Bret Taylor’s AI startup Sierra is raising a $950 million funding round led by Tiger Global and GV, the company announced Monday, pushing its post-money valuation above $15 billion. The raise gives Sierra more than $1 billion to work with – capital the company says it will use to become the “global standard” for AI-powered customer experiences.
Like a lot of AI companies…
In Harvard study, AI offered more accurate emergency room diagnoses than two human doctors
May 4, 2026
A new study examines how large language models perform in a variety of medical contexts, including real emergency room cases – where at least one model seemed to be more accurate than human doctors.
The study was published this week in Science and comes from a research…
AI dictation apps have come a long way in a short time. For years they were slow and inaccurate – unless you spoke with a particular accent and enunciated clearly.
Advances in large language models (LLMs) and speech-to-text models have changed that, producing systems…
Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate.
At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time…
FDA approval, fundraising, and the reality of building in healthcare according to BioticsAI founder
May 1, 2026
Founders building in the healthcare space can’t just build fast and break things. Timelines stretch longer, stakes are higher, and success depends on navigating systems that reward rigor over speed.
That’s exactly the reality Robhy Bustami, co-founder and CEO of…
Financial services platform Stripe is introducing a digital wallet specifically built for the AI era, where autonomous agents can perform tasks that include shopping, paying for reservations, buying tickets, and more.
At its annual conference this week, the company…
Artificial intelligence continues to advance at a dizzying clip, forcing enterprises to develop and release new products quicker than ever or risk becoming irrelevant to a faster-moving competitor.
Salesforce believes it has found a strategy that allows it to keep up even if it isn’t clear where AI is headed next. The customer management software giant is crowdsourcing its AI roadmap in real…
In a Pacific conflict, the nearest U.S. drone factory is thousands of miles away. Ships and planes carrying parts to the front lines would be vulnerable to attack. Defense startup Firestorm Labs thinks the answer is a drone factory that fits inside a shipping container.
The…
Shapes, an app where humans and AI characters chat together in shared group conversations, is emerging from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Think Discord, but with AI characters alongside humans.
Founded in 2022, Shapes has more than 400,000 monthly active users.
Colby Adcock’s Scout AI raises $100M to train its models for war: We visited its bootcamp
April 30, 2026
At a U.S. military base in central California, four-seater all-terrain vehicles roam hillside trails. This is a training exercise, but not for the people in the vehicles: It’s an effort to train AI models to enter conflict zones.
The autonomous military ATVs are operated by Scout AI, a startup founded in 2024 by Colby Adcock and Collin Otis that calls itself a “frontier lab for…
