Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, a startup that builds customer service AI agents for enterprises, is convinced that the way humans interact with software will change in the near future. Last month, Sierra launched Ghostwriter, an agent designed to build other agents. With this “agent as a service” …

Every founder who applies to Startup Battlefield wants the same thing: the Disrupt Main Stage. Six minutes to pitch and demo live, in front of top-tier Silicon Valley investors. A dedicated TechCrunch article published as you present. A shot at the $100,000 equity-free prize and the Disrupt Cup. Here’s how …

Six months ago, Mercor was flying high after raising a massive $350 million Series C that valued the AI data training startup at $10 billion. But after admitting on March 31 that it was the target of a data breach, the company has been facing a world of trouble. Since …

In 2021, Anjuna Security was growing fast, hiring aggressively, and chasing a market that seemed limitless. By the end of that year, the venture-backed cybersecurity company had scaled to around 75 employees, building out sales, customer success, and support teams in anticipation of continued hypergrowth. As the market turned, enterprise …

Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email telling him that he was the 2026 recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing. “Yeah, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch. Back in 2009, the tech Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the tutelage of famed …

Is Poke an OpenClaw for the rest of us? That’s the idea coming from a new startup offering an AI agent that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp. The AI agent Poke launched publicly in March, allowing consumers to access a personal assistant that …

In 2022, California announced that it wanted to install 6 million heat pumps by 2030. So far, it has only installed about 2. 3 million, which means to make that goal, it would need to average about 2,000 installs per day for the next five years. Hitting that target could …

Asia AI data center provider Firmus on Monday announced a fresh $505 million raise led by Coatue at a $5. 5 billion post-money valuation. With this round, Firmus has raised $1. 35 billion in six months, it says. The Singapore-based data center company previously raised AU$330 million (approximately $215 million) …

It takes just a skim of Eclipse’s recent investments to see where this venture firm’s interests lie — and where it is headed. The Palo Alto-based VC, which saw its median deal size explode over the past several years, has poured an increasing amount of money into the “physical world. …

Arcee, a tiny 26-person U. startup that built a massive, 400B-parameter open source LLM on a $20 million shoestring budget, has released its new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking — and it’s the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” claims CEO Mark …