An ambitious satellite builder will launch one of the highest-powered spacecraft ever built in the weeks ahead to demonstrate technology that will be required to build data centers in orbit. K2 Space, founded by brothers and former SpaceX engineers Karan and Neel Kunjur in 2022, has packed its satellite Gravitas …

Pre-Series A founders, this is your reminder! Nominations for Startup Battlefield 200 are still open, and the arena is already filling up. If you’ve been planning to apply, now’s the time to move. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, hand-selected startups won’t just pitch. They’ll step onto the stage and go head-to-head …

Social network Bluesky is gearing up for big changes with today’s news that the company raised $100 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Bain Capital Crypto, was closed in April 2025 but had not been disclosed until now. Others that participated in the round include existing investors …

The team behind Cove, a Sequoia-backed startup that was working on an AI-powered collaboration board, has joined Microsoft, according to an email sent to customers informing them that Cove’s service is shutting down. Cove was founded in late 2023 by Stephen Chau, Andy Szybalski, and Mike Chu, all of whom …

At Etsy, Zoë Weil helped to drive a billion-dollar increase in gross merchandise volume within a single year by improving the online marketplace’s AI ranking systems. With her new startup, Sequen, she aims to bring her and her co-founders’ years of AI research and product development to other businesses in …

Every new technology creates a new environment in which we work, but it’s not clear how AI will do that. One possibility is that the interface disappears entirely. That’s the vision of Josh Sirota, who founded the startup Eragon back in August and has just raised $12 million at a …

Artificial intelligence models are multiplying fast, and competition is stiff. With so many players crowding the space, which one will be the best — and who decides that? Arena, formerly LM Arena, has emerged as the de facto public leaderboard for frontier LLMs, influencing funding, launches, and PR cycles. In …

The fashion industry knows it has a waste problem. About one garbage truck of textiles is thrown away every second. Meanwhile, the industry generates more carbon pollution than international flights and maritime shipping combined. Some companies are experimenting with new ways to recycle textile waste, while others are developing new …

Electricity is a key raw material for artificial intelligence, but new processing techniques outstrip the ability of data center operators to manage their relationship with the power grid, forcing them to throttle down by as much as 30%. “There is so much power squandered in these AI factories,” Nvidia CEO …

Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan told a SXSW audience that he’s got “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping because he’s so excited to be working with AI agents. “I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview …