As was widely reported, Oracle axed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.

One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’”

The person soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately. The severance offer arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention — and some laid-off employees would push back.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to laid off employees. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company was also paying for one month of COBRA insurance.

The catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good chunk of a tech worker’s pay, particularly at Oracle, the company did not accelerate soon-to-vest RSUs. Any shares that hadn’t vested by the termination date were forfeited.

That held true even for stock granted as retention incentives or in place of salary increases tied to promotions. One long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months from vesting; RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.

Some employees also discovered that if they were classified as remote workers by the company, and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker provisions like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protections.

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The WARN Act is a law that requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months notice prior to letting them go. It’s triggered when 50 or more people are impacted at one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be sidestepped.

Some people were unaware they were classified as remote workers, because they were near an office and worked on a hybrid schedule.

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not necessarily extend severance, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle included the two-months’ WARN notice pay in its existing calculation of four-weeks, plus one week per year.

For a short time, a group of employees tried to negotiate en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition urging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI.

For instance, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment and covered COBRA for 18 months.

Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay, and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, the Seattle Times reported.

And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees, offered lump sum severance that was the equivalent of base pay through the end of 2026, plus healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated vesting of stock through August 15. So if an employee was close to obtaining another tranche, they will get it.

Oracle declined to negotiate, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It was a take-it-or-leave scenario, the employee said.

When asked about its severance terms, classifying employees as remote, and the failed attempt by employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such a reaction from the company isn’t a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it does underscore that for all the theoretical high pay (often via stocks) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employees’ market, they have very few protections in place when it isn’t.

San Francisco real estate has never been very accessible. But the record sales happening right now in the city’s high-end market are testing the upper limits of what even this famously unaffordable city thought was possible.

Consider a six-bedroom, 5,700-square-foot home in Cow Hollow, one of San Francisco’s most coveted neighborhoods. It was listed two weeks ago at $7.95 million, so, not cheap. It just sold for $15 million. The sellers, who bought the property for $7.8 million in the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was pushing residents out of cities, nearly doubled their money in under five years.

San Francisco real estate agent Rohin Dhar flagged the sale on X, where it drew the kind of reactions you’d expect from people who thought they’d seen everything this market had to offer.

Then there’s a 4,100-square-foot home in Presidio Heights, one of the city’s most exclusive enclaves, that was listed in late April for $4.4 million and sold a week later for $8.2 million, nearly double the asking price. Venture capitalist Nichole Wischoff, who toured the property before it sold, wasn’t impressed with what the money was buying.

“Mediocre house, good location,” she wrote on X, noting that the view from the patio was of a neighboring home that appeared to have burned down. “Someone just bought this for $8.2M,” she wrote. “If you like to see cash lit on fire, come tour real estate in SF.”

It isn’t only the ultra-high end that’s seeing action. A 2,300-square-foot home in Bernal Heights sold this week for $4 million — a million dollars over asking — just two years after the same owners tried and failed to sell it for $2.95 million. That sale represents a different but equally telling story: the frenzy isn’t limited to the rarefied tier of eight-figure homes. Across a wide swath of the market, buyers are bidding aggressively, with homes routinely selling for $500,000 to $1 million over asking.

The numbers back up the anecdotes. New data from Redfin shows luxury home sales in San Francisco jumped 22% year-over-year in March, with homes going under contract in a median of just 12 days — down from 28 days a year earlier. Nearly two-thirds of luxury properties went under contract within two weeks. By contrast, non-luxury sales rose less than 4%, with prices essentially flat. The high end is essentially operating in a totally different universe.

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The invisible force behind all of this is no mystery to anyone paying attention to the city’s tech economy. San Francisco is home to some of the most valuable private companies in the world, and their employees have been quietly accumulating — and, increasingly, cashing out — fortunes.

OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the most valuable AI companies ever created, have allowed employees to sell portions of their shares in secondary market transactions in recent years, putting serious money into the hands of people who, in many cases, already live here and want to upgrade. That liquidity is flowing directly into the housing market, and the market is responding accordingly.

The truly astonishing part may still be ahead. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and a cluster of other tech giants have yet to go public. When they do — and the conventional wisdom holds that some of them will, sooner than later — the wealth unlocked could make the current moment look quaint in comparison. Thousands of employees holding equity in companies valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars will become even more liquid almost overnight.

What that means for a housing market already producing $15 million sales within just a week or so of being listed is, candidly, difficult to fathom at this moment. San Francisco has spent decades as the punchline of conversations about housing affordability. It’ll be strange, to say the least, if $15 million soon looks like an opening bid.

Amazon is adding a short-form video feed to the Prime Video app called “Clips,” the company announced on Friday.

Rolling out first in the U.S., Clips will include… well, clips of shows on Prime Video that are designed to hook a viewer and get them to give the full show a try. From that clip, users can add a title to their watchlist, share it with a friend, or navigate to rent, buy, or access the title through their subscription.

“Clips gives customers a whole new way to browse with short, personalized snippets tailored to their interests,” said Prime Video’s director of Global Application Experiences, Brian Griffin, in a press release. “Whether they have a few minutes to scroll or are looking for something to watch when they have more time, entertainment is just a tap away.”

Amazon first tested this short-form feed during the NBA season, showing highlights that users can scroll through as though they’re watching TikToks.

It’s not a surprise to see Prime Video make this change — Netflix, Peacock, Tubi, Disney, and others have recently rolled out similar experiences, which are designed to promote discovery. Netflix’s short-form feed even shares the Clips name.

Clips is first rolling out to select U.S. customers on iOS, Android, and Fire tablets, but it will be available more broadly this summer. Users can navigate to Clips by scrolling down on the Clips carousel on the Prime Video mobile home page, which will surface a full-screen vertical feed.

In Brief

Bloomberg has a deep dive this week into how Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is trying to rescue one of Silicon Valley’s most storied, and stumbling, chipmakers. It’s worth a read, but it actually undersells the most jaw-dropping part of the story: Intel’s stock has risen a stunning 490% over the past year, a bet by Wall Street that may be running well ahead of the company’s actual turnaround.

Tan, who took over in March of last year, has spent much of his first year schmoozing rather than restructuring — locking in a sweetheart deal with the U.S. government (now Intel’s third-largest shareholder), cozying up to Elon Musk on a factory partnership, and reportedly landing preliminary manufacturing agreements with both Apple and Tesla.

The fundamentals are still messy. Intel’s chip yields lag well behind industry leader TSMC, and employees tell Bloomberg that Tan has been light on specifics internally, with some teams adjusting missed deadlines rather than recovering from them.

But investors are betting big on the bigger picture. Whether the execution follows is the multibillion-dollar question.

Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI.

Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday.

“We’ve never done something like this in Cloudflare’s history,” co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday on the quarterly conference call, marking the first mass layoff in the company’s 16-year history. The company is cutting people from all teams and geographies except for salespeople who carry revenue quotas, CFO Thomas Seifert detailed on the call.

The news of the workforce cuts came as the company reported quarterly revenues of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase and the highest single quarter in the company’s history. However, this was coupled with a loss of $62.0 million compared with losing $53.2 million in the year-ago quarter.

That widening loss, even as revenue surged, highlights a familiar paradox in Cloudflare’s story: The company is growing fast but has yet to turn a consistent profit. But the loss was a smaller percentage of revenue, and the quarter was coupled with a lot of other positive indicators. For instance, Cloudflare reported that it had over $2.5 billion in “remaining performance obligations,” a year-over-year growth of 34%. RPO is the favorite metric these days to indicate revenue under contract but not yet delivered.

Hence, Prince insisted, the 20% cuts were not to reduce expenses but were strictly because of its use of AI.

“Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era,” Prince and Cloudflare co-founder and president, Michelle Zatlyn, wrote in a related blog post about the layoffs.

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Prince acknowledged on the call that even though Cloudflare has been selling AI-powered products, it was at first cautious about adopting AI itself.

“Internally, the tipping point was last November. At that point, across our teams, we began to see massive productivity gains, team members that were two, 10, even 100 times more productive than they had been before. It was like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver,” he described.

“Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone,” he added.

Image Credits:SEC filings; Cloudflare press releases /

Prince highlighted the internal use of AI coding, saying that virtually the entire R&D team is now using the company’s own Workers platform — a tool that lets developers build and run software directly on Cloudflare’s global network — including its vibe coding feature. He also noted that 100% of the code produced this way and deployed for use in Cloudflare’s products is “now reviewed by autonomous AI agents.”

But it’s not just developers who are using AI internally, he said. “Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done.”

As a result, these highly productive, AI-powered employees require fewer support staff, he argued.

“A lot of the support people that provide support behind them, those roles aren’t going to be the roles that, you know, drive companies going forward,” Prince said.

Interestingly, Prince says that Cloudflare “will continue to hire people, and we’ll continue to invest in them because the people that are embracing these tools are just so much more productive than we’d ever seen before. I would guess that in 2027 we’ll have more employees than we did at any point in 2026.”

Cloudflare said it ended its first quarter before layoffs with a headcount of about 5,500.

The pattern Prince described — deploying AI gains as justification for workforce reductions even during a period of strong revenue growth — is fast becoming a familiar script across the tech industry. Whether it reflects true structural transformation or acts as convenient cover for cost discipline is a question that investors and employees will be wrestling with for some time to come.

When asked by an analyst on the call why the company needed to cut so deeply after such a good quarter, Prince said, “Just because you’re fit doesn’t mean you can’t get fitter.”

Porsche is closing three of its subsidiaries as it copes with falling sales and declining profits, the German automaker announced Friday.

The automaker’s battery subsidiary, Cellforce Group, is perhaps the highest-profile casualty. The division had already been through a “realignment” in August after Porsche dropped plans to make its own batteries, turning Cellforce into a research and development arm. Now, Porsche says it’s pursuing a “technology-open powertrain strategy” — corporate-speak that indicates the automaker will rely more heavily on other companies for its batteries.

Porsche eBike Performance, which made e-bike drive systems, and Cetitec, a networking software subsidiary that served both Porsche and the wider Volkswagen Group, will also be shut down.

More than 500 people, who are employed at the three subsidiaries, will lose their jobs.

“We must refocus on our core business,” Porsche CEO and Executive Chair Michael Leiters said in a statement. “This is the indispensable foundation for a successful strategic realignment. This forces us to make painful cuts — including our subsidiaries.”

It’s a message that Leiters, who became CEO early this year, first delivered in March when the company announced plans to realign its business. “We will comprehensively reposition Porsche, make the company leaner, faster and the products even more desirable,” he said at the time.

Since then, Porsche has extracted itself from several endeavors, including an agreement reached in April to sell its equity stakes in Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Group to a consortium led by New York-based investment firm HOF Capital.

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Porsche’s electrification efforts got off to a strong start with the Taycan in 2019, but the company soon ran into trouble developing follow-on EVs. The Macan Electric was delayed by nearly two years as software development within Volkswagen’s Cariad division lagged behind expectations.

The entire company has suffered declining sales in key markets, including North America, where sales fell 11%, and China, where deliveries were off 21% in the first quarter of this year. European sales were also down 18%, though they rose slightly in Germany.

Porsche has blamed EV adoption for its woes, though the company’s continued poor performance in China, where electric vehicles have claimed more than half the market, suggests that consumer acceptance of EVs may not be the root cause.

The closure of Cellforce captures the change of fortunes for Porsche’s EV program. The German automaker had originally started the subsidiary to develop and manufacture batteries that would distinguish its EVs from other companies.

“The battery cell is the combustion chamber of the future,” Oliver Blume said in 2022 when he chaired Porsche’s executive board.

After struggling to develop EVs in a timely manner, Porsche has shifted much of its new vehicle efforts to reviving some of its internal combustion platforms, which were originally intended to constitute a minority of sales by 2030. The company is still planning to roll out new EVs though, and will soon sunset the gas-powered version of the Porsche Macan. Porsche is expected to bring an all-electric version of the Cayenne, and several variants, to market this year.

As families across the U.S. prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day this Sunday, Allison Stern is looking beyond the single day of appreciation.

Stern just closed $10 million in commitments for her debut early-stage fund, Mother Ventures, which focuses exclusively on the mother as a consumer.

“In the U.S., moms are responsible for 85% of household purchases and have $2.4 trillion in spending power,” Stern (pictured below) told TechCrunch. “The numbers say that moms are the buyers, and they really are a very unique economic engine.”

Stern, a mother of two, is tapping into that spending clout by backing startups that reflect the needs of modern mothers. Since launching Mother Ventures two years ago, she has already deployed $4 million into 13 startups. Her portfolio includes Coral Care, which allows instant booking of pediatric specialists for children with developmental delays, and Tin Can, a popular Wi-Fi-enabled “landline” designed as a retro-style phone for kids.

Before launching her own fund, she co-founded Tubular Labs, a social video analytics startup she helped grow to $25 million in annual recurring revenue prior to its 2023 acquisition by private equity, and served as an operating partner at The Chernin Group (TCG), a consumer-focused growth equity firm.

Part of TCG’s investment thesis included backing companies serving “overlooked unique audiences with spending power,” such as Barstool Sports, which originally targeted Boston sports fans, she said.

Image Credits:Mother Ventures

When Stern set out to launch her own fund, she identified mothers as a similarly underserved market with the potential to deliver superior returns. “I felt like motherhood is the ultimate niche that’s not really a niche,” she said,

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Stern convinced Tony James, the former president and COO of Blackstone and current board chair of Costco, to back Mother Ventures as an anchor LP. Other backers of the fund include Jessica Rolph, founder of the child development startup Lovevery, as well as female executives from Netflix, Rent the Runway, and Sesame Street, she said.

She argues that millennial and Gen Z mothers expect a different set of products, from on-demand transportation services such as Zum, to ready-meal delivery from DoorDash, and fintech tools like Greenlight that allow parents to instantly fund a child’s debit card.

“We want healthy things. We want subscription things. We want digital communities,” she said.

However, Stern doesn’t want her fund to be perceived as one that invests only in parenting tech. “It’s a consumer fund, and focus on the mom as the consumer allows us to be wider in our bets,” she said.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Avride, a robotaxi company that has partnered with Uber, after identifying more than a dozen crashes and one minor injury.

The safety regulator’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said all 16 crashes that it has identified have to do with “the competence of” Avride’s self-driving system, which has apparently struggled with changing lanes, responding to other vehicles in the same lane, and responding to stationary objects.

All of the crashes have come while the Avride vehicles were under the supervision of a safety monitor in the driver’s seat. Reached for comment, Avride declined to explain why the safety monitors did not intervene in these crashes. The company pointed out that it reported these crashes to the NHTSA as required by the agency’s 2021 Standing General Order on automated driving.

“We have implemented targeted technical and operational mitigations to address our findings from each reported incident between December 2025 and March 2026, and have further enhanced overall system capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “Our total operations have continued to grow, while the frequency of incidents relative to our mileage has steadily declined.”

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Avride, best known for its sidewalk delivery robots, is a subsidiary of Nebius, formerly Yandex NV, the Netherlands-based company that sold off its Russian business in 2024. The company has also spent years developing and testing self-driving cars, and struck a partnership with Uber in 2024. The following year, Uber and its parent company Nebius agreed to make “strategic investments and other commitments” to Avride worth up to $375 million.

The investigation comes just a few months after Uber started offering rides in Avride robotaxis in Dallas, Texas, which is where “many of the reported crashes have occurred,” according to the ODI. Some of the crashes also occurred in Austin, Texas. At least one of the reported crashes involved a robotaxi carrying a passenger.

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The probe arrives amid expanded testing, deployment, and scaling of autonomous vehicle technologies by numerous companies across the United States, drawing increased scrutiny.

Waymo is currently being investigated by both NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board for illegal behavior around school buses, and for a January crash in which one of the Alphabet-owned company’s robotaxis struck a child.

The ODI said on Friday that it completed a preliminary review of videos of each Avride crash. These videos, according to the office, show “instances of the AVs changing lanes into the path of or directly into other vehicles traveling in an adjacent lane and in close proximity to an AV; failing to slow or stop for slow-moving or stopped vehicles in the lane and path ahead; failing to slow for or avoid vehicles entering the lane and path ahead; and striking stationary objects partially obstructing the lane and path ahead.”

The crash that caused a minor injury happened in December 2025 in Dallas, according to data filed with the NHTSA. It involved an Avride-equipped Hyundai Ioniq 5 that clipped the open driver’s side door of a parked pickup truck. One of the truck’s occupants sustained a minor injury that did not require hospitalization.

Another December crash in Dallas involved an Avride robotaxi that tried to change lanes to avoid a parked pickup truck, according to data filed with the NHTSA. The Avride vehicle turned into a van that was beside it, resulting in damage to both vehicles.

Multiple crashes involved other vehicles turning into the Avride robotaxis, though it’s unclear from the descriptions if there was a chance for the robotaxis to avoid those collisions. At least one crash involved an Avride vehicle crashing into a dumpster. Only one of the reported crashes describes the safety monitor attempting to intervene.

Poland’s intelligence service said it detected attacks on five water treatment plants where hackers could have taken control of the industrial equipment inside, including, in the worst case, tampering with the safety of the water supply.

The story is relevant beyond Poland’s borders: U.S. water infrastructure has faced similar threats in recent years. In 2021, a hacker briefly gained access to a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida and attempted to increase the level of sodium hydroxide — a caustic chemical — to dangerous levels. The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have since warned that water utilities remain a soft target for foreign hackers.

On Friday, Poland’s Internal Security Agency, the country’s top intelligence agency, published a report covering the last two years of the agency’s operations and threats the country faced. The report said Polish intelligence thwarted multiple acts of sabotage from Russian government spies and hackers, who targeted military facilities, critical infrastructure (essential systems such as power grids, water supplies, and transportation networks), as well as civilian targets. These attacks, according to the report, may have resulted in fatalities.

“The most serious challenge remains the sabotage activity against Poland, inspired and organized by Russian intelligence services. This threat was (and is) real and immediate. It requires full mobilization,” read the report.

The report did not specify whether the hackers behind the attacks on the water treatment facilities were Russian government spies. But Poland has recently been the target of several attempts by Russian government hackers to attack its infrastructure, including a failed attempt to bring down the country’s energy grid. That breach was later attributed to poor security controls at the targeted facilities.

Poland’s experience is part of a growing global pattern of attacks on water and energy infrastructure. As recently as last month, a joint advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, the NSA, and several other federal agencies warned that Iranian-backed hackers are actively targeting programmable logic controllers — the industrial computers that run water and energy facilities — at U.S. utilities. The same Iranian hacking group, CyberAv3ngers, previously broke into digital control panels at multiple U.S. water treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2023, in attacks that federal agencies linked to escalating hostilities in the Middle East.

In other words, the attacks against Poland are not unique, they follow a strategy that the Russian government is applying both in war zones such as Ukraine, as well as against Western countries that it sees as longstanding enemies. The plan, according to Polish intelligence, is to destabilize and weaken the West, and cyberattacks and cyberespionage are just tools in a larger toolkit for Putin’s regime.

Peter Williams, a veteran cybersecurity executive who was the head of the hacking and surveillance tech division of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris, has been ordered to pay $10 million to his former employer. Williams was the central figure in one of the worst leaks of advanced hacking tools in the history of the United States and its closest allies.

On Wednesday, a judge ordered Williams to pay that amount in restitution on top of the $1.3 million he had already been ordered to pay to L3Harris. Williams, a 39-year-old Australian citizen who previously worked in one of Australia’s intelligence agencies, was until last year the general manager of Trenchant. Born out of the acquisition of two sister startups, Trenchant is L3Harris’ division that develops advanced spyware and hacking tools and sells them to the U.S. government and its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, a coalition of five English-speaking nations that share classified intelligence with one another. In addition to the U.S., the alliance includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Veteran cybersecurity reporter Kim Zetter first reported the new order to pay restitution in her newsletter.

Williams’ lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

Last year, Williams was arrested and accused of stealing seven unspecified trade secrets — almost certainly cyber exploits, which is code that hijacks software vulnerabilities, and surveillance technology — from Trenchant and then selling them to Operation Zero. The Russian firm acts as a broker, buying and selling hacking tools, and it says it works exclusively with the Russian government and local companies.

Williams pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

Williams made $1.3 million selling the trade secrets, which he used to buy luxury watches, a house near Washington, D.C., and family vacations. Trenchant told prosecutors that it suffered losses of up to $35 million due to Williams’ theft.

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U.S. prosecutors said Williams “betrayed” the United States and its allies by giving Operation Zero, which the U.S. government calls “one of the world’s most nefarious exploit brokers,” tools that could have been used to hack “millions of computers and devices around the world.”

As TechCrunch previously reported, Williams took advantage of his privileged “full access” to Trenchant’s internal network to siphon the tools out of the company’s offices. After Williams sold the hacking tools to Operation Zero, some of them ended up being used by Russian government spies in Ukraine, and later Chinese cybercriminals, according to former L3Harris employees who recognized the stolen code in cybersecurity research that Google published after investigating the cyberattacks in which those tools were deployed.

Williams also tried to frame one of his employees for the theft.

The Trump administration on Friday launched a new website that will house a collection of “new, never-before-seen” files about UFOs, according to the Pentagon. (And yes, we’re apparently okay with calling them UFOs again, as the URL to the new website is war.gov/ufo.)

In a public announcement by the Defense Department — which, under Trump, rebranded as the Department of War — the initial set of files housed on the site will include those containing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire U.S. government. The materials have been reviewed for security purposes, but many have “not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies,” the Department’s statement read.

The collection will also grow over time as additional files are released on a “rolling basis,” it noted.



The release of the documents follows the December 2017 news story, broken by The New York Times, Politico, and others, about a $22 million classified Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which had been investigating military encounters with unknown objects.

Since then, interest in UAPs, now the modern term for UFOs, has grown among the public, fueling increased concerns about what’s in our skies, as was the case with the 2024 U.S. drone sightings. Figuring out what’s truly unexplained has been complicated by the fact that our skies look much different from in years past, thanks to things like SpaceX launches and satellites. That’s why a collection of military intelligence-backed files is interesting.

The news of the government’s funding of the Pentagon program has also influenced pop culture in recent years, as reflected in films like 2023’s “Jules” about a man’s kinship with an alien who crashed in his backyard; “Bugonia,” which deals with conspiracy theories around aliens among us; and in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film “Disclosure Day,” which references government cover-ups around the topic.

Years ago, such a release of UFO files would have been major news, but today many Americans are more concerned about daily pressures, like the Iran war and its impact on gas prices, the ever-growing cost of living, job losses blamed on AI, healthcare, climate change, and other more pertinent issues.

According to the Pentagon, the release of the UFO files is the result of an interagency effort, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). This initiative includes the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of Energy (DOE), the DOD’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and components of other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Ahead of this, independent news site 404 Media spotted in March that the Executive Office of the President had registered the domain aliens.gov; however, that site is not active at this time.

Sweden-based caller ID company Truecaller said it will cut 70 jobs, or roughly 15% of its workforce, in the second quarter, as the company posted its Q1 2026 results with a decline in revenue and profits. Truecaller blamed real-money gaming in India, changes in advertising partner algorithms, and conflict in the Middle East for the slide.

As TechCrunch reported last month, the company is already facing challenges from India’s telecom-led solutions, such as Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) identification service, and 5% year-on-year decline in downloads last year.

In its Q1 2026 results, Truecaller’s net sales dropped 27% to 362 million SEK ($39.34 million). In its biggest market, India, net sales dipped by 41% year-on-year. In addition, ad revenues declined by 44%.

“The year-on-year comparison looks especially weak given that Q1 and Q2 last year included a large contribution coming from the real money gaming sector in India in connection with the IPL season that takes place around this time. The situation in the Middle East also reduced our revenues from that region,” Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala said during the earnings call.

Last August, India banned real-money gaming apps such as Dream 11 and MPL that allowed users to use money to play fantasy sports. Industry bodies estimated that the real-money gaming industry was worth $23 billion in India. Because of this shutdown, platforms on which these real-money apps are advertised were deprived of that revenue.

Truecaller also said that the revenue decline in the ad business was also due to a programmatic partner, identified as Google by an analyst earlier this year, changing its algorithms.

There were only a few positives for the company this quarter. First, it crossed the mark of 500 million active users. Plus, its subscription revenue increased by 27%, representing 31% of net sales. The company has been adding features like AI Assistant and Family Protection to make its paid offerings more attractive.

Truecaller’s stock has dipped by over 26% this year and by over 79% in the last 12 months. However, after the Q1 results, it has seen some recovery.

If you’re planning to raise a Series A in the next 12 to 24 months, the rules you think you’re playing by may already be outdated.

Series A isn’t just harder — it’s slower, more selective, and increasingly unforgiving. The bar has shifted, and many founders are still optimizing for a version of the market that no longer exists.

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, taking place October 13-15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, one session on the Builders Stage cuts directly into that gap, led by some of the VCs shaping the next funding cycle: The Series A in 2027.

This isn’t a retrospective. It’s a forward-looking breakdown of what it will actually take to raise in the next funding cycle and who will get left behind. Get your passes to Disrupt and join this session live. This offer to buy one, get one at 50% off ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Image Credits:TechCrunch

Get ahead of Series A changes

The window between building and raising has stretched. Metrics that once signaled readiness are being questioned. Teams that would have been fundable two years ago are now getting passed over. And in many cases, founders don’t realize it until they’re already in the market.

This session is designed to correct that before it costs you time, leverage, or your round.

What “fundable” actually means now

The definition of a “fundable” company is being rewritten in real time. In this session, you’ll get a direct view of how top investors are recalibrating:

Techcrunch event This Week Only: Buy one pass, get the second at 50% off

Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register before May 8 to bring a +1 at half the cost. This Week Only: Buy one pass, get the second at 50% off

Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register before May 8 to bring a +1 at half the cost. San Francisco, CA | REGISTER NOW

What traction actually signals readiness, and what no longer does

How expectations around growth, efficiency, and capital have changed

What product and GTM milestones matter heading into a raise

Where AI is raising the bar and where it’s distorting signals

This is practical information you can use right away. It reveals how decisions are being made right now and how they’ll be made when you go out to raise. Secure your ticket to Disrupt to learn what it takes (now) to raise.

Who you’re hearing from onstage

This Builders Stage session brings together investors who are actively shaping the next funding cycle — not commenting on the last one.

Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures

Nina Achadjian invests across seed to growth in AI, robotics, and vertical SaaS. She works closely with companies like Anthropic, Gong, and ServiceTitan, and brings both operator experience from Google and early-stage investing insight.

Image Credits:Index Ventures

Janelle Teng Wade, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners

Janelle Teng Wade focuses on early-stage AI/ML, data infrastructure, and developer platforms. She co-authors Bessemer’s widely referenced State of the Cloud Report and helps define their frameworks for scaling to $100 million+ in revenue.

Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Peak XV

Shailendra Signh has been part of a firm that has backed 500+ companies and category leaders like CRED, Pine Labs, and Druva. The firm’s portfolio has produced 30+ IPOs and dozens of $100 million+ revenue companies.

Image Credits:Lionel Ng/Bloomberg / Getty Images

These are investors defining what the next wave of venture-backed companies needs to look like — through the companies they fund, the frameworks they build, and the standards they apply. Register for Disrupt to access this session and 250+ others.

What you’ll walk away with

The goal of this session is simple: clarity. You’ll leave with a sharper understanding of:

What metrics you should actually be building toward.

How to structure your team ahead of a raise.

What signals investors are prioritizing — and what they’re ignoring.

How to position your company in a more selective market.

And just as importantly, you’ll learn what to stop optimizing for. Because in this environment, doing the wrong things well doesn’t help; it sets you back. Buy your pass to Disrupt before prices increase.

Where this fits at Disrupt

This session is part of the Builders Stage lineup at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where sessions are built around execution, not theory. This is where founders go to pressure-test their strategy, recalibrate their assumptions, and get answers they can actually act on.

If you’re thinking about raising in the next one to two years, this isn’t optional. Get this wrong, and you don’t raise. Or you raise later than planned, with less leverage, under more pressure. Get it right, and you separate from the pack — before you ever start pitching.

That’s the difference this session is designed to create. Register now to save 50% on two passes and to attend the Series A in 2027.

Get your Disrupt ticket for live Series A insights

The Series A market is changing faster than most founders are adapting. You can figure that out mid-process — or you can understand it before you ever start.

Save $410 on your pass and get a second pass at 50% off. Offer ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Join this session plus 250+ others across all Disrupt tracks for three days of real-world fundraising and tech insights.