More than 76% of consumers in India prefer talking to businesses over a phone call, according to a recent study from Truecaller. Since voice is still consumers’ preferred way to communicate, that leaves a big opportunity to automate support and outreach calls using voice AI in the country. Voice AI startup Ringg, which already processes 20 million call attempts a month, is betting that…
Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica
August 26, 2026
Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica in a bid to build out its own design research lab, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. Lica’s co-founders will lead the effort.
Lica started off as an app that could turn screenshots and…
Accel-backed Keenable is indexing the web for AI agents
August 26, 2026
Search engines were built and optimized for people, who can’t spare the time or attention required to scan entire web pages. But as people increasingly use AI chatbots to search the web and do tasks, there’s a line of thinking that the internet’s current…
‘The world seems to be ready’: An interview with OpenAI head of product Thibault Sottiaux
August 26, 2026
Users of OpenAI’s software engineering tool Codex might know Thibault Sottiaux as the guy who resets their token limits whenever the product hits a growth milestone. Now, OpenAI is trying to bring that dopamine hit to the rest of us with ChatGPT Work, a platform for white-collar workers to leverage AI agents. I spoke to Sottiaux for our feature on the product and its challenges, but we…
Few of the top AI labs have published or demonstrated containment response plans, according to a recent study. A containment plan spells out what happens once an AI is caught trying to subvert human control – what access gets cut, and when the system gets shut down…
Everyone is buzzing about Instinct, an AI personal assistant still in private access, not only for its incredible capabilities, but also for its potential privacy concerns. The agent, a veritable taskmaster, has been praised as feeling “like magic” and being one…
How much control are you willing to give an LLM over your digital life?
Getting the most value from a model means giving it the keys. For a control freak or the AI-hesitant, it seems like a lot. For Andrew Ambrosino, the lead engineer for OpenAI’s desktop app, it’s the only way to test the future, which is why that app now has access to, and control over, his inbox, his Slack account…
Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is a smut-machine
August 24, 2026
Anthropic’s universal usage standards for Claude forbid the model from generating sexually explicit content, including depicting or requesting sexual intercourse or sex acts, generating content related to sexual fetishes or fantasies, or engaging in erotic chats. But…
Nvidia published some interesting new research on Friday suggesting it’s the harness, more than the underlying model, that is far more important when asking an AI to do long-horizon tasks. A harness is the software wrapper around an AI model – the tools, memory…
Starcloud, a startup developing satellites that can perform AI inference in orbit, told TechCrunch that it has added a $250 million extension to its March $170 million Series A funding round. The extension values the company at $2.3 billion.
The additional capital will allow the company to open a larger manufacturing facility and advance its largest orbital data center spacecraft, Starcloud-3…
