Months after analysts warned that AI-driven demand for memory chips would ripple through consumer electronics, India is providing the strongest evidence yet that the disruption has arrived, with rising handset prices reshaping the smartphone market.
The memory chips in question – RAM and storage components – are the same ones tech giants need by the truckload to build AI data centers.
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their…
General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has landed a $400 million loan from Upper90, a tech investment firm. It might be the first deal to put up inference-specific chips as collateral – chips built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, rather…
How a former DeepMind researcher raised at a $300M pre-seed valuation before launching a product
July 17, 2026
Andrew Dai left Google DeepMind knowing visual AI was the frontier he wanted to stake his claim in. He pulled off a whirlwind fundraise that resulted in a more aggressive valuation-to-capital ratio than Thinking Machines, which raised one of the largest rounds in U.S. history.
In this episode of Build Mode, host and Startup Battlefield lead Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Andrew Dai, founder…
While the rest of the AI industry races to label its work as “AGI” or “superintelligence,” Alexandre LeBrun, the CEO of Yann LeCun’s world model startup, AMI Labs, avoids the terms altogether. Lebrun said in an interview with TechCrunch that the company doesn’t…
Applied Computing, a London-based startup that’s building a foundation AI model for the oil, gas, and petrochemical industry, has raised a $20 million Series A led by engineering giant KBR, with Databricks Ventures participating.
Founded in 2023, the startup targets oil…
Voice AI startups’ biggest unlock has been handling calls for enterprises in areas like sales, marketing, and customer support. Large organizations are offloading calls to voice model developers like ElevenLabs and Deepgram; infrastructure companies like Vapi, Retell, and LiveKit; and dedicated customer support shops like Decagon and Sierra.
San Francisco-based Rime is trying to gain an edge in…
Vint Cerf says his favorite place is where he’s never been before.
One of the architects of the protocols behind the open internet, Cerf left Google after 20 years last week, but he’s not done thinking about the digital future. Starting today, he’s advising Innovation…
Indian AI coding startup Emergent has raised $130 million in a Series C funding round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, a five-fold jump in six months.
The funding round was led by private equity firm Creaegis. New investors MNI Ventures-Claypond, Sentinel Global, and…
The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier
July 15, 2026
For several weeks this summer, the AI industry was fixated on Anthropic’s latest frontier models and Washington’s fight to control who was granted access to them. But while everyone was watching the frontier, developers kept building – and they weren’t waiting around for permission from the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world.
Chinese open-weight models accounted for 41% of downloads on…
