TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 is the flagship early-stage startup competition held at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, spotlighting the world’s most promising young companies. Each year, thousands of applicants from around the globe vie for one of 200 slots in the cohort, which provides unparalleled visibility, access to top-tier investors, and opportunities to grow.

Early-stage startups from around the world are joining the Startup Battlefield email list to be the first to know when applications open this month. Don’t miss a beat if you’re ready to join the action.

What is Startup Battlefield?

Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images

Startup Battlefield 200 is a highly selective startup launch program designed to prepare early-stage startups for visibility, investment, and scale. Each year, TechCrunch hand-selects 200 companies to gain unmatched exposure, credibility, and opportunities to scale faster than they ever imagined:

Free exhibit space at TechCrunch Disrupt for all three days

Exclusive access to masterclasses and curated networking

Direct exposure to top-tier press and investors

A chance to pitch live at Disrupt

A shot at the main Disrupt Stage to compete for a $100,000 equity-free prize and the iconic Disrupt Cup

Alumni who’ve entered Startup Battlefield

Startup Battlefield’s track record is among the strongest in the industry — alumni represent 1,700+ companies that have collectively raised over $32 billion and include well-known names such as:

Dropbox.

Discord.

Cloudflare.

Trello.

Mint.

… and many others that have gone on to significant exits and growth.

Image Credits:TechCrunch

What to expect in 2026

In 2026, Startup Battlefield 200 will once again bring together a global cohort of high-potential early-stage startups building across AI, climate, health, fintech, and beyond.

Applications will open in the middle of this month and close in mid-June. Selected startups will be notified around September 1, when the virtual preparation program begins — designed to help founders refine their story, sharpen their pitch, and get ready for the pitch of a lifetime on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage.

Ready to join the battle this year?

For founders and investors alike, Startup Battlefield 200 remains one of the most influential global early-stage startup stages — a place where breakout companies get seen, funded, and scaled.

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Don’t miss a moment of the action: Join the Startup Battlefield mailing list to be the first to know when applications open next month.

The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports.

In several cases over recent months, Homeland Security has relied on the use of administrative subpoenas to seek identifiable information about individuals who run anonymous Instagram accounts, which share posts about ICE immigration raids in their local neighborhoods. These subpoenas have also been used to demand information about people who have criticized Trump officials or protested government policies.

Unlike judicial subpoenas, which are authorized by a judge after seeing enough evidence of a crime to authorize a search or seizure of someone’s things, administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies, allowing investigators to seek a wealth of information about individuals from tech and phone companies without a judge’s oversight.

While administrative subpoenas cannot be used to obtain the contents of a person’s emails, online searches, or location data, they can demand information specifically about the user, such as what time a user logs in, from where, using which devices, and revealing the email addresses and other identifiable information about who opened an online account. But because administrative subpoenas are not backed by a judge’s authority or a court’s order, it’s largely up to a company whether to give over any data to the requesting government agency.

Administrative subpoenas are not new; the use of these self-signed demands by Trump officials to seek identifiable information about people who are critical of the president’s policies has raised alarm.

Bloomberg reported last week that Homeland Security sought the identity of an anonymous Instagram account called @montocowatch, which says its goal is to share resources to help protect immigrant rights and due process across Montgomery County in Pennsylvania. This comes amid an ongoing federal immigration crackdown across the United States, which has drawn widespread protests and condemnation. Homeland Security lawyers sent an administrative subpoena to Meta demanding it turn over personal information of the person who runs the account, citing a non-Homeland Security employee who claimed to receive a tip that ICE agents were being stalked.

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the account owner, said there was no evidence of wrongdoing and that recording police, sharing that recording, and doing so anonymously is legal and protected under the First Amendment. Homeland Security withdrew its subpoena without providing an explanation.

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The ACLU called the subpoena “part of a broader strategy to intimidate people who document immigration activity or criticize government actions.”

Bloomberg reported the effort to unmask the @montcowatch account was not an isolated incident, referencing at least four other cases where Homeland Security officials used administrative subpoenas in efforts to identify the people running Instagram accounts publishing content critical of the government. Those subpoenas were also withdrawn after the account owners sued to block the attempt.

Tech companies have in recent years published transparency reports that detail how many government demands for data they receive. But most do not break out how many judicial and administrative subpoenas they receive over a period of time, even though the two kinds of demands are fundamentally different.

When asked by TechCrunch, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan did not say if Meta provided Homeland Security any data involving @montcowatch or if the company was asked to provide information about the account another way.

A new report by The Washington Post on Tuesday found that an administrative subpoena was also used to seek information from Google about an American retiree within hours of him after sending a critical email to Homeland Security’s lead attorney Joseph Dernbach. The retiree’s home was later visited by federal agents inquiring about the email.

The Post described the retiree as someone critical of Trump during his first term, who attended a No Kings rally last year, regularly attends gatherings and protests, and wrote criticisms to lawmakers, all actions protected under the First Amendment.

Within five hours of emailing the Homeland Security lawyer — who was named in an article about the case of an Afghan the U.S. was trying to deport and whose email address is listed on the Florida Bar’s website — the retiree received an email from Google, according to The Washington Post. The email notified him that his account had been subpoenaed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The subpoena demanded to know the day, time, and duration of all his online sessions, his IP address and physical address, and a list of each service he used, and any other usernames and identifiable information relating to his account, such as his credit card, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers.

Two weeks later, Homeland Security agents were on his doorstep, asking him questions about the email that he sent to Dernbach, which the agents conceded broke no laws.

Google spokesperson Katelin Jabbari told TechCrunch the company pushes back against overbroad or improper subpoenas, “as we did in this instance,” referring to the subpoena referenced in The Washington Post’s reporting.

When asked by TechCrunch, Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin would not say why the U.S. was seeking information about people who have been critical of the Trump administration and accounts documenting ICE activity, or say for what reason the subpoenas were withdrawn.

“HSI has broad administrative subpoena authority under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(d) and 19 U.S.C. § 1509(a)(1) to issue subpoenas,” said McLaughlin, referring to Homeland Security Investigations, an investigative unit within ICE.

Not all companies are able to hand over data about their customers. For instance, information that is end-to-end encrypted and can only be accessed by obtaining a person’s phone or devices. That said, many companies are still able to provide large amounts of information about their users, including where they log in, how they log in, and from where, which may allow investigators to unmask anonymous accounts.

End-to-end encrypted messaging apps, like Signal, have long championed how little data it collects about its users. The messaging app responds to occasional legal demands by stating that it is unable to produce user data that it does not have to begin with.

The reliance on U.S. tech giants is another reason why European countries and ordinary consumers are seeking to rely less on American tech giants, at a time when chief executives and senior leaders at some of the largest U.S. tech companies are overtly cozying up to the Trump administration.

Skyryse, an El Segundo, California-based aviation automation startup, has raised more than $300 million in a Series C investment, pushing its valuation to $1.15 billion and into unicorn territory.

The round, which was announced Tuesday and led by Autopilot Ventures, provided a multimillion-dollar accelerant for the startup as it nears the end of a lengthy Federal Aviation Administration certification process for its flight control system. The capital will also be used to integrate its operating system, known as SkyOS, across numerous aircraft, including U.S. military Black Hawk helicopters.

Other investors in this round include Fidelity Management & Research Company, ArrowMark Partners, Atreides Management LP, BAM Elevate, Baron Capital Group, Durable Capital Partners, Positive Sum, Qatar Investment Authority, RCM Private Markets Fund managed by Rokos Capital Management, and Woodline Partners. The startup, which was founded in 2016, has raised more than $605 million in equity capital.

Image Credits:Skyryse

Skyryse has made inroads with investors as well as the U.S. military, emergency medical service operators, law enforcement, and private operators for its simplified flight system. The startup has stripped out dozens of mechanical flight controls like gauges and switches and replaced them with a system containing several flight computers that automate the more complicated and dangerous aspects of flying.

This is not a fully autonomous system; a pilot must still handle the operations. But it’s designed to automate the trickiest aspects of flying, enhance the skills of pilots, and improve safety.

That simplicity and ease of operation — a literal swipe of the finger on a touchscreen — has won over companies like United Rotorcraft, Air Methods, and Mitsubishi Corporation, which have contracts with Skyryse to integrate SkyOS on a variety of helicopters and airplanes.

Skyryse started building and testing its system on helicopters, one of the most unstable aircraft to operate. But the idea is that SkyOS can be applied to any aircraft. That initial operating system, known as Skyryse One, automates takeoff and landing and fully automates hover and engine-out emergency landings. The company has since integrated the operating system on Black Hawk helicopters.

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Skyryse has made progress on its certification process with the Federal Aviation Administration. Last year, the FAA granted final design approval for the company’s SkyOS flight control computers. Skyryse must now complete formal flight testing and verification to achieve full certification.

Apple is bringing agentic coding to Xcode. On Tuesday, the company announced the release of Xcode 26.3, which will allow developers to use agentic tools, including Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex, directly in Apple’s official app development suite.

The Xcode 26.3 Release Candidate is available to all Apple Developers today from the developer website and will hit the App Store a bit later.

This latest update comes on the heels of the Xcode 26 release last year, which introduced support for ChatGPT and Claude within Apple’s integrated development environment (IDE) used by those building apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple’s other hardware platforms.

The integration of agentic coding tools allows AI models to tap into more of Xcode’s features to perform their tasks and perform more complex automation.

The models will also have access to Apple’s current developer documentation to ensure they use the latest APIs and follow the best practices as they build.

At launch, the agents can help developers explore their project, understand its structure and metadata, then build the project and run tests to see if there are any errors and fix them, if so.

Image Credits:Apple

To prepare for this launch, Apple said it worked closely with both Anthropic and OpenAI to design the new experience. Specifically, the company said it did a lot of work to optimize token usage and tool calling, so the agents would run efficiently in Xcode.

Xcode leverages MCP (Model Context Protocol) to expose its capabilities to the agents and connect them with its tools. That means that Xcode can now work with any outside MCP-compatible agent for things like project discovery, changes, file management, previews and snippets, and accessing the latest documentation.

Developers who want to try the agentic coding feature should first download the agents they want to use from Xcode’s settings. They can also connect their accounts with the AI providers by signing in or adding their API key. A drop-down menu within the app allows developers to choose which version of the model they want to use (e.g. GPT-5.2-Codex vs. GPT-5.1 mini).

In a prompt box on the left side of the screen, developers can tell the agent what sort of project they want to build or change to the code they want to make using natural language commands. For instance, they could direct Xcode to add a feature to their app that uses one of Apple’s provided frameworks, and how it should appear and function.

Image Credits:Apple

As the agent starts working, it breaks down tasks into smaller steps, so it’s easy to see what’s happening and how the code is changing. It will also look for the documentation it needs before it begins coding. The changes are highlighted visually within the code, and the project transcript on the side of the screen allows developers to learn what’s happening under the hood.

This transparency could particularly help new developers who are learning to code, Apple believes. To that end, the company is hosting a “code-along” workshop on Thursday on its developer site, where users can watch and learn how to use agentic coding tools as they code along in real time with their own copy of Xcode.

At the end of its process, the AI agent verifies that the code it created works as expected. Armed with the results of its tests on this front, the agent can iterate further on the project if need be to fix errors or other problems. (Apple noted that asking the agent to think through its plans before writing code can sometimes help to improve the process, as it forces the agent to do some pre-planning.)

Plus, if developers are not happy with the results, they can easily revert their code back to its original at any point in time, as Xcode creates milestones every time the agent makes a change.

New York City and others like it are filled with old buildings that are for the most part fine, except they’re not all that comfortable to live in. Built in an era when massive boilers were cutting-edge technology, the buildings are usually too hot or too cold, but seldom just right.

There are companies trying to rectify that using clever horseshoe-shaped heat pumps. Superficially, they’re similar to window air conditioners, except they don’t block the view and they can heat as well as cool.

Gradient makes one of those heat pumps, but now it’s adding a twist: In multifamily buildings, it can link every one of its window units together. The startup shared with TechCrunch exclusive details about the new Nexus software and service.

“Multifamily buildings are an ignored sector,” Vince Romanin, chief technology officer at Gradient, told TechCrunch. “It’s a place where we can do better for the user.”

The startup is mostly targeting old buildings that need HVAC upgrades. Gradient has worked with the New York City Housing Authority to install its heat pumps in public housing, and it ran a pilot in Tracy, California, in a newer two-story affordable-housing complex. It’s also talking with colleges and universities, many of which have dorms that weren’t built with hot autumn weather in mind.

Old buildings often have one electric meter, which can tempt residents into overusing their heating or air conditioning. Nexus gives some control back to building managers. They can set guardrails to prevent people from overusing the heat or AC — either intentionally or otherwise — while still allowing them to be comfortable. In one instance, a building manager set the heating limit at 78˚ F, and the next day energy consumption dropped by a quarter.

Romanin said Gradient’s heat pumps are the “lowest-cost option” for old buildings with boilers that are reaching end of life, a common occurrence in New York City. As a bonus, units that previously only had a steam radiator now get air conditioning, future proofing the units against worsening heat waves.

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By installing a window unit rather than a minisplit, retrofits can happen within hours. They also don’t require electrical upgrades, Romanin said. In buildings with old electrical wiring that can’t support a full 12 amp load on a single outlet, Nexus can reduce the draw, said Mansi Shah, senior vice president of product and software at Gradient.

That strategy can extend beyond the building too. When the grid is overwhelmed by demand, which can happen on hot summer days, Gradient is working on a way to dial back its heat pumps while still maintaining occupant comfort. By using information about the building along with feedback from sensors in the heat pumps, the company hopes to predict which units can reduce their air conditioning demand, like those on the shady side of a building. That sort of demand response can help the grid serve more heat pumps without requiring costly upgrades.

“There’s a lot of people who said when we electrify everything, the grid won’t handle it,” Romanin said. “I think that it is very possible to electrify everything and make the grid better, make the grid’s job easier, and make electrons cheaper.”

Henry Soong is trying to make vertical microdrama series that don’t suck. That makes the Watch Club founder quite unique within this multibillion-dollar industry of apps that churn out formulaic, cringe-worthy content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending.

“Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl! I fell in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf, and his mother is a vampire, and she disapproves of me!’” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this can be so much bigger than just sloppy, AI-adjacent romance soap operas.”

Soong’s comments are a little combative, but they’re not wrong. Competitor ReelShort made $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year, while DramaBox made $276 million. The quality, he said, is so milquetoast that it could feasibly be made using AI-generated scripts.

What would be the earning potential for a microdrama app that makes shows that are actually good and worth talking about?

Soong is trying to answer that question with Watch Club, an app with microdrama stories made by SAG and WGA actors and writers (leading apps like DramaBox and ReelShort do not use union talent).

Soong, a former Meta product manager who describes himself as “a fangirl, through and through,” thinks that what makes TV so special is the communities that form around them. Given his experience working on social products, he’s also seeking to differentiate Watch Club from existing microdrama apps by embedding a social network within it.

“I think you can actually build such a more interesting business if you take what makes TV truly the most fun,” he said, pointing out “Heated Rivalry” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You watch it, and then you just want to gossip with your three best friends about it, or see what 100,000 funny, clever other young women or gay people on the internet are saying.”

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Right now, people chat about “Severance” theories on Reddit, or they react to the “Stranger Things” finale on Tumblr. Before Twitter became the cesspool that is X, you had to work hard to avoid “Succession” or “White Lotus” spoilers. Soong sees the potential of housing both the show and the fan forums in one place.

How will that app make money? Like most early-stage, venture-funded companies, that’s a question to punt for now, until it’s clear how users are engaging with the app. The answer may be ads, but the idea alone was interesting enough to secure seed funding led by GV. Watch Club also received checks from individuals like Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte, as well as current and former executives from Hulu, HBO Max, and Meta. Upside Ventures, the firm run by major U.K. YouTubers the Sidemen, also participated.

Soong doesn’t have a background in film, which is why he brought in Devon Albert-Stone as founding producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a slate of 10 shows.

“We work with brilliantly talented people when they have a few months free to go work on something that may not be huge budget because we offer them huge creative latitude to go do something that Amazon would never let them do at a speed and velocity that feels way more exciting than the glacial pace of the television industry,” Soong said.

He added: “I’m really good at figuring out how to monetize businesses that seem almost impossible to monetize.”

At Meta, his mission from 2016 to 2019 was to figure out how to make money in China, a country where no one could use Meta’s products. By 2019, Soong said, Meta generated $5 billion per year of ad sales for companies within China who wanted to advertise to audiences outside of the country.

Chinese ad sales may not be as glamorous as film and TV, but that job gave him additional context to understand the business model behind microdrama apps, which boomed in China at the end of the last decade.

“Right around the time that I was leaving Meta [in 2019] is when these Chinese micro drama apps started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so that Americans and Germans would download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know this business playbook. I know how expensive and capital-intensive it is, and I think you can build a way better microdrama business if you aren’t 100% dependent on paid user acquisition.”

Watch Club will have its first opportunity to test its concept when it releases its first show, “Return Offer,” which it plans to distribute on its app with daily episodes. On Tuesday, the company shared the first trailer for the show — which is about a group of tech interns in San Francisco competing for a return offer.

“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can give birth to the thing that supplants streaming television, and part of doing that is by building welcoming, creative sets with talented professionals, where people are having fun, despite small budgets, making something wonderful,” Soong said.

A growing number of people are asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other LLMs about their health, often discovering that the chatbots provide remarkably useful medical insights.

KJ Dhaliwal (pictured left), who in 2019 sold the South Asian dating app Dil Mil for $50 million, says he has been thinking about the inefficiencies of the U.S. healthcare system ever since he was a child acting as a medical translator for his parents, and he saw the advent of LLMs as an opportunity to do something about it.

In May 2024, he launched Lotus Health AI, a free primary care provider that’s available 24/7 in 50 languages. On Tuesday, Lotus announced it raised $35 million in a Series A round co-led by CRV and Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total funding to $41 million.

People are already consulting AI about their health, but Lotus goes a step further: it moves beyond those chats to facilitate actual medical care, including diagnosis, prescriptions, and specialist referrals.

In essence, Lotus is building an AI doctor that functions like a real medical practice, equipped with a license to operate in all 50 states, malpractice insurance, HIPAA-compliant systems, and full access to patient records.

The key difference is that the majority of the work is done by AI, which is trained to ask the same questions a doctor would.

Since AI models are also prone to hallucinations, the company always has board-certified human doctors from top health institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, and UCSF review the final diagnoses, lab orders, and medical prescriptions.

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Lotus has developed an AI model that, similar to OpenEvidence, synthesizes the latest evidence-based research with a patient’s history and clinical answers to generate a treatment plan.

“AI is giving the advice, but the real doctors are actually signing off on it,” Dhaliwal told TechCrunch.

Lotus recognizes the limits of virtual care. For urgent health issues, Lotus directs patients to the nearest urgent care center or emergency room. And if a case requires a physical examination, the platform refers the patient to an in-person physician, Dhaliwal said.

Outsourcing such a significant portion of medical decision-making to AI is an ambitious bet given the regulatory hurdles in healthcare. For instance, physicians are restricted to seeing patients only in the states where they hold a license.

As CRV general partner Saar Gur, who led the deal and joined the company’s board, put it: “There are many challenges, but it’s not SpaceX sending astronauts to the moon.”

Gur (pictured right), an early investor in DoorDash, Mercury, and Ring, is convinced that the telemedicine frameworks established during the pandemic, combined with recent breakthroughs in AI, allow Lotus to navigate many of the existing regulatory and engineering hurdles.

“It’s a big swing,” Gur said. But for an investor like Gur, that’s the draw: Lotus is attempting to fundamentally reimagine the entire primary care model.

At a time when primary care doctors are in short supply, Lotus claims it can see 10 times as many patients as a traditional practice, even when it limits each visit to 15 minutes.

The startup isn’t the only one building an AI doctor. Lightspeed-backed Doctronic is one of the competitors. Lotus is differentiating itself — at least for now — by offering its entire suite of care completely free of charge.

Dhaliwal said that eventual business models may include sponsored content or subscriptions, but the current focus remains entirely on product development and attracting patients rather than revenue.

In Brief

All startups accepted into YC will soon have the option to receive their seed checks via stablecoins, crypto YC partner Nemil Dalal told The Block.

YC’s famous “standard deal” is that it invests $500,000 into startups accepted into its program in exchange for 7% of their companies. Now that deal is hitting the blockchain (Base, Solana, and Ethereum, to be exact), starting with the upcoming spring batch.

Dalal said that stablecoin transfers are often more effective, specifically for founders working in emerging markets. But also, YC is putting its money where its mouth is, so to speak. Last fall, YC partnered with Base and Coinbase Ventures to encourage founders to build more blockchain-related companies.

Interest in blockchain tech is on the rise again in Silicon Valley as the U.S. has taken steps toward more formal, crypto-friendly regulation of the industry.

The city’s tech scene is reeling as U.S. immigration agents have escalated their crackdown in Minneapolis, killing several people, including at least two U.S. citizens.

Eight Minneapolis-based founders and investors told TechCrunch that they have put much of their work on hold and now spend their days focused on their communities, volunteering at churches, and helping buy food. It’s part of a grassroots effort, across race and class, that is seeing people speak out, donate money, protest, and offer emotional support to one another.

“There’s a lot of commonality between how a teacher is reacting right now and how a tech professional is reacting,” Scott Burns, an investor in the area, told TechCrunch. He said people are “very fatigued.” Burns is going to church more often to help pack food to deliver to those too frightened to leave their homes. “It was like what happens after a natural disaster,” he said of the effort.

Burns and other members of the Minneapolis tech industry told TechCrunch that the immigration raids have been very disruptive to their lives, describing a city that has seen itself united in the last several weeks in the face of escalating violence from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

How can building a company remain a focal point when ICE agents appear to be everywhere, plainclothed and armed with military-grade weapons? Federal agents have been seen searching public transportation and prowling around workplaces. They are outside homes and in parking lots. They have been spotted circling schools.

One Black founder, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect members of his staff, said he now carries his passport with him everywhere he goes. He is a U.S. citizen but has seen people of color throughout the city profiled and picked up by ICE and border patrol agents.

“People aren’t exaggerating how hard it has been. It’s hard to focus; it’s been a challenge just navigating even my team through it,” he said.

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He recalled a routine phone meeting with a colleague who suddenly fell silent. Lost for words, the colleague said she was watching ICE detain someone in the neighborhood, the same one his mother lived in.

“I had to get off the phone and call my mom to make sure she had her passport on her,” the founder said.

Protesters clash with law enforcement after a federal agent shot and killed a man on Jan. 24. the second federal-involved shooting in the city this month, deepening tensions over enforcement operations in Minneapolis, United States, on January 24, 2026. Image Credits:Arthur Maiorella/Anadolu / Getty Images

A community, disturbed

Efraín Torres, a Latino founder, works from home, listening tentatively to the immigration raids that happen in his neighborhood. “You can’t not hear them,” he told TechCrunch. Cars will beep. Protestors whistle alerts. “And if you miss it, you’ll see signs saying, ‘My neighbor was taken by ICE.’”

Officials even perform “citizen checks,” stopping people and asking them to prove immigration status — which the Supreme Court said last year can be done based on details like race or if a person has an “accent.” These checks have been conducted on people performing even mundane tasks, Torres said, like snow-blowing the lawn. He said he’s had a few run-ins himself with ICE, which is why he likes to stay low.

“The line separating me from being a victim of assault is just a chance encounter,” he said, adding that he knew people who were followed by ICE — something others have reported is happening alongside raids.

The Trump administration has escalated its immigration raids throughout the country, though the force deployed in the Twin Cities is especially large, with more than 3,000 federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge.” ICE and border patrol agents now outnumber local police in Minneapolis almost 3 to 1, Senator Amy Klobucharof Minnesota has said.

The state is home to one of the largest populations of immigrants from Somalia, a group the administration has targeted before. That includes U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, who has sparred with President Trump. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, has also seen himself targeted by the president, as has the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, whio is also a Democrat.

The surge in immigration enforcement is part of President Trump’s campaign promise to curb illegal immigration, though some argue that Trump has been specifically targeting cities and states that didn’t vote for him. More than 2,000 people have been arrested by ICE in Minnesota since Trump took office last January.

“It’s been difficult,” said one Black investor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He, too, is a U.S. citizen and can trace his roots in the country back for a century. Still, living just outside the city, he carries his passport with him just in case.

“Where I go to the gym, they’re in rural Minnesota,” he said, meaning agents aren’t only in the city. “It’s just been a strange time.”

A demonstrator holding a sign that reads “Stop Minnesota Massacre” while joining a protest. Protesters gathered to demand the removal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from the capital and to call for federal accountability. The demonstrations follow the recent deaths of two Minnesota residents, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti during separate encounters with immigration agents in Minneapolis. Image Credits:LightRocket / Getty Images

Everyone is doing what they can, however, to help others. This investor, for example, works with founders in college, many of whom are immigrants. He buys them food so they don’t have to risk going to the grocery store themselves. He also tries to work from home, when possible, as do many of the other people TechCrunch spoke with.

“It’s a tense and difficult time on the ground,” Mary Grove, another investor in the area, told TechCrunch.

Investor Reed Robinson, who has also been helping community members financially, said some of his founders with children have created a volunteer system to watch each other’s kids at school or daycare. It’s so common for ICE to detain the daycare staff, he said, adding that ICE agents frequently violate the law and court orders.

“It feels unnecessary, it feels intrusive, it feels like a violation of rights,” Robinson said about the immigration operation.

Like Robinson, many people feel anger beneath the unease and fear.

The emotional toll makes it hard to build, investors and founders said. Torres, for example, said his company now has a no-ride-sharing-app policy. Some of his engineers are on H-1B visas (which the Trump administration has also attacked) and have reported being followed by immigration officials.

“Each time, it was three to four armed men in tactical outfits,” Torres said, adding that he and his wife have spoken about fleeing the state. “They’re inflicting trauma everywhere they go.”

Grassroots efforts prevail as corporate leaders disappoint

The Minneapolis tech scene is still quite small, with companies raising just over $1 billion in the past few years. There are some notable companies in the ecosystem, such as the fintech Sezzle (now public), the clean water company Rorra, and the medtech Reema. There is an incredible history of innovation, Robinson said. “It’s not going to stop; we’re going to continue to do the work while we figure out this current situation.”

The Twin Cities — Minneapolis and St. Paul — are the headquarters of some of the biggest American companies, such as Target, Optum, Best Buy, UnitedHealthGroup, and General Mills, to name a few. Some founders and investors criticized the leadership of these big companies, mainly for their vague responses to the chaos gripping the cities, even as many of their own employees are detained.

“We haven’t had an adequate response,” one startup investor said.

Sixty top executives from the state signed a statement that called for an “immediate de-escalation of tensions” after ICE agents killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Large companies in the state have also come together to fund millions in grants through the Minneapolis Foundation for businesses impacted by the immigration operation.

Protesters hold a vigil for Alex Pretti, the man fatally shot by federal immigration enforcement the previous day in Minneapolis, United States, on January 25, 2026. Image Credits:Anadolu / Getty Images

But compared to what is happening on a grassroots level, many founders and investors said these actions are not enough. A recent CNBC poll found that a third of the executives they polled have stayed silent because they didn’t find speaking out relevant to the business. Eighteen percent were worried about “backlash from the Trump administration,” while 9% said they were still figuring out how to respond.

“When you see the failure of community institutions to demonstrate any kind of bravery, that’s really where it’s probably most disappointing,” Tim Herby, a local investor, told TechCrunch, calling the past two months heart-wrenching.

Grove, the investor, said her team routinely checks in with others in the community, including her portfolio companies, to ensure they are doing well. She said people are helping each other pay rent, while restaurants are offering free meals. A local tech nonprofit, Minnestar, is set to host a community event to bring people together and discuss next steps.

One Black investor said he found it ironic that today, the police are alongside many people in speaking out against the government, just a few years after people in the city were protesting against them after the murder of George Floyd. It’s a new day-to-day.

Another Black founder, meanwhile, said some of his white friends have started to drive him around the city for safety. He recalls one day sitting in a restaurant chatting with friends, when the television started giving live updates of ICE shooting another person. The mood fell somber, a reminder of how these raids have consumed every moment of life.

“I saw a friend yesterday,” he said. “It was the first time he left the house since New Year’s.”

In Brief

As Intel continues to try to turn itself around, its CEO promised that the company will start producing a new type of chip, one that has been made very popular by rival Nvidia.

At the Cisco AI Summit on Tuesday, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced that the company will start producing graphics processing units (GPUs). These are more specialized processors, compared to the CPUs Intel traditionally produces, and are used for gaming and tasks like training artificial intelligence models.

TechCrunch reached out to Intel for more information.

The project will be overseen by Kevork Kechichian, the executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center group, according to reporting from Reuters. Kechichian was hired in September among a slew of new engineer-focused hires.

Intel also hired Eric Demers for the effort in January. Demers was previously at Qualcomm for more than 13 years, most recently serving as a senior vice president of engineering.

This initiative seems to be in relatively early stages as Tan said the company plans to develop its strategy around customer demands and needs.

While Nvidia didn’t invent the GPU, that specific kind of chip has played a large role in its success. Its GPUs for AI systems are so advanced and popular, the chipmaker currently holds a commanding market lead.

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It’s interesting to see Intel expand into this area now as Tan said the company would be consolidating and focusing on its core businesses when he took the helm as CEO last March. While GPUs are still semiconductors, of course, this is still a notable expansion.

In Brief

French police and Europol searched the local office of X, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday.

The raid is part of an ongoing investigation launched in 2025 on allegations of “fraudulent extraction of data” of an automated data-processing system “by an organized group.”

French prosecutors’ cybercrime unit said the investigation has now been expanded to cover other alleged crimes, including complicity in possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, privacy violations, and Holocaust denial.

The expansion of the investigation comes as X and its owner Elon Musk face widespread criticism for allowing its Grok AI to be used to generate nonconsensual imagery, including child abuse imagery, of other people on its platform.

Musk, who bought X (previously Twitter) in 2022, and former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino were summoned for questioning on April 20. Unnamed X staffers were also summoned for the same week, per the prosecutor’s announcement.

When reached for comment, X spokesperson Rosemarie Esposito referred to a statement posted on X’s Global Government Affairs account, in which the company said “the allegations underlying today’s raid are baseless and X categorically denies any wrongdoing.”

A spokesperson for eMed, where Yaccarino is now the chief executive, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

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When reached for comment, Maylis De Roeck, a spokesperson for the Paris prosecutor’s office, confirmed the raid in a statement: “The Public Prosecutor’s Office’s objective is ultimately to ensure platform X’s compliance with French law, given that it operates within the national territory.”

This story was updated to include X’s statement.

The Trump administration’s approach to immigration has reached a level of violence that the tech industry cannot ignore. In 2026 so far, federal immigration agents have killed at least eight people, including at least two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis — Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As immigration enforcement has grown more extreme — even detaining school children seeking legal asylum — tech workers have called on their leaders to speak up.

The tech industry has always been entwined in politics. Companies like Palantir, Clearview AI, Flock, and Paragon are contracted by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and assist in the agency’s crackdowns. But as President Trump took office last year, his industry connections have grown. Elon Musk ran a government agency for months, and prolific Silicon Valley investor David Sacks is leading an advisory board on technology for the president. The CEOs behind some of the largest companies in the country — like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai — had prime seats at Trump’s inauguration and have remained allied with him.

“We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco,” ICEout.tech, a group of tech industry workers opposing ICE, wrote in a statement on January 24, the day of ICU nurse Alex Pretti’s death. “Big tech CEOs are in the White House tonight,” the statement added, referring to a screening of a documentary about Melania Trump where Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and Zoom’s Eric Yuan were in attendance. “Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities.”

Some of tech’s biggest players have since spoken out, to mixed reception from their employees and the industry. Below, we are keeping an ongoing list of what tech leaders have had to say.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor, published an editorial in the San Francisco Standard on January 29, calling on Silicon Valley to stop trying to be neutral in the wake of the Minnesota killings.

“We in Silicon Valley can’t bend the knee to Trump,” Hoffman wrote. “We can’t shrink away and just hope the crisis will fade. We know now that hope without action is not a strategy — it’s an invitation for Trump to trample whatever he can see, including our own business and security interests.”

He said he’s been encouraged to see more tech leaders speaking out, saying: “it’s a good start to something America needs much more of right now.”

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“Whichever candidates you may have supported in the past — or even if (like many of my friends in Silicon Valley) you don’t usually do politics — you almost surely did not want this,” he wrote.

Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly opposed Trump’s policies during his first term, but has changed his tune in the new administration as his company has struck deals to develop AI infrastructure for the U.S. government, including the gargantuan $500 billion Stargate project.

In the days following Pretti’s death, Altman addressed OpenAI staff in an internal Slack message, which was reported by The New York Times.

“What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right,” he said. “President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country.”

Altman added, “We didn’t become super woke when that was popular, we didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular, and we are not going to make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics or anything else. But we are going to continue to try to figure out how to actually do the right thing as best as we can.”

Dario Amodei, CEO at Anthropic

In an NBC interview, anchor Tom Llamas asked Dario Amodei about his views on defense in relation to current events. The anchor pointed out that Anthropic has a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, and that it has partnered with Palantir — which has supplied technology to ICE — on projects for that agency.

First, Amodei reaffirmed that Anthropic does not have any contracts with ICE, despite its relationship with the Defense Department, and emphasized his concern about “the need to protect democracies against autocracies” like China and Russia.

“I’m a big believer in, carefully, with guardrails, arming democracies to defend against these countries,” Amodei said, adding that these values persist in the context of internal American politics.

“We need to be really careful about making sure democracies are worth defending. We need to defend our own democratic values at home,” he said. “I believe some of the things we’ve seen in the last few days concern me about that.”

He also mentioned ICE’s raids in Minneapolis in a post on X, where he referred to “the horror we’re seeing in Minnesota.”

Tim Cook, CEO at Apple

Apple’s CEO addressed staff in an internal memo on January 27:

“This is a time for deescalation,” Cook said. He later added, “I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.”

Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal

Like the tech industry workers behind ICEout.tech, Signal President Meredith Whittaker has been outspoken about the role tech leaders have in social justice.

“I want everyone in tech who’s ever intoned about freedom, or their love of privacy, or their commitment to liberty, to join me in an unequivocal condemnation,” Whittaker wrote on X.

In another post, she said, “Masked agents of the US state are executing people in the streets and powerful leaders are openly lying to cover for them. To everyone in my industry who’s ever claimed to value freedom—draw on the courage of your convictions and stand up.”

As an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, Signal is often used by activists to organize community actions.

Tony Stubblebine, CEO at Medium

The leader of the online publishing platform Medium, Tony Stubblebine posted screenshots on Threads of a message he shared with staff in which he explains his reasoning for allowing employees to take part in a nationwide general strike if they so choose, though he clarified that he is “not in the business of dictating people’s politics.”

“I started the week in my own head and heart over what I was seeing in Minneapolis and really struggling with the idea that those two murders were just the tip of the iceberg of wrongs,” Stubblebine wrote.

In the memo, he writes about the difficulty of navigating his role as a tech CEO during this time, saying that it feels “awkward to navigate being both on-mission and on-money.” He added that he is thinking about the company’s “responsibility to make [its] stance clear, especially as many other tech orgs are donating to the Trump campaign and supporting the current administration’s agenda.”

Stubblebine also pointed out that Medium’s approach to its role as a web publisher reflects the greater values of the company — “for example, that we don’t allow things like hateful content or racist slurs on Medium.”

Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind

Jeff Dean has spoken out about his reaction to the killings in Minnesota.

“This is absolutely shameful,” Dean wrote on X, responding to a video of federal agents shooting Alex Pretti. “Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”

James Dyett, OpenAI’s head of global business

James Dyett posted on X about what he sees as hypocrisy in the tech industry.

“There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets,” Dyett said. “Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry.”

Keith Rabois, Ethan Choi, and Vinod Khosla, partners at Khosla Ventures

While Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois has publicly expressed support for ICE and the Trump administration’s practices, others at the firm have publicly opposed these views.

Rabois made incendiary comments on X after border patrol agents killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, prompting one founder to respond that that if he were a founder in Khosla Ventures’ portfolio, he would give the money back, calling Rabois “an embarrassment.”

Ethan Choi, another partner at Khosla Ventures, responded to the post to clarify that not everyone at the firm agrees with Rabois’ views. “I want to make it clear that Keith doesn’t represent everyone’s views here at [Khosla Ventures], at least not mine,” Choi wrote, adding: “What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong. Don’t know how you could really see it differently. Sad to see a person’s life taken unnecessarily.”

Vinod Khosla, the firm’s founder, reposted Choi’s message and called the federal agents “macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration.”

“The video was sickening to watch and the storytelling without facts or with invented fictitious facts by authorities almost unimaginable in a civilized society,” Khosla wrote. “ICE personnel must have ice water running thru their veins to treat other human beings this way. There is politics but humanity should transcend that.”

Khosla also posted on X that he agrees with Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, that more tech executives should speak out against the Trump administration.

TikTok has largely recovered from a slight dip in active users in the days following its ownership change, when a group of American investors took control of the video app’s operations in the United States. The decline, though brief, benefited competing video apps like UpScrolled and Skylight Social, which saw rapid user adoption as some looked for TikTok alternatives.

According to estimates from digital market intelligence firm Similarweb, TikTok saw usage dip into the range of 86-88 million daily active users in the U.S. immediately after the ownership change. That compares with a typical average of 92 million daily active users.

The app has bounced back to more than 90 million daily active users, indicating that many who left TikTok have since returned.

As TikTok saw a small dip in usage, alternative video-sharing apps UpScrolled and Skylight Social began growing quickly. Although only a tiny fraction of TikTok’s size, UpScrolled topped 138,500 daily active users at its peak on January 28; it has now dropped back down to 68,000.

Meanwhile, Skylight Social hit 81,200 daily active users, according to Similarweb’s estimates and has since dropped to 56,300 daily active users. Overall, Skylight Social saw its user sign-ups increase to 380,000 as of late January, the company told TechCrunch.

Image Credits:Similarweb

TikTok’s usage decline, which prompted some to try the new apps, wasn’t driven by the ownership change directly, but rather by how users feared it would impact their TikTok experience. There were growing concerns about TikTok’s updated privacy policy, which gave the app permission to track users’ precise GPS location. (This addition could be related to TikTok’s tests of a “Nearby” feed to show users videos from local creators, but was added to the policy alongside the change in ownership, leading to user backlash over privacy concerns.)

When reading the privacy policy anew, some users also discovered disturbing language, like how TikTok said it may collect users’ “immigration status,” among other personal data. However, this turned out to be a reference that was included because of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which requires businesses to inform consumers if they collect certain sensitive data. TikTok does that — in the sense that anything someone shares on the platform in their video content technically becomes part of the platform, so it requires disclosure.

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In addition, TikTok experienced an unfortunately timed, multi-day data center outage, which caused the app to not function properly, sometimes breaking search, likes, and comments, causing video glitches, disrupting the algorithm, and creating issues with the in-app chat. Users believed these glitches meant TikTok was now censoring their content, which sent them looking for alternatives.

The company announced on Sunday evening that the data center outage was resolved, chalking it up to a winter-storm-driven power outage.

As users made peace with the new terms and conditions and the outage-driven issues were resolved, users returned to the platform, Similarweb’s data shows. But there’s still hope for the newcomers, as the firm notes that TikTok’s usage has been slowly declining over the latter part of 2025, when usage peaked at 100 million daily active users from July to October 2025, compared with the 90+ million seen now.

Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman have announced the launch of a new AI startup called Luffu that aims to help families proactively monitor their health. The duo are developing an “intelligent family care system” that will start with an app experience and then expand into hardware devices.

Two years after their exit from Google, Park and Friedman are betting on AI to help lighten the mental burden of caregiving. According to a recent report, 63 million, or nearly 1 in 4, U.S. adults are family caregivers, up 45% from 10 years ago.

Luffu uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so families can stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.

“At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself,” Park said in a press release. “I was caring for my parents from across the country, trying to piece together my mom’s health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it hard to get complete, timely context from her about doctor visits. I didn’t want to constantly check in, and she didn’t want to feel monitored. Luffu is the product we wished existed—to stay on top of our family’s health, know what changed and when to step in—without hovering.”

Image Credits:Luffu

The pair note that today’s consumer health market is filled with tools for individuals, but that real life health is shared across partners, kids, parents, pets, and caregivers. Family information is scattered across devices, portals, calendars, attachments, spreadsheets, and paper documents.

With Luffu, people will be able to track the whole family’s details, including health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, doctor visits, and more. Users can log health information using voice, text, or photos. Luffu proactively watches for changes, and surfaces insights and alerts, such as unusual vitals or changes in sleep.

The pair told Axios that people can ask questions using plain language to ask about their family’s health, such as “Is Dad’s new meal plan affecting his blood pressure?” or “Did someone give the dog his medication?”

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“We designed Luffu to capture the details as life happens, keep family members updated and surface what matters at the right time—so caregiving feels more coordinated and less chaotic,” Friedman said in the press release.

People who are interested in Luffu can join the waitlist for the limited public beta.