New types of design tools, such as Perplexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Flora, and Krea, have risen in popularity in the last few years, thanks to AI. These tools bank on the promise that, with AI, a product team with designers can iterate through variations quickly.
A new design startup, Dessn, now backed by $6 million in funding, believes that design tools that don’t let you…
Amazon Ring, facing a surge in customer-support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing startup Vapi to handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform.
That…
General Motors has laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees – in a deliberate skills swap: clearing out workers whose expertise no longer fits and making room for some with AI-focused backgrounds. GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it had…
Digg is back from the dead. Again.
Just months after launching, the reboot of Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing site shut down in March as the company shifted course. Originally redesigned as a competitor to the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it wasn’t able to effectively manage the bot traffic invading its platform and hadn’t differentiated itself enough…
There aren’t enough rockets for space data centers - Cowboy Space raised $275M to build them
May 12, 2026
The apparently insatiable demand for AI compute has data center entrepreneurs looking to the stars. There’s a key problem: There aren’t enough rockets to put data centers in orbit around Earth, and they’re too expensive.
Most of the players are hoping that SpaceX’s…
Artificial intelligence is changing the world, and simultaneously inventing a whole new language to describe how it’s doing it. Spend five minutes reading about AI and you’ll run into LLMs, RAG, RLHF, and a dozen other terms that can make even very smart people in the…
As was widely reported, Oracle axed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.
One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she…
Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies – including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon – that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI.
Cloudflare, which provides internet security and…
When Anthropic unveiled its new Mythos model in April, it also delivered a stern warning to anyone developing software. The model was so powerful at sniffing out software vulnerabilities, the lab claimed, that it had discovered thousands of high-severity bugs that would need…
Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but their open source models are still facing no shortage of interest from those who don’t mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap inference. And investors are taking notice.
Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab developing the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised about $2…
