SpaceX said it has struck a deal with Cursor to develop a next generation “coding and knowledge work AI,” which includes a surprising provision—an option to buy the popular software development platform for $60 billion later this year.

Partnering with and potentially purchasing a leader in the hottest AI product category can only be seen in the context of SpaceX’s much-anticipated public offering. Investors seeking more value in the IPO might see its engagement with Cursor as another way to extract value from Elon Musk’s increasingly sprawling tech conglomerate.

The deal won’t shock those who follow the industry closely. Last week, it was reported that xAI would begin renting computing power from its data centers to Cursor, with the coding startup using tens of thousands of xAI chips to train its latest AI model. And last month, two of Cursor’s most senior engineering leaders, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, left the company to join xAI, where both report directly to Musk.

SpaceX described the partnership as a project combining Cursor’s “product and distribution to expert software engineers” with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, which the company claims has the equivalent compute power of a million Nvidia H100 chips.

SpaceX also said that at some undisclosed point later this year, it will either pay Cursor $10 billion for its work or acquire the company for $60 billion. Last week, TechCrunch reported that Cursor was eying a $50 billion valuation in an upcoming private fundraising round. That figure itself reflects an astonishing series of leaps. Cursor was valued at just $2.5 billion in January of last year, climbed to $9 billion by last May May, and was assigned a $29.3 billion post-money valuation when it closed on $2.3 billion in Series D funding in November.

Either figure would represent a significant expense for SpaceX, which is widely seen to be losing money following the acquisition of xAI and the social media network X and is planning extensive capital investment. The brief statement did not say if either deal could be paid in SpaceX stock.

In the meantime, the move could shore up weaknesses at each company, but it also reveals them. Neither Cursor nor xAI has proprietary models that can match the leading offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI — the same companies now competing directly with Cursor for the developer market.

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Cursor still uses and sells access to Claude and GPT models even as both firms roll out their own coding tools, an awkward arrangement that this new SpaceX partnership may be designed to eventually escape.

Over his 15-year reign as Apple’s top banana, Tim Cook has become instantly recognizable, powerful beyond imagination, and exceedingly wealthy. Most estimates peg Cook’s current net worth at roughly $3 billion, assets that he amassed largely through performance-based equity awards as Apple’s market cap has grown more than 11x on his watch to roughly $4 trillion.

But the job comes with plenty of baggage, too. Cook has also had to navigate two Trump administrations and one Biden administration — each with its own posture toward Big Tech, China, and regulation. Cook also faced down the FBI over encryption, spent years in court defending the App Store against accusations that Apple had turned the iPhone into an illegal monopoly, and made compromises to stay in the Chinese market that attracted a whole lot of unwanted attention from human rights groups. Not last, Cook watched the company’s most ambitious hardware bet — the Vision Pro headset — bomb with consumers. That’s saying nothing of AI, where the outcome is still unknown. Incoming CEO John Ternus inherits all of it.

Here’s a walk through some of Cook’s biggest battles over the years.

Surely we all remember that 2016 FBI encryption fight? After a mass shooting at a holiday gathering in San Bernardino, California, the FBI demanded that Apple help unlock the gunman’s iPhone. Cook refused, arguing that encryption was the only meaningful countermeasure against exposing people’s private data and that being forced to break it would set a dangerous precedent. The standoff eventually ended when the FBI found another way in, but it cemented Apple’s identity as a privacy company and set up years of tension with governments around the world. Ternus will inherit that identity and the obligations that come with it.

The App Store antitrust wars haven’t been a walk in the park for Cook, either. Epic Games sued Apple in federal court over its requirement that apps use Apple’s in-app payment system and its 30% cut of sales (and when the judge pressed Cook on why users couldn’t simply pay developers directly at lower prices, his answers did little to deflect her skepticism). Apple largely prevailed in 2021, with the court declining to call it a monopoly, but it was ordered to allow developers to link to external payment options. It complied in the narrowest sense, charging a 27% commission on those external purchases (some discount!), and courts found it in contempt. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling in late 2025, and after a rehearing request was denied last month, Apple is now preparing to petition the Supreme Court, which had already declined to hear its prior appeal. A lower court still must determine what fee Apple can actually charge.

The Epic saga is just one front in a much wider antitrust war. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple in March 2024, accusing it of unlawfully dominating the smartphone market by restricting third-party app and device developers — think competing smartwatches, digital wallets, and messaging services — in ways that make it harder for users to switch away from the iPhone. A federal judge denied Apple’s motion to dismiss that case, meaning it could grind through the courts for years. And just this week, Apple revealed it faces a potential $38 billion fine in India, where regulators have found it guilty of abusing its dominant position in the app market and say Apple has refused to hand over required financial data — a case complicated by the fact that Apple’s market share in India is still relatively modest, around 9%, giving it an unusual angle to contest the findings. Ternus inherits this fight mid-stream, with the App Store’s revenue model under direct judicial threat.

China has been a constant and increasingly uncomfortable balancing act, too. Cook built Apple’s manufacturing operation around Chinese supply chains, making the company deeply dependent on a country whose government grew both more assertive and less predictable over time. He also made uncomfortable concessions to operate in the Chinese market — most notably removing VPN apps from the Chinese App Store and storing Chinese users’ iCloud data on state-controlled servers. Cook proved adept during Trump’s first term at insulating Apple from tariffs and trade war risks, in part by cultivating a personal relationship with Trump — who remarked upon news of Cook’s retirement that he’s “an incredible guy!” Apple has already signaled that Cook will continue to help Ternus negotiate geopolitical terrain as executive chairman — an acknowledgment that these relationships are tricky and that Cook’s institutional knowledge remains highly valuable.

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Yet AI is perhaps the most immediate and unresolved challenge that Ternus is being handed. Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea, formally leaves the company this month following numerous delays in the rollout of a more capable AI-powered Siri. Rather than relying solely on its own models, Apple has turned to both Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to power some Apple Intelligence features. Longtime market research analyst Bob O’Donnell told Reuters on Monday that Ternus’ biggest challenge will likely be “getting a better AI story and offering together that relies more on Apple’s own capabilities and less on third parties,” though some have argued that the company will look smarter in hindsight for waiting out the expensive competition playing out currently among today’s biggest AI outfits.

Last but not least, executive turnover at Apple more broadly is less discussed but meaningful. Ternus is inheriting a largely rebuilt leadership team following the recent departures of several other Apple execs over the last year, including its longtime COO, general counsel, and head of UI design. It’s a challenge and an opportunity that will require him to put his own stamp on things relatively quickly.

The through line connecting most of these challenges is that Cook’s greatest skill was his ability to manage complicated relationships with governments and partners while keeping the business humming. Whether Ternus has that same skill, or Cook’s continued presence as executive chair is meant to cover for any gaps there, may prove among the more interesting questions of the transition.

A much scarier question hanging over Ternus’ tenure is whether the world that made Apple the most valuable company on the planet could actually end. Many industry watchers believe AI agents will become the primary way people interact with services, rendering the App Store and its 30% cut a distant memory. Couple that with the possibility of compelling new hardware that erodes the iPhone’s grip on our lives, like whatever OpenAI has in the works, and Ternus could find himself maneuvering through much more than complex relationships and litigation.

Investors are aggressively courting AI researchers to build startups that can make AI more reliable and efficient.

Yu Su, an Ohio State professor leading an AI agent lab, said he initially resisted the pressure from VCs to commercialize his work. He finally took the leap last year and spun out his work into a startup when he saw that foundational model advances could make agents truly personalized.

NeoCognition, a startup Su describes as a research lab developing self-learning AI agents, has just emerged from stealth with $40 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners and angels, including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.

“Today’s agents are generalists,” Su (pictured right) told TechCrunch. “Every time you ask them to do a task, you take a leap of faith.”

According to Su, the issue lies in a lack of consistency. Current agents, whether from Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Perplexity’s computer tools, successfully complete tasks as intended only about 50% of the time, he said.

Since agents are still so unreliable, they are not ready to be trusted, independent workers, Su told TechCrunch. NeoCognition intends to change that by developing an agent system that can self-learn to become an expert in any domain, similar to how humans learn.

Su argues that while human intelligence is broad, its real power is our ability to specialize. When we enter a new environment or profession, we can rapidly master its unique rules, relationships, and consequences.

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NeoCognition is building agents to mirror this exact approach.

“For humans, our continued learning process is essentially the process of building a world model for any profession, any environment,” Su said. “We believe for agents to become experts, they need to learn autonomously to build a model of any given micro world.”

Su views this capacity for rapid specialization as the critical missing link to getting AI to work reliably on its own.

While it is possible to train agents for autonomous tasks, they must be custom-engineered for a specific vertical. NeoCognition is different because it’s building agents that are generalists capable of self-learning and specializing in any domain.

NeoCognition intends to sell its agent systems primarily to enterprises, including established SaaS companies, which can use them to build agent workers or to enhance existing product offerings.

Su highlighted that an investment from Vista Equity Partners is especially valuable for this reason. As one of the largest private equity firms in the software space, Vista can provide NeoCognition with direct access to a vast portfolio of companies looking to modernize their products with AI.

NeoCognition currently has about 15 employees, the majority of whom hold PhDs.

Apple’s recent crackdown on the MyFitnessPal-owned Cal AI food-logging app demonstrates that the tech giant is still enforcing its strict App Store rules around the use of external payments. The calorie-counting app, which was briefly removed from the App Store last week, had attempted to skirt Apple’s in-app purchase guidelines and had also employed manipulative tactics, Apple told TechCrunch.

The developer has since addressed the issues, and the app has returned to Apple’s App Store.

Cal AI’s App Store rejection made the rounds on social media last week. Apple appeared to be making an example of the company, originally founded by a pair of high school students who grew the business to $50 million in ARR before being acquired by MyFitnessPal in March.

Initially, there was concern that Apple had simply removed the app for using web payments instead of Apple’s own in-app purchase (or IAP), even though that is now permitted.

At present, Apple’s App Store Guidelines allow U.S.-based developers to link out to external payment systems, as a result of a court ruling in the lawsuit brought against Apple by Epic Games. In most cases, however, apps are still required to offer Apple’s in-app purchase option alongside any external link. (The major exception here is for what Apple calls “reader” apps — meaning those that provide subscription-based access to digital content, like books, audio, music, video streaming, and more. Cal AI does not qualify for this exception.)

Apple, when reached for comment, said that the app’s brief removal was due to multiple violations of its rules, including bypassing Apple’s in-app purchase flow, using deceptive billing design, and other manipulative tactics. The episode shows that Apple is still actively policing how developers implement web payments, even though the Epic ruling had loosened some earlier restrictions.

Chief among the violations, Apple said that Cal AI had bypassed Apple’s in-app purchases by implementing an embedded in-app payment flow using a third-party service (in this case, Stripe) to unlock access to digital goods. In doing so, it removed Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) as an option for users during checkout. This violated Apple’s App Review Guideline 3.1.1, which requires that IAP be offered alongside the external link.

Apple said that the company had also been engaged in deceptive billing practices, in violation of Guideline 3.1.2c, as Cal AI’s paywall was designed to mislead and confuse consumers. Specifically, the paywall displayed the weekly calculated pricing more prominently than the actual amount the user would be billed. It also included a toggle for a free trial that obscured information about the subscription’s automatic renewal.

Cal AI was further dinged for its use of “manipulative tactics,” Apple said, in violation of the Developer Code of Conduct’s guideline 5.6. One issue was that the app would prompt users who declined the first subscription offer with a second, different subscription purchase flow. Plus, the app had numerous negative user reviews that accused the app of being a scam because of how it presented its third-party payment options.

After its rejection, Cal AI addressed the issues, allowing it to return to the store, Apple confirmed.

MyFitnessPal and Cal AI did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

It would not be surprising if Cal AI had wanted to test the waters to see how actively Apple’s app review team was enforcing its rules in the wake of the Apple-Epic court ruling. Apple’s response should serve as a warning that the tech giant is still policing its App Store — even at the risk of losing out on its cut of the revenue of a viral app, which today sits in the No. 4 spot on the App Store’s Health & Fitness charts.

There’s a version of a tech conference where you fly somewhere expensive, sit through panels, collect business cards you’ll never follow up on, and fly home. SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 was deliberately designed to be the opposite of that.

When 60,000 attendees descend on Tokyo Big Sight April 27–29, the headline numbers are hard to ignore: 750 startup exhibitors, 151 sessions, city leaders from 49 countries. But the stat that tells you what kind of event this actually is? It’s 10,000 facilitated business meetings — brokered, booked, and tracked before most attendees even land.

The infrastructure of deal-making

SusHi Tech’s official app is less event guide and more matchmaking engine. Before the conference opens, attendees register their profile and describe what they’re looking for. The app’s AI surfaces recommendations, opens a direct message channel, and lets you pre-book one of the venue’s expanded meeting spaces. On the floor, QR code business card exchange replaces the fumbling-for-a-card moment. It’s a small thing that signals a larger philosophy: Remove the friction between the people who should be talking.

That deal-making ethos extends to the startup pitch competition. TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield program manager, Isabelle Johannessen, will select one standout startup well-suited to the North American market from the semifinalists to advance to the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield 200, a launchpad to one of the industry’s most prestigious stages.

Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images

Corporates are pitching to startups — not the other way around

One of SusHi Tech’s more interesting structural choices is the reverse pitch format. Rather than startups lining up to impress big companies, corporates and city governments take the stage to present their unsolved challenges and invite startups to propose solutions.

This year, Moreton Bay and Rome are both running reverse pitch sessions — essentially issuing public RFPs to a global startup audience. On the corporate side, 62 partner companies — including Sony, Google, Microsoft, and Mizuho — are hosting dedicated Open Innovation exhibits and sessions, actively hunting for collaborators. Twelve domain-specific clusters spanning logistics, life sciences, railways, and climate tech are also exhibiting for the first time, each looking to co-create with startups rather than simply observe them.

750 startups, 400 of them international

Of the 750 exhibitors, 400 come from outside Japan — a genuine cross-section of the global startup ecosystem. City partners from 25 countries and regions bring their own cohorts with an explicit mandate to connect startups to Japanese partners and capital. A new group of 45 “SusHi Tech Global Startups” — growth-stage Japanese companies backed by Tokyo Metropolitan Government — are making their global debut in a dedicated pavilion.

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For international founders and investors who’ve been watching Japan from the outside, SusHi Tech is the most efficient entry point the market has ever offered. The business card you exchange on April 27 doesn’t have to end up in a drawer.

Can’t make it to Tokyo? You can still be there

Missing SusHi Tech Tokyo doesn’t have to mean missing out. Remote participants get more than a livestream — on-site staff will walk the floor on your behalf, carrying a device that displays your face so you can interact with attendees and exhibitors in real time, face-to-face. It’s the closest thing to actually being there.

Apply for remote participation with on-site staff support here.

Can’t swing that either? Ticket holders can stream sessions online and tap into the programming from wherever they are. Browse the full session list here.

Note: Some sessions may not be available for online streaming.

SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 runs April 27–29 at Tokyo Big Sight. Business days are April 27–28; Public Day (free admission) is April 29. Register here.

It used to be easy enough to distinguish between human-made and AI-generated imagery — just two years ago, you couldn’t use image models to create a menu for a Mexican restaurant without inventing new culinary delights like “enchuita,” “churiros,” “burrto,” and “margartas.”

Now, when I ask the brand new ChatGPT Images 2.0 model for a menu of Mexican food, it creates something that could immediately be used in a restaurant without customers noticing that something’s off. (However, ceviche priced at $13.50 might make me question the quality of the fish.)

Image Credits:ChatGPT Images 2.0

For comparison, here’s the result I got from DALL-E 3 two years ago (at the time, ChatGPT did not generate images):

Image Credits:Microsoft Designer (DALL-E 3)

AI image generators have historically struggled to spell because they generally used diffusion models, which work by reconstructing images from noise.

“The diffusion models […] are reconstructing a given input,” Asmelash Teka Hadgu, founder and CEO of Lesan AI, told TechCrunch in 2024. “We can assume writings on an image are a very, very tiny part, so the image generator learns the patterns that cover more of these pixels.”

Researchers have since explored other mechanisms for image generation, like autoregressive models, which make predictions about what an image should look like and function more like an LLM.

Unfortunately, OpenAI declined to answer a question in a press briefing this week about what kind of model is powering ChatGPT Images 2.0.

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The company did, however, explain that the new model has “thinking capabilities,” which give it the ability to search the web, make multiple images from one prompt, and double-check its creations — this allows Images 2.0 to create marketing assets in various sizes, as well as multi-paneled comic strips.

OpenAI also says that Images has a stronger understanding of non-Latin text rendering in languages like Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Bengali. The model’s knowledge cuts off in December 2025, which could impact how accurately it can generate certain prompts involving recent news.

“Images 2.0 brings an unprecedented level of specificity and fidelity to image creation. It can not only conceptualize more sophisticated images, but it actually brings that vision to life effectively, able to follow instructions, preserve requested details, and render the fine-grained elements that often break image models: small text, iconography, UI elements, dense compositions, and subtle stylistic constraints, all at up to 2K resolution,” OpenAI said in a press release.

These capabilities mean that image generation isn’t as rapid as typing a question to ChatGPT, but generating something complex like a multi-paneled comic still takes just a few minutes.

All ChatGPT and Codex users will be able to access Images 2.0 starting Tuesday; paid users will be able to generate more advanced outputs. The company will also make the gpt-image-2 API available, with pricing dependent on the quality and resolution of outputs.

In Brief

OpenAI and Anthropic continue to take swipes at each other. This week, during a podcast appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called out his competitor’s new cybersecurity model, noting that the company was using fear to make its product sound more impressive than it actually is.

Anthropic announced Mythos earlier this month, releasing the model to a small cohort of enterprise customers. The company has claimed that Mythos is too powerful to be released to the public out of concern that cybercriminals will weaponize it. Critics have said this rhetoric is overblown.

During an appearance on the podcast Core Memory, Altman implied that Anthropic’s “fear-based marketing” was a good way to keep AI in the hands of a small and exclusive elite. “There are people in the world who, for a long time, have wanted to keep AI in the hands of a smaller group of people,” he said. “You can justify that in a lot of different ways.”

“It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million,’” he added.

Fear-based marketing was not invented by Anthropic. Arguably, much of the AI industry has leveraged scare tactics and hyperbole to make its tools sound powerful. Ongoing rhetoric about how AI may lead to the end of the world hasn’t just come from Luddite doomer activists; it has also come from the people selling this technology to the public — Altman included.

After 15 years at the helm, Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple and handing over the reins to the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus. Cook, who joined Apple in 1998, succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011 and went on to transform Apple into a powerhouse worth $4 trillion.

With his time as CEO coming to an end on September 1, let’s take a look at some of the highlights of Cook’s 15 years as the leader of one of the most influential companies in the world.

Financial growth

Apple was already an influential company when Cook took the reins, but under his leadership, the company’s market capitalization increased tenfold. When Cook took over in August 2011, Apple was valued at just under $350 billion. The company passed $1 trillion in 2018, $2 trillion in 2020, $3 trillion in 2022, and $4 trillion in 2025. Now the tech giant currently sits at $4.01 trillion.

The company reported $112 billion in net income for the fiscal year ending in September 2025, which was eight times what Apple saw in September 2010. The company was able to achieve that 699% increase despite many issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. Cook, who was formerly chief operations officer and credited as the brains behind Apple’s global supply chain under Steve Jobs, expanded Apple’s reach in China and added roughly 200 stores to the company’s global network during his tenure as CEO.

New product categories

Image Credits:Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Cook expanded Apple’s iPhone and computers ecosystem into a broader network of complementary devices that includes wearables and gadgets.

Apple launched the Apple Watch in 2015 and has since turned it into a full-fledged health and fitness companion complete with blood oxygen tracking and ECG monitoring. Apple then disrupted the earphones market in 2016 with the launch of the first AirPods, changing the wireless headphones category. It then launched its first over-the-ear headphones in 2020. It’s also worth noting that Apple purchased Beats in 2014.

The tech giant also released the Apple Vision Pro in 2024, positioning it not just as a VR headset, but as a spatial computing platform. The launch, however, failed to resonate with consumers who didn’t want to spend several thousand dollars to purchase the gadget.

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Under Cook, the company also released iPads at various sizes and multiple price points, and essentially turned the devices into full-on computers that can handle a variety of different tasks for personal, work, and school use.

Of course, Cook also oversaw key changes to the iPhone, including the introduction of the more affordable iPhone SE, as well as advancements like Face ID and edge-to-edge displays.

Although Apple moved away from the “i” branding in new product releases under Cook, he oversaw the major expansion of the company’s product lineup.

Services expansion

Image Credits:Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Under Cook, Apple built a powerful services business. The tech giant launched Apple Pay in 2014, which is now used by an estimated 818 million people globally. In 2019, the tech giant launched its Apple TV+ (now Apple TV) streaming service, whose content has since earned hundreds of awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Apple launched its Apple Music streaming service in 2015 to take on Spotify, and the service now has over 112 million subscribers. In 2019, Apple launched Apple Arcade and has since built it out with a portfolio of premium games.

Although Jobs first announced iCloud in 2011, the storage service has since grown vastly under Cook, including the launch of iCloud+ in 2021. Additionally, Cook oversaw the evolution of the App Store and repeatedly defended its 30% commission structure.

Apple’s services business generated $109.16 billion in revenue during the fiscal year ending in September 2025. The segment accounted for a significant portion of the company’s total $416.16 billion revenue for the year.

Shift to in-house processors

Image Credits:Harun Ozalp/Anadolu / Getty Images

Under Cook’s leadership, Apple began transitioning from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon chips in 2020 and completed the shift across its Mac lineup by 2023. The result was longer battery life, higher performance, greater power efficiency, and more.

AI era

Image Credits:Hakan Nural/Anadolu / Getty Images

Apple entered its AI era in 2024 with the launch of Apple Intelligence. Since then, however, the company hasn’t had any major breakthroughs and has faced significant delays in launching its anticipated revamped AI-powered Siri (it’s expected to roll out sometime this year).

The tech giant remained largely absent from the broader tech industry’s generative AI race that kicked off when OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in 2022. Earlier this year, Apple and Google announced that Google’s Gemini would power its next-generation AI tools.

$600 billion U.S. spending commitment

Image Credits:Win McName / Getty Images

Cook joined President Donald Trump last year to announce a $600 billion U.S. spending commitment, marking the tech giant’s biggest investment plan ever. The four-year plan includes expanding hiring and manufacturing activity in the country, with a focus on building a stronger domestic semiconductor and advanced technology supply chain.

Apple Park

Image Credits:Kirby Lee / Getty Images

Jobs’ vision for Apple Park came to life under Cook’s leadership in 2017. The 175-acre headquarters, which replaced Apple Campus, houses more than 12,000 employees. It features thousands of native and drought-resistant trees and is powered by 100% renewable energy.

Today, Apple Park is the backdrop of the company’s new product launches.

When was the last time you were actually excited about email? If you’re older, probably back in 2004, when Gmail was rolling out its first beta invites. If you’re younger, probably never. Over the years, numerous startups have tried and failed to reinvent it, with the most successful ones simply bolting new functionality — like improved workflows or AI agents — onto the same basic inbox.

Today, a new company built by a team of former Pinterest designers and engineers is rethinking what an inbox can be from the ground up. And you might actually find this one exciting.

Extra, the first product from the consumer technology company BuildForever, ditches subject lines, folders, and tags in favor of an inbox organized around your life — bringing everything important into a single, actionable overview within its “Today” tab. This tab updates in real time with the most current and critical information extracted from the mountains of email in your inbox.

Image Credits:BuildForever/Extra

The rest of your inbox is then automatically organized into custom categories that become tabs, reflecting your life as determined by what’s already in your inbox. That means you could have tabs for family activities, travel plans, finances, newsletters, and more. The result of this reimagined inbox is a uniquely personalized experience — and one where you finally feel like you have a shot at staying on top of it all.

The idea, like many in the consumer space, emerged from a personal problem the founder wanted to solve: His inbox was a mess.

“I was a religious inbox zero person by day [at work] … you’re just constantly checking this email. And then I would open up my personal email, and it was just this wall of to-dos. And with all the junk in there, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, where do I begin?’” explains BuildForever co-founder and CEO, Naveen Gavini, a former SVP and chief product officer at Pinterest who worked at the consumer tech company for nearly 12 years.

“Honestly, after 12 hours of email all day, I didn’t have the energy, so I just quit.”

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The result, he tells TechCrunch, was missed messages, unintentionally ghosted friends, and a general sense of being buried. The problem, he believes, is structural: As emails pile up, the important ones simply fall off the page and into oblivion.

Extra attempts to change this paradigm with an entirely new interface for email, and, under the hood, AI intelligence. Notably, though, the team is not pitching Extra as an AI app, and that’s intentional.

“I think, in Silicon Valley, people are very deep in [AI], but I think the average person doesn’t even know where to start,” says Gavini. “When you mention AI, it kind of feels a little ‘power, user-y.’ But also, I just think that there are so many companies that are promising to be the AI personal assistant for your life. And I think people don’t really need that. People just want some of these basic problems solved,” he says.

“That’s what we’re focused on — solving those user problems, versus pitching the next AI that can do everything.”

And yet, a product like Extra couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the AI technology that quietly learns, understands, and then organizes your inbox for you. On top of that background intelligence, there’s even an AI assistant you can talk to for help finding emails, unsubscribing, replying with your voice, and more.

Image Credits:BuildForever/Extra

Extra’s inbox is information — not information overload

Instead of starting in a traditional inbox interface, in Extra, you begin on the “Today” view. This page represents everything going on in your inbox that you should care about, and it’s organized into categories of what needs action, what’s happening today, and what’s “good to know.” You can treat the actionable items like a to-do list, where you can swipe to clear the item when it’s completed.

For each action item, Extra tries to predict the next steps you’ll need to take and then highlights them for you, whether it’s a file you need to open and review, a link you need to click, or anything else.

Below that are the “Good to Know” items, like order and shipment confirmations, test results from your last doctor’s appointment, and a curated selection of news headlines from your newsletters in a daily news brief.

At the bottom of the Today tab is the “Daily Cleanup” section, where Extra lets you review the low-priority emails that have cluttered your inbox and lets you take action. From here, you can choose to unsubscribe from marketing emails and updates you don’t want, and Extra also offers the option to delete all the emails from that sender from your inbox, which saves you storage space.

Image Credits:BuildForever/Extra

Otherwise, you can just mark the emails as done to archive them, which is also reflected in your Gmail. (For now, Extra works with Gmail only, but that could change in the future. The company may possibly offer its own email addresses at some point.)

In addition to the daily brief section on the Today tab, newsletter subscribers will have a place to browse their favorite writers’ headlines within a dedicated “News” tab. Here, Extra uses wide images, headlines, and snippets to encourage you to read the full article, much like the Apple News app would.

An “Events” tab pulls out not only your own appointments and plans from your email, but also suggests events you might like to add to your calendar — such as local happenings surfaced through local newsletters or emails from venues or other organizations. And if you add something from these suggestions to your personal calendar, Extra will understand the next step — like buying tickets for the upcoming concert — and suggest that action.

The “Shop” tab, meanwhile, reimagines shopping-related emails as a curated storefront of interesting finds, rather than unwanted clutter. Extra uses product photos alongside promotion details to gain your attention.

“We actually go through your emails and shopping, and extract the products themselves … And this is a really big difference for brands,” explains Gavini. Typically, there’s a very low likelihood that you would see a brand’s email, he says, because Gmail buries them in its own Promotions tab. But since these are the brands you want to hear from, Extra presents the information in a more attractive, more visual format that actually entices you to shop.

“What we found is [that] giving people control of their inbox allows them to decide what they want to receive, and then they can receive it in the most native and best format to consume it,” Gavini notes.

Image Credits:BuildForever/Extra

The other tabs in Extra’s app will be unique to you, allowing you a place to peruse and archive emails tailored to your own life and activities, intelligently organized on your behalf. (There is a traditional “inbox” view if you need it — but you can also move that one to the end of the row if you find it’s no longer useful.)

Extra’s beta testers have now collectively unsubscribed from over 2 million emails per year, and over 4 million emails have been transformed into “Today” view summaries, the company says.

Extra is now launching its app on iOS and web to those on its waitlist who will be able to invite others using special codes.

Email that’s … fun to use?

In TechCrunch’s initial tests, we were surprised to find an already well-polished product, given its beta status at the time. The app has been thoughtfully designed, is easy to use, and — dare I say it? — it makes checking your inbox an almost delightful experience. (I’m as shocked as you are, trust me.)

I am truly deriving such joy from unsubscribing from all the junk cluttering my inbox and wiping out all the emails from the spammer marketer in the process. I feel accomplished as I mark my to-dos as done. I’m discovering concerts I want to see and new products I want to buy. I’m keeping up with things I would have normally missed. It’s what email could have been doing for me all along, had it not been designed by a bunch of engineers who spent their time debating the perfect shade of blue for links.

There is some room for improvement, but my feedback so far has focused on small tweaks, not major issues.

BuildForever was co-founded by Steven Ramkumar and Albert Pereta, both of whom also spent over a decade at Pinterest. The broader idea is to combine their engineering and design talent to fix top consumer apps, starting with email.

Image Credits:BuildForever/Extra

“If we could bring the same sort of design and thought process of Pinterest — which is delight, joy, and inspiration — to something that feels so anxiety-inducing and boring as email, that was our goal,” Gavini says.

The company hopes to expand its approach to other products over time, potentially including messaging, calendars, contacts, and others.

BuildForever is backed by $9.5 million in seed funding led by Abstract, A* (Kevin Hartz), Felicis, and Elad Gil. Other angel investors include Pinterest co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp; Gmail creator Paul Buchheit; OpenAI applications CEO Fidji Simo; Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra; Pinterest and Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram; A24 partner Scott Belsky; Partiful CEO Shreya Murthy; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch; and others.

Extra is free to use and will remain free, with monetization planned for a later point. It’s available on the web and on iOS.

If you’ve ever played a role-playing game (RPG), you know how fun it is to create your character in any way you choose and embark on epic adventures. Now, picture an AI-powered, text-based RPG where every interaction with a non-player character (NPC) is completely unscripted.

Latitude, the startup known for its open-ended text adventure games featuring “infinite storylines” generated by AI, recently unveiled its new platform that allows users to step into the role of game designers.

This AI-driven RPG platform, called Voyage, enables players to design their own gaming worlds with the help of AI. Players can describe their settings, including details such as regions, cities, landmarks, main quests, and villains. They can also establish game mechanics like abilities, leveling systems, and combat challenges.

For example, if you want to create a fishing village haunted by a sea monster, the AI will generate the necessary code to bring that idea to life. You can customize your world further before sharing it with others to play.

Image Credits:Latitude

For players, Voyage’s platform offers a range of experiences across different genres, from cozy adventures to more hardcore quests. Because it’s text-based, players read along with the story (with audio narration available) and type how they want their character to act.

Unlike traditional RPGs, if a character is facing a goblin attack, instead of the typical options to run, fight, or hide, players can choose unique scenarios like becoming a goblin therapist, helping the creatures with their issues instead of resorting to violence.

When players enter their desired actions, the AI narrates the outcome, including how the NPCs respond. Because there’s no fixed script, interactions can veer in unexpected directions, often leading to surprising and sometimes weird conversations. For instance, during our testing, a troll who had tied up our character started to unload about his marriage troubles.

Character progression, meanwhile, depends on the character’s skills and a little luck, much like rolling dice in tabletop games. Each character can also unlock special abilities as they defeat bosses or finish quests, such as using “Counterspell” to stop an enemy from using magic. (Several abilities in Voyage draw inspiration from classic Dungeons & Dragons spells, which is fun!)

And, if players ever find themselves stuck, there’s a chatbot available to suggest actions or even skip to different parts of the story.

At the core of Voyage is Latitude’s World Engine, a system that took the company five years to develop. This engine leverages multiple AI systems that can narrate actions, manage gameplay, track characters and objects, and remember backstories and relationships, ensuring continuity throughout the game. So, instead of generic NPCs with repetitive lines, players encounter characters who remember previous interactions. For instance, if you betray a character’s trust, they may choose to avoid you or become a rival in future encounters.

“Characters aren’t just reactions to you, but have their own personality backstory, that react to you in ways that feel like real, and that’s really part of the magic of the engine,” Latitude CEO and co-founder Nick Walton told TechCrunch.

Image Credits:Latitude

Latitude first made waves in AI-native gaming with the launch of AI Dungeon in 2019, which attracted millions of players.

“It exploded on the internet as one of the first times people interacted with generative AI,” Walton said. “It sort of established that initial promise of what would happen if we could have games and worlds that aren’t all predefined in advance, that aren’t all scripted… Voyage takes that core concept and blows it up 10x farther from a single AI model to a full-blown world that you have deterministic systems, challenges, progression, and persistence, and solves all the problems that I think AI Dungeon alone couldn’t fully get to.”

Voyage is currently in expanded beta testing, with an open beta scheduled for later this year. The platform has seen early testers interact with over 160,000 unique AI-generated characters, each with distinct personalities. The average player has made nearly 3,000 gameplay choices.

Image Credits:Latitude

Alongside the launch announcement, Latitude announced a partnership with Google’s AI Futures Fund. The platform combines its proprietary models with third-party models like Google’s Gemini Flash for image generation and Gemma for text, audio, and video.

Additionally, former Roblox Chief Business Officer Craig Donato has joined as an investor and board member. Other notable investors include Album VC, Griffin Gaming Partners, Midjourney, and NFX.

Voyage is free to play but will soon offer subscription plans priced at $15, $30, and $50. These plans will provide advanced AI features and remove limitations on the number of actions players can take.

It’s also important to note that, while the platform is suitable for all ages, some experiences include mature content, which Walton says is similar to what you might find on Steam. He adds that Voyage implements safety measures and parental controls to help users filter out inappropriate material.

Angelo Martino, a former ransomware negotiator, has pleaded guilty to helping cybercriminals extort companies in cyberattacks.

On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department announced the guilty plea. Martino, who used to work for cybersecurity firm DigitalMint, admitted to playing both sides of the negotiation in five different incidents. While ostensibly working for the victims, Martino admitted to feeding confidential information back to the operators of the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware, providing them information such as the victim’s insurance policy limits, as well as their negotiation strategies.

Martino’s goal was to maximize the criminals’ payout, for which he took a cut, prosecutors said. He is the third ransomware negotiator in the past year to face jail for the same scheme.

“Angelo Martino’s clients trusted him to respond to ransomware threats and help thwart and remedy them on behalf of victims,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva in the press release. “Instead, he betrayed them and began launching ransomware attacks himself by assisting cyber criminals and harming victims, his own employer, and the cyber incident response industry itself.”

ALPHV/BlackCat operated as a ransomware-as-a-service, meaning the gang develops and maintains the file-locking malware, while contractors working as affiliates deploy it in cyberattacks and pay a portion of the ransom profits back to the developers.

Last year, U.S. prosecutors accused another DigitalMint employee, Kevin Tyler Martin, as well as Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former incident response manager at cybersecurity giant Sygnia, of going rogue and helping the ransomware gang that they were ostensibly working to counter during their day jobs.

At the time, the authorities mentioned a third individual, without naming him, as being part of this scheme. We now know that it was Martino.

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Martino pleaded guilty to extortion and faces up to 20 years in prison. Authorities said they have already seized $10 million in assets from him.

According to the Justice Department, Martino also admitted to helping Goldberg and Martin deploy ALPHV/BlackCat’s ransomware against several victims inside the U.S. for six months in 2023. The three essentially became ALPHV/BlackCat affiliates during that time, making more than $1.2 million from one victim, according to prosecutors.

When reached for comment on Tuesday, an unnamed DigitalMint spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement that the company had no knowledge of Martino’s criminal actions and that it fired the two employees after learning of the accusations against them.

In 2023, an international coalition of law enforcement authorities seized the dark web leak site of ALPHV/BlackCat, disrupting its operations. At the same time, authorities also released a decryption tool to help more than 500 ALPHV victims to restore their systems.

Legacy social media sites have been designed to keep us hooked to our devices, eyes glued endlessly to retina-frying feeds of memes and dumb videos in order to create more engaged platforms for advertisements. In recent years, however, a swell of companies have sought to capitalize on users’ burnout, pushing users to engage in IRL experiences, or offering products without addictive features like endless scroll.

Bond, which officially launched on Tuesday, is one of those sites. Dino Becirovic, Bond’s co-founder and CEO, says that his site offers an AI-powered solution to Americans’ screen addiction.

The site works like this: Much like a normal social media platform, users post about what they’ve been up to lately. Bond allows users to update their profiles, posting what it calls “memories,” via a variety of mediums, including pictures, video, and audio files.

Unlike other sites, Bond is designed to act as a kind of idea generator for what the user should go and do in the real world.

Experiences stored within Bond become fodder for its AI system, which then gets trained on what kind of personalized, event-based recommendations to make to the user, Becirovic says.

For instance, if you’ve been posting a lot about how much you like pho and how you haven’t had it in awhile, Bond’s system might recommend a nearby Vietnamese restaurant that is getting good reviews. Or, if you’re into heavy metal, Bond might point out that Iron Maiden is coming to your city next week.

The more you post about your experiences, the more the system can feed you better recommendations, Becirovic says.

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In other words, the system is designed to get you off the app and back out into the real world, where you can do more stuff, instead of just “bed rotting” and “doomscrolling,” as the kids these days say.

Image Credits:Bond

The layout looks a little bit like Instagram, although there is no actual feed. Instead, user profiles are presented in a kind of cluster formation. Clicking on a profile brings up the user’s current stories. These stories disappear from your public-facing profile after 24 hours, Becirovic said, but they then get stored in your private profile. Users can search through their own archive of memories whenever they want.

Bond’s team includes people who previously built major social media apps, including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, the company says. Becirovic previously worked at Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, while Bond’s founding researcher, Arthur Bražinskas, co-led integration of user signals at Google Gemini.

What is the revenue path for a company like this? Most social media sites are just giant vehicles for advertising — and that’s where they make the lion’s share of their revenue. Bond doesn’t have ads, so how’s it going to turn a buck?

Interestingly enough, Becirovic envisions a scenario in which — eventually — users can license their own data from Bond’s archives, selling it to companies that want to use it for AI-training purposes. In this scenario, Bond would take a very small cut of the profits via a licensing fee, thus generating ongoing revenue and positioning itself as a data provider to AI companies that are looking to tune up their models.

“The idea behind this licensing model is that you can monetize your memories,” he said. “If we become this platform with the right incentive structure to get billions of people to create about their daily lives, we will naturally become a really attractive place for people to want to train GPT six and seven, all the other variants that are going to come [in the] future.”

Processed With Darkroom Image Credits:Bond

In another scenario, Bond would use its accumulated data to act as a product recommendation tool that integrates with e-commerce sites. “Our users would opt into this experience. If we are able to do this, we believe we could capture some value from the transaction with merchants by enabling a better user experience, driving conversion, and/or increasing throughput,” Becirovic told TechCrunch in an email.

Becirovic said that Bond would never sell users’ data for the purposes of advertising, and users can “delete any memories by either deleting them in the Memory tab or using natural language in Memory chat.” He added: “Users can also delete their profile if they are not getting value from Bond. As the product grows, we will introduce more privacy control features to our users for them to manage their data.”

Becirovic said Bond will improve its encryption over time, though he is a little vague about the platform’s current protections: “E2EE encryption is a priority for us in the near-future after launch. In the meantime, we store all user data securely in our database and ensure it is protected,” he said.

At the moment, Becirovic seems mostly focused on making Bond cool. “Monetization is not a short-term priority,” he said. “Our initial focus is on creating an application users get more value from the more they capture their memories.”

YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.

The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.

Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.

The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.

Image Credits:YouTube

Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.

Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.

Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.

In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.

Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.

The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”

The AI platform Clarifai deleted 3 million photos that it says it got from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI, according to Reuters. The company also deleted any models that were trained using that data.

Per the FTC’s investigation, Clarifai asked OkCupid — whose executives had invested in the company — to share data in 2014. The dating app then provided these user-uploaded photos, reports say, along with other demographic and location data. Per OkCupid’s own privacy policies, this behavior should have been prohibited.

“We’re ⁠collecting data now and just realized that OKCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this,” Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

Though this incident appears to have taken place 12 years ago, the FTC did not open an investigation until 2019, when a New York Times article about Clarifai mentioned that the company had used images from OkCupid to build an AI tool that could estimate someone’s age, sex, and race based on their face.

The FTC and OkCupid, which is owned by Match Group, settled the lawsuit last month. At the time, OkCupid and Match Group did not admit to the allegations that it deceived users by violating its own privacy policies, but Clarifai’s confirmation that it has deleted the data implies that the company did indeed get access to those photos. The FTC also alleged that since 2014, Match Group and OkCupid deliberately concealed this behavior and attempted to obstruct its investigation.

OkCupid and Clarifai did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.

While the FTC is not able to fine companies for this type of first-time offense, the agency declared that OkCupid and Match are “permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting” the nature of their data collection and sharing. So, OkCupid and Match are prohibited from partaking in these behaviors, which are already not allowed by the FTC.