Author: Jason

We are thrilled to announce that Astro Teller, the head honcho of Alphabet’s X, the Moonshot Factory, will be joining us as a featured speaker at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The whole affair promises to be fun filled and rife with intel and insights that you won’t… Read more

Evernote founder Phil Libin is ready to liven up your video meetings. The entrepreneur’s video startup, mmhmm, launched in 2020 amid the pandemic, on Thursday unveiled its latest product: a video toolkit for online meetings called Airtime. The suite includes two related tools: a virtual camera that helps you appear more polished on video calls,… Read more

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has raised over $100 million in capital for his proptech startup, Flow, in a round that values that company at about $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.  Citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reported that existing backer Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participated in the financing. Neumann told Bloomberg that… Read more

For the first time in roughly five years, OpenAI is gearing up to release an AI system that’s truly “open,” meaning it’ll be available for download at no cost and not gated behind an API. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that OpenAI is aiming for an early summer launch, and targeting performance superior to open models… Read more

OpenAI is reportedly building its own X-like social network. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, The Verge reports. A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already use to help train… Read more

We’re thrilled to announce that Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder and CEO of Aetherflux, will be joining us for a rare, intimate fireside chat as part of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening series on June 18 on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. As with all of our StrictlyVC evenings, the event will feature just… Read more

Meta laid off employees on Thursday in its Reality Labs division, which encompasses various virtual and augmented reality projects. The cuts impact employees within Oculus Studios, which develops apps and games for Meta’s Quest headsets. Meta did not specify how many people were impacted by the layoffs but said that the cuts impacted people working… Read more

Meta may have managed to kill a bipartisan bill to protect children online, but parents of children who have suffered from online harm are still putting pressure on social media companies to step up. On Thursday, 45 families who lost children to online harms — from sextortion to cyberbullying — held a vigil outside one… Read more

Instagram Threads, Meta’s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying… Read more

The funeral of Pope Francis will be livestreamed on YouTube on Saturday. Pope Francis passed away earlier this week at age 88 due to a stroke and cardiac arrest. Vatican News’ YouTube channel will begin coverage of the funeral at 10 AM CET/4 AM ET, with availability in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German.… Read more