings if there is a change of plans -- without losing money upfront.

Under the partnership, Infosys plans to integrate Anthropic's Claude models into its Topaz AI platform to build so-called agentic systems.

Cohere's Tiny Aya models support over 70 langauges

According to a16z, it has eyes around the world in order to spot companies as early as local funds might.

The reason why this nascent startup had VCs lining up is the founders.They are so famed in the AI world, everyone tried to hire them.

From an AI research perspective, this is nothing novel, one expert told TechCrunch.

As India's first AI company to IPO, Fractal Analytics didn't have a stellar first day on the public markets, as enthusiasm for the technology collided with jittery investors in the wake of a sell-off in Indian software stocks.

India is hosting a four-day AI Summit this week that will be attended by executives from major AI labs and Big Tech, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state.

Terra Industries, the African defense company, announced Monday that it had secured an additional $22 million in funding to further expand the business.

C2i has raised $15 million as it tests a grid-to-GPU approach to reducing power losses in AI data centers.

Neysa is targeting deployments of more than 20,000 GPUs over time as demand for local AI compute accelerates.

OpenAI said OpenClaw will live on as an open source project.