Nuclear startup X-energy began its investor roadshow Wednesday as it works toward its IPO, setting its target price between $16 and $19 per share, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If it lists at the high end, the startup could net $814.3 million.

X-energy and its peers have been riding a renewed wave of interest in fission power as demand for electricity has surged on the back of AI data centers and society-wide electrification.

Amazon is one of X-energy’s biggest backers. The tech giant led a $500 million Series C-1 round and has pledged to buy as much as 5 gigawatts of nuclear power from the company by 2039.

The IPO is sure to come as a relief to X-energy’s investors, which have put about $1.8 billion into the company, according to PitchBook. The startup had previously attempted to go public via reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, but the two parties canceled the deal in 2023 as the SPAC craze petered out.

X-energy’s reactor is what’s known as a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor. Inside, uranium encased in spheres of ceramic and carbon is cooled by helium gas. The gas then transfers heat to a steam turbine loop to generate electricity. The fuel design, known as TRISO, is expected to be safer than previous fuel arrangements, though it’s not widely used today.

The startup said in its SEC filing that it’s already embroiled in a patent dispute with another company that recently went bankrupt. Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) went bankrupt in 2024, and its assets were purchased in bankruptcy to form Standard Nuclear. X-energy alleges that USNC infringed on its fuel fabrication patents and that the matter hasn’t been resolved to its satisfaction during the course of the bankruptcy proceedings.

Outside of China, development of new nuclear reactors has all but stalled, stymied by delays and cost overruns. A new breed of startups hopes that by shrinking reactors, they’ll be able to overcome some of the challenges that have beset traditional designs.

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None of the small modular reactor startups have built a power plant yet, though several are racing to meet a deadline of July 4 set by the Trump administration.

While many might miss the arbitrary deadline, they’re still likely to achieve criticality, the moment when fission reactions become self-sustaining.

But the road from criticality to profitable power plants is likely to be long. Mass manufacturing can help bring costs down, but it usually takes around a decade for the process to start paying dividends. What’s more, the number of reactors these companies are planning to build might be more than other companies have attempted, but it might not be high enough to reap the true benefits of mass manufacturing.

X-energy expects that by the time its reactor production techniques are mature — what experts call “Nth-of-a-kind” — it will be able to bring costs down by 30% relative to the first-of-a-kind. Investors should pay close attention to how much that first reactor costs. It could make or break the company’s prospects.

In Brief

Google announced on Wednesday that it’s introducing a native Gemini app for Mac, catching up to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have had Mac apps for quite some time.

“Now, you can bring up Gemini from anywhere on your Mac with a quick shortcut (Option + Space) to get help instantly, without ever switching tabs,” Google explained in its blog post. “Whether you’re drafting a market report and need to verify a date or building a budget in a spreadsheet and need the right formula, you can get an answer and get right back to work.”

When using the new app, you’re able to share anything on your screen with Gemini to get help with what you’re looking at in the moment, including local files.

For example, if you’re looking at a complex chart, you could ask “What are the three biggest takeaways here?” and receive a summary.

The app also supports the ability to generate images with Nano Banana and videos with Veo.

The native macOS app is available to all Gemini users on macOS versions 15 and up, globally, starting today. It’s available for download at gemini.google/mac.

Doug Field, the high-profile executive who shaped Ford’s electric vehicle (EV) and technology strategies over the past five years, is leaving the automaker. Field’s departure was announced Wednesday as part of a broader reorganization of the company’s leadership.

Field joined Ford in 2021 with a robust resume from Silicon Valley that included leading Apple’s special projects team and serving as senior vice president of engineering at Tesla. His hiring was more than just a return to his professional roots. (Field began his career at Ford as a development engineer from 1987 to 1993.) The hiring was meant to drive Ford CEO Jim Farley’s vision to turn the legacy automaker into a leader in software, EVs, and other advanced technology.

Field directly reported to Farley, tasked initially with overseeing the company’s embedded software and hardware operations, covering vehicle controls, enterprise connectivity, features, integration and validation, architecture and platform, driver assistance technology, and digital engineering tools. In practice, this made him responsible for the design, development, and implementation of the entire tech stack used in Ford and Lincoln vehicles, including infotainment, navigation, driver-assist technology, connected services, and vehicle cybersecurity.

Field was a visible figure at Ford whom Farley often praised on the company’s earnings calls. He was among the key leaders when the automaker split its business into three units: the EV and digital services division, the traditional internal combustion engine business, and the commercial vehicles unit. And he was behind Ford’s skunkworks program — a secretive internal team — to build a low-cost electric vehicle.

Under the reorganization laid out Wednesday, Ford has created what it calls a “product creation and industrialization” team to be led by COO Kumar Galhotra. Ford’s electric vehicle and design team, which Field led, will be folded into this new organization.

The new organization comes with ambitious targets, including an 8% adjusted profit margin for its Ford+ commercial business by 2029. The team will also oversee Ford’s plan to refresh 80% of its North American portfolio by volume and 70% of its global portfolio by 2029. This will include the Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform, a mid-sized pickup, and the next-generation F-150 and F-Series Super Duty trucks.

The UEV platform is what the Ford skunkworks program — now known as the Advanced Development Projects team — developed. Alan Clarke, a former Tesla executive who has led that skunkworks program, is now vice president of Advanced Development Projects.

A federal jury found Wednesday that Live Nation has been operating as an illegal monopoly — a verdict that could lead to the breakup of the entertainment giant and its ticketing subsidiary, Ticketmaster, and bring relief to concertgoers who are sick of dynamic pricing and inexplicable service fees.

The ruling came as internal Slack messages surfaced during the trial showing Live Nation employees joking about taking advantage of customers — including one conversation about parking prices that prosecutors argued revealed the company’s true attitude toward its customers.

The verdict is the latest development in a web of litigation that began when the Department of Justice and 40 state attorneys general sued Live Nation in 2024 for alleged monopolistic practices. The two companies had merged in 2010 to form an entertainment giant that came to control the majority of ticket sales and venue bookings in the country, which made it more difficult for other companies to compete, according to the lawsuit. Without meaningful competition, customers had no choice but to accept Live Nation’s dubious pricing models, which critics say benefit the company’s bottom line, rather than artists.

Last month, the DOJ tentatively settled with Live Nation, while a separate state-level trial was already underway. But 34 of the attorneys general pressed forward — and on Wednesday, the jury delivered its verdict.

During the widely followed trial, the Slack messages surfaced between two Live Nation employees: Ben Baker, now head of ticketing for Venue Nation, and Jeff Weinhold, now a senior director in the ticketing department.

“These people are so stupid,” Baker said in a conversation about raising prices on parking. “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them BAHAHAHAHAHA.”

In a later conversation, also about parking prices, Baker said, “Robbing them blind baby.”

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Live Nation argued that these remarks represented “off-the-cuff banter, not policy, decision-making, or facts of consequence.”

As part of the DOJ settlement, Live Nation is supposed to pay a $280 million fine and divest at least 13 of its venues, requiring those venues to accept bookings from competing promoters. But given the jury’s finding that Live Nation operated as an illegal monopoly, the consequences might end up being more severe.

What happens next isn’t clear. Judge Arun Subramanian still has to determine remedies at a later date. But the possibility of breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster remains on the table.

Monarch Tractor’s assets have been acquired by construction giant Caterpillar, after struggling to pivot to a software services business, according to filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The acquisition, first reported by Bloomberg, caps a few tough years for Monarch as it went through multiple rounds of layoffs, was sued by three different dealers, and lost a major contract manufacturing partner in Foxconn. It also comes just a few weeks after co-founder and wine scion Carlo Mondavi said he was “pushed out” after disagreeing with CEO Praveen Penmetsa’s software-forward approach.

Mondavi couldn’t be immediately reached for comment. Penmetsa declined to comment beyond a statement Monarch issued last week, which said its technology had been acquired by an unspecified “large global equipment manufacturer.” Caterpillar didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Monarch raised more than $200 million over the last eight years. It was founded in 2018 by Mondavi, Penmetsa, and former Tesla executive Mark Schwager. The goal was to build “driver optional” electric tractors that were also capable of autonomously navigating wineries, fruit farms, and dairy farms.

While Monarch initially set out to build the small tractors at its own facility in Livermore, California, it eventually became one of four companies that partnered up with Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn to occupy a former General Motors factory in Lordstown, Ohio.

Foxconn planned to build vehicles for EV startups Fisker, Lordstown Motors, and IndiEV, as well as the tractors for Monarch. But Foxconn only ever made a few electric trucks for Lordstown Motors (which it bought the factory from) before that company went bankrupt. Fisker and IndiEV also went bankrupt before Foxconn could ever make those companies’ future vehicles at the factory. Foxconn did make a few hundred Monarch tractors at the factory, but the electronics giant sold the plant in August 2025 to SoftBank, leaving Monarch without a manufacturer.

By that point, Monarch was already struggling. It laid off staff in early 2024 before closing a $133 million funding round. Just a few months later it laid off even more employees and said it was restructuring to focus on software and licensing its autonomous tech.

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Dealers who purchased Monarch tractors have claimed the company’s autonomous tech never worked well in the first place. One dealer who sued Monarch in September 2025 said the tractors were “defective” and “unable to operate autonomously.” (Monarch denied the claims in a court filing.) Two other dealers have since filed similar federal lawsuits against Monarch. In one case, a former defense lawyer for Monarch wrote in a January filing that Monarch entered into an assignment for the benefit of creditors — an alternative to Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Mondavi spoke up about his departure last month in a comment on an Instagram post from a farmer who complained about Monarch’s tractors. The wine-maker wrote he “left over a year ago due to fundamental differences in approach” after seeing “reliability issues” with Monarch’s tractors on his farm, and on friends’ farms.

“I wanted to address them through hardware changes, while the CEO believed they could be solved more through software. I believed strongly in a different path but was ultimately blocked and pushed out alongside another co-founder,” he wrote.

The company auctioned off most of its remaining tractors earlier this year.

Agentic AI is the tech industry’s newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers. To that end, OpenAI has now updated its agents software development toolkit (SDK), introducing a number of new features designed to help businesses create their own agents that run on the backs of OpenAI’s models.

The SDK’s new capabilities include a sandboxing ability, which allows the agents to operate in controlled computer environments. This is important because running agents in a totally unsupervised fashion can be risky due to their occasionally unpredictable nature.

With the sandbox integration, agents can work in a siloed capacity within a particular workspace, accessing files and code only for particular operations, while otherwise protecting the system’s overall integrity.

Relatedly, the new version of the SDK also provides developers with an in-distribution harness for frontier models that will allow those agents to work with files and approved tools within a workspace, the company said. (In agent development, the “harness” is a term that refers to the other components of an agent besides the model that it’s running on. An in-distribution harness often allows companies to both deploy and test the agents running on frontier models, which are considered to be the most advanced, general-purpose models available.)

Screenshot Image Credits:OpenAI

“This launch, at its core, is about taking our existing Agents SDK and making it so it’s compatible with all of these sandbox providers,” Karan Sharma, who works on OpenAI’s product team, told TechCrunch.

The hope is that this, paired with the new harness capabilities, will allow users “to go build these long-horizon agents using our harness and with whatever infrastructure they have,” he said.

Such “long-horizon” tasks are generally considered to be more complex and multi-step work.

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OpenAI said it will continue to expand the Agents SDK over time, but initially, the new harness and sandbox capabilities are launching first in Python, with TypeScript support planned for a later release. The company said it’s also working to bring more agent capabilities, like code mode and subagents, to both Python and TypeScript.

The new Agents SDK capabilities are being offered to all customers via the API, and will use standard pricing.

Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns.

In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies.

The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR.

“Before GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020.

However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own.

Hightouch says that many brands initially attempted to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models — broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lack knowledge of specific brands — only to find the resulting images and videos failed to meet “on-brand” standards.

“Foundation models didn’t know about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts, tone, or assets,” Gupta says. “The LLMs would hallucinate products that didn’t exist, and you can’t do advertising and emails on products that don’t exist.”

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To ensure brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to its customers’ existing creative tools, such as the popular design platform Figma, photo libraries, and content management systems (CMS).

By pulling from these sources, the platform “learns” a company’s specific brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then use these photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers build personalized ad campaigns autonomously, without having to wait on designers or developers.

The goal of Hightouch’s AI is to create images and videos that look like they were made by professional designers, avoiding the “fake” or generic look often associated with AI.

“For example, Domino’s will never generate a pizza,” Gupta says. “They’ll always use existing images of pizza, and they’ll place it into an ad where the background might be generated, and other things might be generated around it.”

The company, which now employs approximately 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.

Pictured above, left to right: Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta

LinkedIn’s Blake Lawit, the chief global affairs and legal officer of the Microsoft-owned professional networking site, confirmed in an interview at the Semafor World Economy summit this week that the company’s data shows a decline in hiring of around 20% since 2022.

However, he pushed back at the idea that AI was to blame.

“At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills. It’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked — because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We’ve looked and, honestly, we haven’t seen it,” he said during his interview.

Instead, the executive suggested that the decline in hiring was more closely tied to a rise in interest rates.

Screenshot Image Credits:Semafor

“We have not seen the sort of impacts that you would expect to see in areas that everyone is talking about AI… like industries, whether or not it’s customer support, or administrative, or marketing — all these places that if we were seeing impacts [from] AI that’s where it would be,” Lawit continued.

“Yes, hiring’s down, but not down more,” he added.

Lawit also noted that LinkedIn’s data didn’t indicate that the decline in hiring of college-aged young adults getting their first jobs was “down more,” either, when compared with people who were in the middle of or later in their careers.

Still, he didn’t rule out that things could change.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen in the future, but not yet.”

On that point, however, Lawit had a warning of sorts. Lawit noted that over the last several years, the skills that are needed to do the average job have changed 25%. With the rise of AI, LinkedIn expects that figure to be 70% by 2030.

“So, even if you’re not changing jobs, your job’s changing on you,” he said.

In Brief

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) told two U.S. Senators that it plans to require data centers to disclose details about their energy use, according to Wired.

The development comes a month after Sens. Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter asking the EIA to gather data on data centers. The request was an effort to push the agency to cover an industry that is consuming ever-increasing amounts of energy.

The nationwide survey will be mandatory, Wired reports. The agency has not yet set a date for when it will implement the new questionnaire.

The EIA announced in March that it would conduct a pilot survey of 196 companies in Texas, Washington state, and the Washington, D.C.-Northern Virginia metro area, and in April it said it would launch a second survey in three different states. EIA chief Tristan Abbey expects the two pilot surveys to be complete in September, at which point it will begin developing the mandatory survey that will cover data centers nationwide.

Since its launch in 2021, Gizmo, an AI-powered learning platform that transforms students’ notes into interactive study materials, has attracted more than 13 million users across over 120 countries. This is a significant jump from the more than 300,000 users the platform had when TechCrunch last covered it in 2023.

And, as user adoption increases, investor interest is following suit. The company recently secured $22 million in Series A funding, according to its announcement on Tuesday.

The funding will go toward expanding Gizmo’s engineering and AI teams, as well as expanding its presence in the U.S. college market. The company, which had just seven employees prior to the raise, plans to scale to around 30, CEO Petros Christodoulou tells TechCrunch.

The company’s momentum comes at a time when student behavior is shifting. Academic performance in the U.S. has hit a historic low, according to the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Excessive screen time and reduced attention spans have been noted in previous studies as contributing factors.

Plus, with many young learners drawn to platforms like TikTok and YouTube, the biggest challenge for edtech startups is how to sustain engagement. Gizmo is betting that gamifying learning may be the solution.

Image Credits:Gizmo

Designed for teenagers and young adults, Gizmo believes that its appeal is the use of game mechanics to drive engagement. Features like leaderboards, streaks, limited daily lives for incorrect answers, and the ability to challenge friends are designed to keep users coming back.

Other micro-learning platforms have also gained traction in recent years, such as Anki, Quizlet, and Nibble, alongside newer entrants such as Yuno and Knowt, which have all attempted to redirect screen-time habits into productive learning. However, for a young learning app like Gizmo to grow this much interest in just a few years is notable. For comparison, Yuno touts 1 million app downloads, and Knowt has more than 7 million users.

The Series A round was led by Shine Capital, with participation from Ada Ventures, Seek Investments, GSV, and NFX, which previously led Gizmo’s $3.5 million seed round.

After helping lead the lawsuit that bankrupted media firm Gawker, Aron D’Souza says he saw something broken in the American media system: People who felt harmed by coverage had little recourse to fight back.

His solution is software. D’Souza says his latest startup, Objection, aims to use AI to adjudicate the truth of journalism. And for the price of $2,000, anyone can pay to challenge a story, triggering a public investigation into its claims. (D’Souza is also the founder of the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-style competition that allows performance-enhancing drugs and is set to debut in Las Vegas next month.)

Objection launched on Wednesday with “multiple millions” in seed funding from Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, as well as VC firms Social Impact Capital and Off Piste Capital.

Thiel, who funded the Gawker lawsuit partly in defense of the individual right to privacy, has long been critical of the media. D’Souza says his goal is to restore trust in the Fourth Estate, which he argues has collapsed over decades. Critics, including media lawyers, warn Objection could make it harder to publish the kind of reporting that holds powerful institutions to account, particularly if that reporting relies on confidential sources.

Anonymous sources have played a key role in major award-winning investigations into corruption and corporate wrongdoing. These are often people who are at risk of losing their jobs or facing other retaliation for sharing important information. It’s the journalist’s job — alongside their publication’s editors, peers, and lawyers — to ensure that those sources are reliable and not acting out of pure malice and to verify the information they provide.

Image Credits:Objection AI

But that’s not enough for D’Souza, who said “using a fully anonymized source who hasn’t been independently verified” would lead to a lower evidence and trust score on Objection. Under the platform’s rubric, primary records like regulatory filings and official emails carry the most weight, while anonymous whistleblower claims are ranked near the bottom. Those inputs are collected in part by a team of freelancers — former law enforcement agents and investigative journalists — and are ultimately fed into what Objection calls an “Honor Index,” a numerical score the company says reflects a reporter’s integrity, accuracy, and track record.

“Protecting a source’s information is a vital way of telling an important story, but there’s an important power asymmetry there,” D’Souza told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “The subject gets reported upon, but then there’s no way to critique the source.”

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His solution presents a lose-lose for journalists: either divulge sensitive source information to Objection’s “cryptographic hash” that determines “if it’s high quality reporting,” or face demerits for protecting sources who share important information at great personal risk. If technology like Objection takes off, it could chill whistleblowing, experts argue.

Jane Kirtley, a lawyer and professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, says Objection fits into a long pattern of attacks that erode public trust in the press.

“If the underlying theme is, ‘Here’s yet another example of how the news media are lying to you,’ that’s one more chink in the armor to help destroy public confidence in independent journalism,” she said, adding that clearly journalists need to do their part to be as transparent as possible in their reporting.

Kirtley pointed to existing journalistic standards, like the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which advises reporters to use anonymous sources only when there is no other way to obtain the information. She also cited longstanding industry practices like peer criticism and internal editorial review as built-in accountability methods. More broadly, she questioned whether Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are not steeped in journalistic traditions are equipped to evaluate what serves the public interest.

D’Souza says Objection is not an attempt to silence whistleblowers: “It’s an attempt to fact-check; it’s the same as [X’s] Community Notes. The wisdom of the crowd plus the power of technology to create new methods of truth-telling.”

When asked if Objection could make it harder for media to publish important stories holding power to account, he said “If it raises the standards of transparency and trust, that’s a good thing.”

He calls Objection a “trustless system” with transparent methodology that relies on a jury of large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, and Google, prompted to act as average readers and evaluate evidence claim by claim. The company’s chief technologist, ex-NASA and SpaceX engineer Kyle Grant-Talbot, leads the technical development on the platform, which D’Souza says is designed to apply scientific rigor to disputes over facts.

The proposal comes as AI systems themselves face scrutiny over bias, hallucinations, and transparency — all of which could complicate their use as arbiters of truth.

While Objection can be applied to any published content, including podcasts and social media, D’Souza’s focus remains largely on legacy and written media outlets.

“Each objection is limited to a single factual allegation,” D’Souza said in a follow-up email. “This means that even where reporting is long and complex, an objection will be limited to a narrow factual issue within it. A user may choose to file multiple objections to different parts of the same article, but these will all proceed independently of each other.”

Objections cost $2,000, a steep price for most Americans but relatively minor for wealthy individuals or corporations that might otherwise turn to the courts. D’Souza said he expects the platform to serve people who feel misrepresented in the media. But critics note that those who are most able to use Objection are likely to be the same powerful actors who already have other avenues to push back.

“The fact that this is a pay-to-play kind of system … tells me that they are less concerned about providing helpful information for the general public and much more concerned with giving the already powerful a means to basically browbeat their journalistic opponents,” said Kirtley.

First Amendment and defamation lawyer Chris Mattei was even more blunt, saying the platform “seems like a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful.”

“At a time when so many try to obscure the truth, we should be encouraging whistleblowers with knowledge of wrongdoing,” said Mattei, who is a leading litigator. “The purpose of this company seems to be the opposite.”

The system also only evaluates evidence submitted to it, including party submissions and material gathered by its investigators, raising questions about how it handles incomplete or undisclosed information, which is common in investigative reporting.

When asked how he would prevent misuse, such as companies targeting unfavorable coverage or the system itself lacking sensitive evidence, D’Souza said journalists can submit their own evidence to protect their reputations. That effectively requires reporters to participate in a system they didn’t opt into, one that could further put their credibility on the line. If they don’t, the system may return an “indeterminable” result, potentially casting doubt on reporting that is accurate but difficult to verify publicly.

Image Credits:Objection AI

Even when Objection finds no issue with a story, a companion feature called “Fire Blanket” can still introduce doubt about its credibility. The tool, currently active on X via platform APIs, flags disputed claims in real time by posting warnings — injecting the company’s own “under investigation” labels into public conversations while the claim is still under review.

Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at UCLA, said the platform itself would not likely violate free speech protections, framing it instead as part of the broader ecosystem of criticism that surrounds journalism. He compared the concept to opposition research that’s aimed at reporters instead of politicians, and dismissed the idea that it would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers.

“All criticism creates a chilling effect,” he told TechCrunch.

Whether anyone adopts it, or simply tunes it out, may determine whether Objection reshapes journalism or fades into the growing ecosystem of tools attempting to do so.

Or as Kirtley said: “Why would you believe that AI would necessarily give you more reliable information about the truth or fals[ity] of fact than a journalist who had researched and written the story? I mean, why would you just assume that? I wouldn’t assume that at all.”

Editor’s note: Because D’Souza’s proposal centers on transparency and accountability, we have published a link to the full transcript, edited lightly for length and clarity.

In Brief

Glydways, a San Francisco-based startup developing personal autonomous pods designed to operate on dedicated 2-meter-wide lanes in cities, has raised $170 million in a Series C funding round.

The round was co-led by Suzuki Motor Corporation, ACS Group, and Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Mitsui Chemicals and Gates Frontier, and new investor Obayashi Corporation also participated.

Now it seems the startup is already in discussions to raise another $250 million in funding that would push its valuation to more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reported.

Glydways has made progress on its concept, which it claims can move up to 10,000 people per hour, per lane and reduce infrastructure costs by up to 90% compared to rail. The startup, founded in 2016, is launching three operational pilots this year in Atlanta, New York City, and the United Arab Emirates. The company is aiming to launch large-scale operations in 2027.

The novel idea has attracted influential backers, including OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who invested in Glydways’ Series B. Investor Vinod Khosla, who sits on the startup’s board, previously told TechCrunch that Glydways — and not robotaxis — was the better solution for cities. Khosla noted the startup’s transport system could replace most cars in most of our cities in the next 25 years.

“That sounds radical, but these entrepreneurs want to make that happen, and I’m pretty certain it will happen, and it’s not robotaxis; it’s not Waymo. It’s a much better solution.”

In Brief

Accel announced on Tuesday that it raised $5 billion in fresh capital to back late-stage companies.

The venture firm told Bloomberg that $4 billion will go to its late-stage Leaders Fund, for which it hopes to cut at least 20 checks, averaging $200 million each. Accel is looking to invest in companies building AI-powered technology, with a focus on software, hardware, robotics, defense tech, and data center infrastructure.

Accel limited partners also poured in $650 million, which will go to a “sidecar” fund, Bloomberg reported, allowing the firm to increase its investments in certain companies.

Accel has backed more than 800 companies to date, including Anthropic, Perplexity, and Lovable. This latest fundraise comes as the firm hopes to keep up with the AI boom competition.

A spokesperson for Accel did not respond to a request for comment.

Emergent, an Indian startup known for its vibe-coding platform, has launched Wingman, a messaging-first autonomous AI agent, as it expands into a growing category of software that runs in the background to complete tasks — popularized by tools like OpenClaw and Claude from Anthropic.

The Bengaluru-based startup initially gained attention for its vibe-coding platform, which competes with tools like Cursor and Replit and lets users without technical backgrounds build full-stack applications via natural-language prompts. With Wingman, Emergent is now pushing beyond creation into execution, aiming to let AI agents handle routine tasks across tools and workflows.

“The obvious next step for us was, can we help them not just build the software, but actually operate more autonomously through it?” said Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO of Emergent. “You move from software that supports the business to software that can actively help run it.”

Emergent said more than 8 million builders have used its vibe-coding platform to create and deploy software, with over 1.5 million monthly active users. Founded in 2025, the startup raised $70 million in January at a valuation of $300 million, with backing from investors including SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Image Credits:Emergent (screenshot)

Wingman is designed to operate through messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, allowing users to assign and monitor tasks through chat. At the same time, the agent runs in the background across connected tools such as email, calendars, and workplace software. It can carry out routine actions autonomously but seeks user approval for more consequential steps, the startup said.

The launch comes as autonomous AI agents emerge as a key battleground in the industry, with a growing number of companies racing to build tools that can complete tasks on behalf of users. Projects like OpenClaw — previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot — have gained traction among early adopters, while players including Anthropic and Microsoft are working toward addressing this space with their own agent-based systems.

Emergent is attempting to differentiate by embedding Wingman into messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Apple’s iMessage, allowing users to interact with the agent via chat rather than adopting a new interface. The startup also introduced what it calls “trust boundaries,” enabling the agent to carry out routine tasks autonomously while requiring user approval for more consequential actions. This aims to address concerns around fully autonomous systems.

Jha told TechCrunch the decision to build Wingman inside messaging platforms was driven by how people already work. “A lot of real work already happens through chat, voice, and email — asking for something, following up, sharing context, making a decision,” Jha said. “Increasingly, they’ll be the main ways we work with agents too.”

Like many emerging AI agents, Wingman still faces limitations. Jha said the system struggles “around consistency in really ambiguous situations, messy edge cases, unclear goals, or workflows where a lot of human judgment is needed.”

Wingman is being rolled out with a limited free trial, after which access will be paid, with existing Emergent users able to use the agent through their accounts.

In Brief

VCs love to chase after the hottest startups, but startups aren’t always interested in selling more shares. So it is with Anthropic, sources tell Bloomberg.

VCs have been offering the OpenAI competitor a preemptive funding round that would value the company at $800 billion or more — almost matching, or perhaps even surpassing, its rival. In February, OpenAI closed a record-breaking $110 billion round that gave it an $852 billion post-money valuation. Just a few weeks earlier, Anthropic announced a $30 billion round (which, in another era, would have been record-breaking, too), at a $380 billion valuation.

But so far, Anthropic has not been interested in the VCs’ latest offers, Bloomberg reports. Of course, this could change. Anthropic has its own enormous capital expenditures to consider, even if it has not been signing agreements with as much fervor as OpenAI.

The Claude maker has in recent months, for instance, committed $50 billion to build its own data centers, $30 billion to spend on Microsoft’s cloud, and it spends billions a year on AWS. At some point, it may need money, especially if it can raise it on good terms, potentially at more than double its previous valuation.

Still, investors are looking at Anthropic’s rising revenue — reportedly $30 billion by the end of March, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 — and saying, “Worth it.” Investors are so thirsty for Anthropic shares that demand has grown nearly insatiable on the secondary markets. So at the slightest head nod from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, his company could secure funding that leapfrogs its rival’s valuation.

Anthropic declined comment to Bloomberg and did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Motorola has filed a lawsuit in India against social media platforms and content creators over posts it alleges are defamatory, raising concerns it could dampen critical coverage of the company, experts say.

The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms such as X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as broader restraint on what it describes as false or defamatory material related to the company’s devices.

In its over 60-page filing, Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what it describes as false or defamatory content about its products, including reviews, videos, comments, and boycott campaigns.

The complaint cites hundreds of posts across platforms, including videos alleging device issues and phones catching fire. But it is also targeting unfavorable product reviews and user commentary that the company alleges are false or defamatory.

Two content creators named in the suit, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they learned about the case only after receiving an email from X’s support team on Tuesday notifying them that their account had been referenced in the proceedings.

In the email, X said it had received the lawsuit and was informing the user in the interest of transparency, suggesting they could seek legal counsel, contest the case, or remove the content.

One of the creators said the post cited in the suit related to an incident they had verified, adding that the company had replaced the device. “Brand is just mentally harassing us, and they want to set an example,” the creator told TechCrunch.

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“It will impact,” they said. “I will stop covering good parts too.”

India is the second-biggest market for Motorola after the U.S., accounting for about 21% of its global smartphone shipments in 2025, according to data from International Data Corporation (IDC). More than 90% of its devices shipped in India were in the sub-$250 segment, the IDC data showed — a price band where consumers often rely on online reviews and word of mouth.

Free-speech advocates contend that Motorola’s complaint is overreaching.

“When a single complaint pulls together hundreds of URLs and asks for a blanket injunction against all of them, it collapses categories that the law has traditionally kept separate,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founding director at the New Delhi-based digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation. He warned of a broader “chilling effect,” saying many creators may choose to take down content rather than face the cost and stress of legal proceedings.

“The category at greatest risk is precisely the one consumers most depend on: independent product criticism that holds manufacturers accountable for genuine safety and quality issues,” he told TechCrunch.

Madhav Sheth, CEO of local smartphone brand Ai+ and former Realme India head, defended stricter action against what he described as misinformation, saying on social media that “freedom of speech is not a license for defamation.” He warned of legal action against “fake news or unverified ‘exposés.’” His remarks drew criticism online from users who said they could discourage legitimate product reviews.

Others in the industry took a different view. Sunil Raina, managing director of Lava International, said on X: “When faced with criticism, you have two choices: intimidate or improve. One silences the feedback. The other silences the need for it.”

The case may signal a broader shift in how brands respond to online criticism in India. The creator cited above said they expect more such legal action in the future, as evolving rules around online content increase liability for creators and platforms — a trend reflected in recently proposed changes to India’s IT rules aimed at tightening oversight of online content.

Motorola did not respond to a request for comment. Google, Meta, and X also did not respond.

Airwallex, the Australian fintech that has spent a decade quietly building global payments infrastructure, is moving into in-person payments. The move deepens its rivalry with Stripe across the payments stack, and enables the startup to directly aim at Square and Adyen on one of the last major battlegrounds in financial technology.

Airwallex is launching a point-of-sale product that it says does something its rivals’ offerings don’t: Allow businesses to accept in-person payments in multiple countries via a single platform, without onboarding local vendors in every market.

“When a business expands into a new market, they typically have to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance, and manage yet another set of vendor relationships,” CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told TechCrunch.

In 2019, Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion, when Airwallex had just $2 million in revenue. But Zhang decided to keep building. “I even said yes to the deal,” he said, recalling the months-long negotiation. “But what really got me to change my mind is when I actually flew back to Melbourne and went deep on what motivated me to build Airwallex.”

Zhang founded Airwallex in 2015 out of frustration with the friction and expense of moving money internationally, but took a different approach than most fintech: He spent years assembling its own underlying payment rails.

Today, Airwallex, valued at $8 billion by its investors, claims it generates annualized revenue of about $1.3 billion, and that the number is growing by roughly 85% every year. The startup says it now serves more than 46,000 U.S. businesses and processes $100 billion in annual volume.

The startup currently boasts close to 90 regulatory licenses across roughly 50 markets, direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries, and the ability to settle transactions in more than 90 currencies. It is the very infrastructure, Zhang says, that Stripe and Square lack in meaningful ways — particularly the local banking licenses that allow funds to be held, converted, and deployed within a given market rather than immediately repatriated.

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“Stripe and Square can process payments in Japan,” he said, “but when you actually process the payment, you need to immediately pay out to the merchant’s bank account. You can’t hold the funds.”

Airwallex’s license in Japan — which took seven years to obtain — enables it to do exactly that.

The company’s new POS product extends that infrastructure to the physical countertop. Its platform now connects in-store and online payments, and offers unified reporting and direct integrations into back-office systems. For businesses operating across borders, stores in different countries can operate on the same payment systems and reconcile in the same place, without the usual tangle of local vendor relationships.

Adyen, the listed Dutch payments company, makes a similar global infrastructure argument, and is perhaps Airwallex’s most direct competitor in this space. At the legacy end of the market, Fiserv as well as the newly combined Global Payments and Worldpay, command enormous market share among traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, though their architectures are considerably older.

Whether businesses with established Stripe or Square relationships will find the global infrastructure argument compelling enough to switch is the open question. Airwallex is betting that multinationals tired of managing a different payments vendor in every country will favor its product.

“There’s just not been a real competition to Stripe in the last 15 years, which is quite amazing considering how big the market is,” Zhang said.