Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: Truecaller faces mounting pressure as growth slows in India, its largest market, while telcos, Apple, and Google roll out caller ID and spam-blocking features — Truecaller is one of the world's most widely used caller identification platforms, with more than 500 million users.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Citizen Lab details two spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's locations — Security researchers have uncovered two separate spying campaigns that are abusing well-known weaknesses in the global telecoms infrastructure to track people's locations.
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: LinkedIn profile review shows Thinking Machines Lab has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other employer; TML's headcount now stands at ~140 — Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing …
Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch: Beehiiv rolls out new creator tools, including metered paywalls, letting creators host webinars for up to 10,000 people, AI analytics, and more — It's been clear for a while that Beehiiv wants to be more than just a newsletter platform. The L.A.-based company announced a slew of updates …
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Apple fixes a bug that stored notifications for deleted messages on iPhone and iPad, following a report that police used it to extract deleted Signal messages — Apple released a software update on Wednesday for iPhones and iPads fixing a bug that allowed law enforcement to extract messages …
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: Source: Mira Murati's TML signed a deal with Google Cloud, valued in single-digit billions, to access Google's latest AI systems built on Nvidia's GB300 chips — Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has signed a new multi-billion-dollar agreement to expand …
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch: Tesla expands its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026 — Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Appfigures: app releases across the App Store and Google Play grew 60% YoY in Q1, with App Store releases alone up 80%, possibly driven by AI coding tools — Everyone said AI would kill apps. Instead, new app launches are soaring. — According to a new analysis from market intelligence …
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: Bill Peebles, the researcher behind Sora, is leaving OpenAI, along with Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI's CTO of enterprise applications — OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company's science research initiative, and Bill Peebles …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Bluesky says a sophisticated DDoS attack is to blame for continued app outages but it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data — Bluesky's website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: Loop, which uses AI to predict supply chain disruptions, raised a $95M Series C co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund — Supply chains are messy. San Francisco-based startup Loop isn't content helping companies merely clean up their supply chains.
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an “early sign” of generalization, surprising researchers — Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old, San Francisco-based robotics startup that has quietly become …
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm invest $60M in London-based self-driving tech startup Wayve as part of an extension to its $1.2B Series D, announced in February — Chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm have invested $60 million into UK self-driving technology startup Wayve as part of an extension …
Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch: Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match scanning tool to support 30+ languages — In February, Spotify made an exciting (and a bit unusual) move when it entered the world of physical book sales.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: Flipkart and Amazon's quick commerce push in India is intensifying competition in an already crowded space where profitability remains under pressure — India's quick commerce market is booming, with demand more than doubling for some players. But the fast-delivery push by Flipkart …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: X is rolling out worldwide automatic post translation powered by xAI's Grok models, and updates its iOS image editor to add tools like drawing and blurring — Social media platform X is now rolling out a new feature that automatically translates posts. The company is also launching …
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: The Trump administration proposes cutting CISA's budget for 2027 by $707M+ to help the agency refocus on its “core mission”, not “weaponization and waste” — The Trump administration is planning to cut the budget of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by at least $707 million for 2027.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Adobe launches Acrobat Spaces, a free AI-based study tool to help students generate flashcards, mind maps, quizzes, and Express presentations without logging in — Adobe Acrobat has largely catered to professionals with its recent AI features. Now, the company is turning its attention …
Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch: Xoople, which is developing a satellite constellation to collect earth data for training AI models, raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to $225M — Space data companies have argued for years that the private sector needs their products, but the real uptake has been from government buyers.
Kate Park / TechCrunch: Japan, driven by labor shortages, is increasingly adopting robotics and physical AI, with a hybrid model where startups innovate and corporations provide scale — Physical AI is emerging as one of the next major industrial battlegrounds, with Japan's push driven more by necessity than anything else.
Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch: Fabless AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400M in a pre-IPO round at a $2.34B valuation, bringing its total funding to $850M, with $650M in the past six months — Fresh off a successful Series C funding round in November, the South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million.
Kate Park / TechCrunch: New York-based Qodo, which offers AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, raised a $70M Series B led by Qumra, taking its total funding to $120M — As AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code each month, a new bottleneck is emerging: ensuring that software works as intended.
Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch: Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark and EQT at a $1.1B valuation, and plans to launch Starcloud 2 later in 2026 — Starcloud's latest funding round values the space compute company at $1.1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Report analyzing payments of 28M US consumers shows Claude adding paid subs at a steadily increasing pace; Anthropic: paid subs have more than doubled this year — Whatever the final outcome for Anthropic from its feud with the Department of Defense, the attention it has generated …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: WhatsApp rolls out features and updates: an AI tool to suggest replies based on a user's conversations, the ability to touch up photos with Meta AI, and more — WhatsApp is rolling out a slew of new features and updates, including one that generates AI-powered suggested replies based on your conversations.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Mistral launches Voxtral TTS, an open-source enterprise text-to-speech model that supports nine languages, including Hindi and Arabic, based on Ministral 3B — French AI company Mistral released a new open-source text-to-speech model on Thursday that can be used by voice AI assistants or in enterprise use cases like customer support.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Mirage, formerly Captions, which develops an AI video editing and marketing suite, raised $75M from General Catalyst, after moving to a freemium model in 2025 — Mirage, the maker of video editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF).
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: In a Kleiner podcast interview, DOD official Emil Michael says he will “never forget” nor “forgive” Uber investors that ousted him and Travis Kalanick in 2017 — Emil Michael, who serves as a senior technology official at the Department of Defense …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Cloaked, which offers security and privacy services such as VPNs, raised a $375M Series B in a mix of equity and growth funding, for enterprise expansion — Consumer-facing security tools often focus on one kind of modality, such as password protection, VPNs, or identity management.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Zendesk agrees to acquire Forethought, which makes AI-powered customer support software, for an undisclosed sum; Forethought has raised $115M — Zendesk is acquiring Forethought, a company that builds software to automate customer service interactions, the companies announced on Wednesday.
Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch: Google Research launches Groundsource, a geo-tagged time series dataset created by using Gemini to extract 2.6M flood events from 5M historical news articles — Flash floods are among the deadliest weather events in the world, killing more than 5,000 people each year. They're also among the most difficult to predict.
Kate Park / TechCrunch: Chinese brain-computer interface startup Gestala raised $21.6M co-led by Guosheng Capital and Dalton Venture at a $100M to $200M valuation, per CEO Phoenix Peng — Elon Musk's Neuralink and OpenAI-backed Merge Labs are pushing forward with brain-computer interface (BCI) technology in the U.S. Meanwhile …
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: Google closes its acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32B, marking Google's biggest acquisition ever; Google initially approached Wiz in 2024 — Google has officially acquired Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion in cash, a full year after the companies announced the deal.
Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: Amazon's Zoox partners with Uber to offer its robotaxis on the Uber app, starting in Las Vegas in late 2026 and expanding to LA in 2027; Zoox needs US approval — Amazon-owned Zoox plans to make its robotaxis available to hail on the Uber app in Las Vegas later this year, the two companies announced Wednesday.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Google rolls out Gemini-powered AI capabilities across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, including a “Help me create” tool in Docs to generate first drafts — Google announced on Tuesday that it's bringing a slew of new Gemini-powered AI capabilities to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: AI networking equipment startup Eridu emerges from stealth and raised a $200M Series A led by Socratic, John Doerr, and more, taking its total funding to $230M — Drew Perkins has been inventing computer network tech and building startups since the dawn of the internet age.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: IDC: India's PC market had its strongest year on record in 2025, with shipments up 10.2% YoY to 15.9M units; commercial buyers accounted for 52.9% of shipments — India's PC market had its strongest year on record in 2025, surpassing the surge in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic as millions …
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch: Cursor launches Automations, a new tool that lets users automatically launch agents triggered through new additions to a codebase, a Slack message, or a timer — As agentic coding spreads, the working life of a software engineer has become dazzlingly complex.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Eight Sleep, which sells smart mattress accessories to track sleep patterns and adjust temperatures, raised $50M at a $1.5B valuation, up from $500M in 2021 — Sleep tech company Eight Sleep today said that it has raised $50 million in a strategic round led by Tether Investments at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Xiaomi launches the €15 Xiaomi tag, an AirTag-like device that works with both Apple Find My and Android Find Hub, and the €300 Xiaomi Watch 5, in Europe — Xiaomi today launched a slew of gadgets ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona including a camera-focused flagship smartphone …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: Source: India issued a blocking order on February 24 to restrict access to developer database service Supabase; the government did not publicly cite a reason — Supabase, a popular developer database platform, is facing disruptions in India — one of its key markets — has been blocked in India, TechCrunch has learned.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Plaid allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8B valuation, up 31% from the $6.1B valuation in April 2025 and 40% below its $13.4B peak in 2021 — Plaid, a company that connects financial applications to users' bank accounts, enabling payments and data verification …
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch: Open source projects like VLC and Blender are seeing a decline in the average quality of contributions, likely as AI coding tools lower barriers to entry — A world that runs on increasingly powerful AI coding tools is one where software creation is cheap — or so the thinking goes …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: Bengaluru-based Sarvam, which is building AI models for local languages, launches its Indus chat app in beta, powered by its Sarvam 105B model — Sarvam, an Indian AI startup focused on building models for local languages and users, on Friday launched its Indus chat app for web and mobile users …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: General Catalyst plans to invest $5B in India over five years, an increase from the $500M to $1B previously announced, after merging with a local VC in 2024 — General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based venture firm with more than $43 billion in assets under management, has announced it plans …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Google rejected 1.75M policy-violating Android apps and blocked 80K+ developer accounts from Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36M apps and 158K accounts in 2024 — Fewer bad actors are targeting Google Play with malicious apps, the company says, a shift that the tech giant credits …
Tim De Chant / TechCrunch: DG Matrix, which builds solid-state transformers to handle up to 2.4 MW and boost data center power efficiency, raised a $60M Series A led by Engine Ventures — Data centers face a conundrum: how to power increasingly dense server racks using equipment that relies on century-old technology.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: A US federal judge orders OpenAI to stop using the word “Cameo” for its Sora products and features, in a trademark lawsuit filed by celebrity video app Cameo — A federal district court in Northern California ruled in favor of Cameo, a platform that allows users …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Airbnb expands its Reserve Now, Pay Later feature globally, after a US pilot for domestic travel saw a 70% adoption rate for eligible bookings — Airbnb said on Tuesday that it is launching its “Reserve Now, Pay Later” feature — which lets users secure bookings without immediate payment — globally.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Cohere releases Tiny Aya, a family of 3.35B-parameter open-weight models supporting 70+ languages for offline use, trained on a single cluster of 64 H100 GPUs — Enterprise AI company Cohere launched a new family of multilingual models on the sidelines of the ongoing India AI Summit.