Not everyone needs a keynote slot to make noise at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Sometimes the best way to meet investors, customers, and partners is by exhibiting directly on the Expo Hall floor at San Francisco’s Moscone West from October 13-15.

That’s exactly what our Exhibit Program offers, and it’s still open to showcase your startup.

Here’s what $12,500 buys you:

A 6’ x 30″ table in the Expo Hall, which is the highest-trafficked part of Disrupt, where more than 10,000 founders, VCs, and tech leaders come looking for partnerships, investments, and networking.

We provide the table, linen, chairs, and signage so you can focus on showcasing your startup — not logistics.

10 Disrupt passes, including five all-access Exhibitor-Partner passes and five Expo+ passes, so your whole team can work the floor, not just staff a booth. Those cover nearly $4,000 of the exhibition price by themselves!

Lead generation through the Disrupt 2026 mobile app, so every conversation turns into a follow-up, not a lost business card.

Access to the Disrupt 2026 press list and Silver Tier sponsor branding across the site, app, and signage.

Joining fellow exhibitors is the fastest, lowest-lift way for a startup at any stage to get in front of the exact room that matters, from investors sourcing deals, to operators evaluating tools, to founders scouting partners.

There is one catch, though: Tables are limited. This offer ends when the last exhibit table sells out, or on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT, whichever comes first.

Book your exhibit table now by heading here. Or, if you’re not ready to exhibit this year, get a Disrupt 2026 ticket here while we’re running a limited-time $400 discount and start planning your presence for next year!

Vogue World is coming to San Francisco next year — perhaps another indication that tech billionaires have become leaders in the fashion zeitgeist.

Of course, the announcement of the enormous fashion/art/music event doesn’t say that. Instead, Anna Wintour wrote that Vogue believes in celebrating cities and “San Francisco is a city like none other.”

“It’s a place of diverse communities living side by side, a place that loves the arts, loves creativity, and isn’t afraid of change.” She also noted the city’s history of rebelliousness and innovation.

“I love that San Francisco has always stood up for values and the things it believes in,” Wintour wrote. “Vogue World will support San Francisco’s creative minds and strengthen the entire ecosystem — and it will offer another opportunity to show San Francisco is on the rise.”

There were rumors that Vogue World would head to San Francisco after Winter was seen having meetings with the city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie.

Plus, in the past year, Wintour has cozied up to the most powerful names in tech, culminating in this year’s Met Gala, which saw Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, serve as lead sponsors for the event. Google’s Sergey Brin and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg were also spotted at the event (the latter’s first, that is). In fact, OpenAI bought a table, as did Meta and Snap (for $350,000 a pop). It’s true that TikTok, Apple, and Instagram previously sponsored the event, but the presence of the tech crowd was so considerable that the Met Gala this year was dubbed the “tech gala” in some places.

Last year, Vogue put Lauren Sanchez on the cover of the magazine after her wedding to the Amazon founder. To the fashion world, this was Wintour’s stamp of approval — not just for Sanchez’s ascent into the fashion world, but that tech and its leaders were worthy of cultural recognition.

Though Bezos and Sanchez reportedly live in Florida (and Amazon is, of course, headquartered in the Seattle area), there is no city more associated with tech than San Francisco. By locating Vogue World there, this is another indication of Wintour’s approval.

Vogue, as a media publication, is always following the money, and as a cultural bible, is always looking for ways to stay relevant. Turning toward the worldwide headquarters of AI, good or bad, is brilliant for business (and Wintour is nothing if not brilliant).

But Vogue World was previously held in New York, London, Paris, and this year, Milan. Maybe because I live in an East Coast bubble, but I’ve not heard anyone in recent years refer to San Francisco as a beacon of style to rank alongside these other cities.

While the city has a reputation as the land of the free-spirited bohemian, tech and its workers have a reputation for hoodies, Patagonia vests, and expensive athletic shoes, if they even dress up that much.

For instance, billionaire Alexandr Wang, who is now running Meta’s all-important Superintelligence Labs, just did an interview with Y Combinator’s Garry Tan in front of a packed stadium wearing a faded Nintendo T-shirt and what looked like a pair of Crocs. Comfy? Yes. High fashion? Decidedly no.

But maybe that’s changing. Wang’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, who once always appeared in a plain gray T-shirt and jeans, has made efforts in recent years to become more fashionable. Zuck and his wife Priscilla Chan were spotted front row at a Prada show this season. The new campaign for Meta Glasses has a slew of celeb ambassadors and looks like it could be a Saint Laurent or Balenciaga ad.

OpenAI and Palantir have recently released merch collabs, playing on the minimalist style of tech workers (the merch line of the latter, I would argue, looks inspired by Virgil Abloh’s Off-White).

I concede that creatively there is much to be done with the understated, Northern California style. Surrounded by beautiful nature and cooler temperatures, plenty of fashion designers could be motivated by San Francisco’s tech industry. I look forward to seeing Claude-inspired terra cotta-colored gowns and Vogue-emblazoned quarter-zips soon.

Let’s cut to the chase: Starting today, you can take an additional $100 off of our current $300 discount for your founder, investor, or attendee TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass, which is a nice bonus on top of our current discounted pricing.

This flash sale will run for just one more full day, until tomorrow, August 7 at 11:59 p.m. PT. This discount will mark your last chance at a bonus deal before our next pricing tier kicks in on August 21.

Register with this link to lock in your extra $100 off.

If you need to learn more before locking in your plans, Disrupt takes over Moscone West from October 13–15, bringing more than 10,000 founders, VCs, tech industry innovators, and builders for three days built around one thing: creating momentum for future success.

This isn’t a passive conference you simply watch — it’s a curated itinerary of speakers, workshops, network opportunities and post-event excitement for those actively building, investing, and looking for what’s next.

The Disrupt Stage: The conversations everyone will be talking about

The Disrupt Stage is our flagship programming, and we just revealed the initial lineup. We’ll dig into the biggest shifts in tech right now, whether it’s a post-smartphone future with Amazon’s SVP of Devices and Services Panos Panay; the real implications of a world in which everyone can develop their own software, with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad; and much, much more.

But that’s just one stage. Disrupt 2026 also features the:

AI Stage, covering the security gaps and business model shifts AI is forcing on every SaaS company.

New Smart Money Stage, tackling stablecoins, instant payments, and AI’s role in financial trust.

New Smart Systems Stage, with a perspective on fusion breakthroughs and grid strain powering AI’s next decade.

Builders Stage, the long-standing favorite stage where founders and investors get tactical about raising, hiring, and scaling.

Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography

Beyond the stages

Most Disrupt passes also unlock Startup Battlefield, where 200 startups will compete live for the Battlefield Cup. You’ll also get access to networking opportunities driven by your needs as a founder, investor, or learner, plus our Expo Hall, where hundreds of startups showcase their work.

This flash sale ends Friday

After 11:59 p.m. PT on Friday, August 7, this extra $100 savings goes away. Regular discounted pricing ends on August 21. If Disrupt is on your radar for this year, this is the best deal you’ll get between now and the event.

Save an extra $100 before Friday.

We’ll see you October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco!

Even in the age of AI-powered autonomous cyberattacks, the crude, tried and tested hacking techniques of tricking victims into doing things they shouldn’t are still producing great results.

Groups of unknown hackers are targeting and breaking into large financial and investment firms in the United States with the goal of stealing sensitive data to extort the victims with the threat of publishing it, Google’s security researchers wrote in a report on Thursday.

The company did not name the victims, but Reuters reported that among them there are leading private equity firms such as Apollo Global Management, Bain Capital, Blackstone, Bridgewater Associates, CME Group, KKR, Moody’s, and TPG.

The hacking groups, which Google dubbed Falcon, Helix, Pink, and Redact, are using an old-fashioned technique to break into those firms: phone calls to employees’ personal cellphones in which the hackers pretend to be co-workers or IT helpdesk staffers, during which they try to trick targets into entering their credentials and multi-factor codes on spoofed websites, according to Google. In cybersecurity parlance, this technique is known as voice phishing, or vishing.

Some of the groups identified by Google run websites where they publicize their hacks and threaten to leak the stolen data as a way to extort the victims into paying a ransom, a common strategy among cybercriminals.

Image Credits:Google /

“We conduct every negotiation on professional terms. The publication of your data is never our preferred resolution; it is the consequence of refusal to engage, deliberate stalling, or failure to honor an agreement,” read one of the sites. “Respond promptly and in good faith, and the matter is resolved without further incident.”

Google researchers said that the different groups may all be part of a larger umbrella collective the company tracks under the name UNC6671. But it’s unclear if they are affiliates, splinter groups, or they all use the same Phishing-as-a-Service infrastructure.

“We believe that this most likely reflects a coordinated group of threat actors operating multiple public extortion brands possibly in an effort to compartmentalize operations, hide overall breach volumes, and isolate any negotiation fallout,” read the report.

Contact Us Do you have more information about these data breaches? We’d love to hear from you. From a non-work device and network, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or Do you have more information about these data breaches? We’d love to hear from you. From a non-work device and network, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email .

According to Google, the hacking groups have also previously targeted large companies in the manufacturing, real estate, healthcare, and insurance sectors, as well as tech, transportation, and hospitality companies with the goal of stealing “valuable intellectual property, software source code, or sensitive VIP client data.”

More recently, the hackers have targeted legal and financial organizations such as private equity firms. “Concentrating on organizations involved in mergers, acquisitions, capital deployment, and litigation may reflect a strategy to target high-value corporate and confidential data to maximize leverage extortion demands,” wrote Google’s researchers.

Google said that one cryptocurrency wallet associated with one of the hacking groups received around $10 million in bitcoin in the first few months of this year, and that the hackers usually demand from $750,000 to $3 million from victims.

Laurie Bischel, a spokesperson for CME Group, declined to comment.

Apollo Global Management, Bain Capital, Blackstone, Bridgewater Associates, KKR, Moody’s, and TPG did not respond to a request for comment.

Security researchers say they have evidence that a Chinese-linked spyware has expanded from mainland China to now target victims in over a dozen countries, including across Europe and the United States. The previously identified spyware also has new functionality capable of stealing troves of data and remotely bricking devices.

The researchers at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf said that the LightSpy spyware, first discovered in 2018 and previously linked to Chinese state-backed hackers, has since evolved into a commercial spyware platform operated by a single threat actor who caters to governments, enterprises, and militaries.

The platform is said to feature custom branding, billing, and demos for advertising it to prospective customers.

The findings underscore how the use of spyware continues to proliferate beyond governments and nation-backed hackers, and more broadly into the private industry.

LightSpy is a modular spyware platform that allows whoever is controlling it to attack a multitude of different devices, including smartphones, Apple devices, Linux servers, and Windows PCs. By using exploits for each device, the spyware can steal large amounts of sensitive information from its targets, including precise location data, chat messages, screen recordings, and stored passwords. The researchers also said the code is capable of remotely wiping and destroying data on a compromised device.

The researchers said that LightSpy has now been identified infecting routers, which researchers say they had not seen before. By attacking routers, the hackers can gain visibility and access to any other device on the same network.

Some of the compromised routers are associated with NATO member countries, said Arctic Wolf.

According to the company, LightSpy operates a network of at least 117 servers in several countries around the world.

The researchers said they were able to link the latest activity to a Chinese contractor after one of the spyware’s operators used the LightSpy administrator’s panel to place an order with Kentucky Fried Chicken using his real name and office address.

In Brief

Connor Moucka, a 26-year-old Canadian citizen, has pled guilty to hacking more than 165 companies, stealing billions of records, and extorting several companies and individuals.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the guilty plea in a press release.

Moucka was accused of hacking cloud provider Snowflake, which allowed him and his co-conspirators to break into dozens of the company’s customers, including AT&T, LendingTree, and Ticketmaster. Moucka stole data from more than 100 million AT&T customers, including call and texting records, as well as banking information, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers from other breaches.

Over the years, Moucka and his accomplices received more than $2.5 million in ransom payments. The hacker also received around $500,000 for selling victims’ data on hacking forums such as the notorious BreachForums. Victims of Moucka and his accomplices’ hacks suffered $9.5 million in losses, according to the DOJ.

“Connor Moucka’s threats and re-extortion tactics were calculated and predatory, and his actions did real harm to his victims, be they companies targeted for theft and extortion or the millions of everyday people who are their customers,” said W. Mike Herrington, an FBI special agent who worked on the case.

Moucka, who was known online as Waifu and Judische, was arrested in Canada at the end of 2024, just months after the Snowflake breaches.

At the time, Austin Larsen, a senior researcher at Google’s cybersecurity firm Mandiant who had been investigating the Snowflake hacks, said Moucka was “one of the most consequential” hackers of 2024.

Moucka is scheduled to be sentenced on October 27 and faces decades in prison.

In Brief

TikTok is laying off 250 employees and closing its Nashville office, which housed some members of TikTok’s content-moderation team. The news was first reported by The New York Times.

Zanna Crowley, a spokesperson for the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, confirmed the news, saying that the shuttering was to “streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth.”

“We remain fully committed to providing secure, safe and positive experiences for the 200 million Americans that create, discover and connect with what they love on TikTok,” the spokesperson said.

The cuts come as social media companies rely more on AI to monitor and remove violent or explicit content on their platforms.

The Nashville office, which TikTok leased in 2024, will close on October 5.

In Brief

More details continue to trickle out about OpenAI’s mysterious new hardware device — described previously as an AI-fueled smart speaker that will be the “physical manifestation” of ChatGPT.

Bloomberg now reports that the device will be “donut-shaped,” designed thusly to allow users to carry it around their home and place it in different locations, like a bedside table or a kitchen counter.

It will be constructed from “high-quality metal,” have a “premium look,” and (in a detail that mystifies) will have distinct “moving parts,” sources told Bloomberg.

It also could be slightly more expensive than your average smart speaker, perhaps $300 to $400 per unit, according to this report. For comparison, most of Amazon’s smart home speakers range in price from $40 on the low end to $240 on the high end.

So, to sum up: an expensive talking AI donut that has … moving parts? OpenAI releasing a smart home device has a certain logic to it, in that it would further integrate ChatGPT into users’ lives. However, historically speaking, smart speakers have not always been profitable and may prove a difficult market to break into. The potentially high price point also might not help.

The device, which is being developed in partnership with LoveFrom, the design studio founded by famous former Apple developer Jony Ive, will likely be released at some point in 2027, Bloomberg writes.

The company’s attempt to enter the hardware market has not gone off without a hitch. OpenAI is being sued by the current king of hardware, Apple, which has accused the AI lab of stealing trade secrets. OpenAI has denied wrongdoing.

In Brief

Defense tech Hadrian announced on Thursday that it had raised a fresh $1.37 billion round at a valuation of $7.87 billion from a mile-long list of well-known investors.

The lead investors in the round include WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, and Baillie Gifford. Participating investors include 1789 Capital, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, funds managed by Apollo and T. Rowe Price, as well as firms like CapitalG, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Altimeter, and others.

Founders Fund and Lux led the company’s $260 million Series C financing about a year ago, bringing the total raised to date to around $2 billion, according to PitchBook estimates.

Hadrian is an interesting defense tech in that it’s not trying to build new AI-powered weapons. The company is building automated manufacturing facilities that will mass-produce parts for the vehicles that the military complex already relies on.

For instance, in March, Hadrian opened a facility in Alabama to mass-produce parts for submarines, making that its fourth facility. The deal for that facility, structured as a public/private partnership, was valued at $2.4 billion, Hadrian said.

Few automotive companies are as dependent on breakout hits as Ford. It’s almost as though it’s baked into the company’s DNA: From the Model T and the Taurus to the F-150 and the Explorer, Ford has lurched from one success to another.

Recently, though, the automaker has been coming up empty handed. While its U.S. vehicle sales rose 6% year-over-year to 2.08 million in 2025, they’re today less than half their peak of 4.48 million in 2000. Of the new vehicles that Ford has introduced in recent years, none have become a sensation.

Ford CEO Jim Farley is betting its forthcoming EV pickup, Fathom, will change its fortunes, calling the introduction of the truck and its Universal EV platform a “Model T moment” for the company. Ford needs a product that can compete with Chinese EVs, which have been taking the world by storm. Yet, for reasons that are both within and beyond Ford’s control, the Fathom is unlikely to be another Taurus or Explorer, two hits that drove Ford sales in the 1990s.

Now, Fathom could be a minor success. Any way you spin it, the base model will be a good deal. On Thursday, Ford said the Fathom would start at $29,945, including the destination fee. That’s significantly below the $50,000 average for new vehicles and the $56,000 average for EVs. It’s also about $5,000 lower than the Keating Line — the average listing price of the largest price segment available at dealers.

But consumers don’t decide to buy a car based on price alone. Here’s where Ford could run into some challenges.

The Fathom will be a compact pickup truck, a form factor that the market largely ignored until Ford started selling the Maverick in 2021. The Fathom is entering an under-exploited niche, but it doesn’t appear to be one with enormous potential either. Sales of the Maverick offer a clue: they’ve been brisk, but at 155,000 last year, the small truck is not a blockbuster, either. The Taurus sold more than twice as many at its peak in 1992.

Now, the Fathom appears to have a few advantages over the Maverick. For one, passengers should enjoy a bit more interior space, according to Ford. The EV will also have a frunk, which could sway some buyers of traditional cars who have overlooked pickup trucks for lack of closed storage.

But the Fathom is still a pickup, and not everyone loves that look. The majority of the market today is dominated by SUVs, with just over 70% of prospective buyers looking for an SUV, compared with 33% for pickups, according to Cox Automotive.

Even among pickup fans, the Fathom may struggle to draw buyers. For many, trucks are a vibe. They want them to look ready to tackle the Rubicon trail, even if they never make it beyond the city limits. Every automaker is aware of this. GM, in a recent briefing I attended, made a point to mention how it is delivering the “lifted trucks” that its customers are demanding. The Fathom, from the little we’ve seen so far, doesn’t scream “rugged.”

Then there’s the EV thing. Most people who buy an EV, myself included, would never buy an internal combustion vehicle again, but a lot of people don’t love change. They’re content with gas-powered cars and trucks, and many dealers are happy to keep them in one.

The Fathom’s success won’t be dictated entirely by the whims of the market, though. Ford can spend on marketing and dealer training to overcome the EV hurdle, and may even convince people that a truck with a frunk is an ideal replacement for a sedan. And it’s almost a guarantee that Ford will introduce a ruggedized version of the Fathom.

Will that be enough to make the Fathom a breakout hit? Probably not. But maybe Ford doesn’t need it to be.

Maybe the Fathom is a test of its new production process, a toe in the water at a part of the beach that hasn’t been overrun. Compact trucks aren’t setting sales records, but the market for them is still growing. Ford can use that demand to soak up every Fathom it makes while it refines its new platform and process. Then, once it’s confident it has the kinks sorted out, it can expand it to other segments, including SUVs.

The Fathom may not be Ford’s swing for the fences. Maybe the company’s merely hoping to get on base and lay the groundwork for the next model rolling off the Universal EV platform — the one it really needs to be a home run.

Tinder isn’t the only major dating app turning away from the swipe and toward real-world events to attract Gen Z users who’ve grown tired of traditional online dating. On Wednesday, Bumble touted the early success of its newest app, Plans, designed to connect people “IRL” in low-pressure group settings, and spoke of what comes next for Bumble’s flagship app after the “swipe” is dead.

On its second-quarter earnings call with investors, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said Plans showed “promising results” in early tests over the past few months, and the company would “lean more into real-life experiences” going forward.

Combined with Tinder’s news this week that it, too, is doubling down on in-person events, it’s clear there’s a major shift happening in online dating. Simply put, the swipe era is coming to an end.

“I am a firm believer that the future of meeting people in groups will become more important. People love to come together in groups and see who they naturally share chemistry with once they have met,” Wolfe Herd told analysts on the call. “Group socializing is a real part of how Gen Z prefers to meet, and we believe Bumble represents a natural bridge from meeting to socializing to then dating.”

The company first experimented with real-world, platonic connections with Bumble BFF, an app for making friends, which has shown some traction with Gen Z women.

With Plans, however, the idea is to give young people a way to meet up with others in their community to develop friendships over small group drinks and dinners at local spots, the company said when announcing the app last month. These meetups could later lead to deeper friendships or romantic connections, Bumble believes. By not being primarily focused on dating, it can take the pressure off these first-time encounters.

In addition, users on Plans can continue their chats on Bumble’s app without having to swipe or give out their phone number. In other words, Bumble is promoting “no swiping” as a plus here, suggesting that this format for finding matches is no longer desired among younger users.

Wolfe Herd also teased that Bumble is working on a new interaction model to replace the swipe entirely.

“The core idea is a shift away from optimizing for swipe speed and velocity towards something more intentional, fewer, better, more considered signals,” she said, saying the shift to the “swipe-free” model would happen gradually so as not to disrupt the ecosystem.

“What will replace the swipe? I will be keeping under wraps a bit longer for competitive purposes, but it is designed to generate more immediate interactions and, most importantly, better outcomes, mimicking real life and eliminating the friction and delay that exists in [the] current dating app model,” she added.

The company also plans to leverage more AI tools under the hood to help deliver improved results, but cautioned this would not mean Bumble was becoming an “AI-driven experience.”

Though Bumble beat on earnings in Q2, it’s still in a turnaround phase. The company’s revenue was down ​15.2% to $210.5 ⁠million year-over-year, and its stock suffered over its Q3 forecast, which shows a decline in paying customers.

OpenAI is removing limits on text-based chats for all users on ChatGPT, which recently crossed the 1 billion weekly user mark, the company announced today.

The new GPT-5.6 Luna model will power this experience and will be the default model for Free and Go users, replacing GPT-5.5.

Both users will also get a new “Think” button that lets them select higher reasoning power for complex questions. OpenAI said that there will still be separate limits for files, images, voice, and image generation.

Image Credits:OpenAI

The update brings changes for Plus and Pro users as well. They’ll gain access to an upgraded GPT-5.6 Sol model that’s better for quick tasks such as questions, web research, advice, planning, writing, and making decisions. The company noted that this new model will give more compact and robust answers. (Notably, this is a separate version from GPT-5.6 Sol used for Codex and Work, which is unchanged.)

ChatGPT Plus and Pro users are also getting a thinking slider to adjust “how much” thought the model puts into an answer. They can tune the thinking slider based on complexity and steps involved in solving a query.

Image Credits:OpenAI

OpenAI said an internal evaluation found that, compared to GPT-5.5-Instant, factual errors were 62% less common for GPT-5.6 Luna and 68% less common for GPT-5.6 Sol.

The updated version of GPT-5.6 Sol is available to Plus and Pro users today, while the other changes for Free and Go users are arriving this week. Next week, users will gain access to unlimited text chats and the new Think button for harder questions.

Developers detest drudgery. The entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things. And, as vibe coding has proved, they’ve even managed to find ways to not do most of the work of putting products together.

So I wasn’t very surprised to hear that Naïve, which offers infrastructure that lets AI agents take on the bulk of the work involved in running a business, had signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch.

Taking vibe coding a step further, the startup claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business — provided you supply the AI agents and the required token budget, of course. It packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and company incorporation behind a single API.

Naïve supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, which can connect to the company’s API to provision the infrastructure to set up a business. It lets an agent orchestrate the formation of a U.S. LLC, supplying details such as the state, industry code, business description, and proposed names, though users are still required to be involved to complete KYC/KYB processes and make any required payments.

The rest of the set up can be done by your AI agents, including setting up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources and connections to services such as Stripe and QuickBooks. A governance layer promises to help users set budgets, restrict their agents’ capabilities, and require human approval before sensitive actions are carried out. The company also provides templates for businesses, such as AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, accounting, customer support, and even a mobile emulator with which agents can operate smartphone apps on emulated devices.

The allure of such automation has clearly resonated, as evidenced by the user figure mentioned above. And Naïve has scaled annual run-rate revenue by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months, CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje said.

Image Credits:Naïve /

Based on that traction, the company has now raised $28.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

Dorje told TechCrunch that his customers are using Naïve to run autonomous businesses such as AI automation agencies, “face-less” online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. In one case, he discovered Naïve’s infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing.

“I think the one that’s growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies,” Dorje said. “You know, the first business that a lot of people start is genuinely just selling agents to other small businesses […] We have some customers who run an entire rental-car agency autonomously.”

But this toolkit for running businesses may only be part of Naïve’s opportunity. Using AI to automate everything sounds great, but the cost of keeping agents running can grow astronomical as they call expensive AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks, and consume resources while sitting idle.

Naïve is using some of the new capital to develop infrastructure that it says can make those agent loops more efficient. It’s building a model router to send queries to the most efficient model for a task while preserving and replaying already reasoned data; a memory system that stores and surfaces business context as needed by agents to do their tasks; and an orchestrator for dividing work among agents.

Notably, Naïve is also building a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine — an approach that lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and makes it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents.

While the autonomous company toolkit is in the most demand today, Dorje said optimizing inference costs is one of its fastest-growing sources of demand. “Part of running an autonomous company and running agents, like that’s your biggest cost line now, and so the highest growing demand right now, I would say is [for] inference and serverless agents,” he said.

He added that part of the business is getting interest from enterprises, though he did not name any.

That could prove to be a more valuable business than helping founders automatically set up phone numbers and corporate cards. Developers may initially use Naïve to deal with the tedium of setting up a company, but as they grow, they may care more about whether it can meaningfully reduce the recurring cost of operating a horde of agents. Enterprises with established businesses may find something to care about on that front, too.

Naïve currently has 10 full-time employees. Dorje said proceeds from the Series A will be used to hire researchers and develop the company’s four infrastructure projects: virtualized sandboxes for agents; model routing and inference optimization; a memory layer; and governance and orchestration.

Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2 and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Apollo.io co-founder Tim Zheng, and former HubSpot COO JD Sherman also participated in the Series A. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to roughly $32 million.

Google announced on Thursday that Google Wallet will now allow parents to set up a secure balance for children under 18. The tech giant says the new feature is designed to help parents teach healthy financial habits while maintaining oversight of their child’s spending through built-in safeguards.

Parents can set daily spending limits, review their child’s transaction history, and choose to receive notifications whenever a purchase is made. Parents can also lock or unlock the account if the child’s device is lost, or activate a temporary “spending timeout” to pause spending at any time.

The new feature brings Google Wallet more in line with competing financial tools, including Apple Cash Family, which lets parents send money to their children while monitoring transactions and managing spending controls.

Additionally, the company is positioning itself against startups like FamZoo and Greenlight, which allow parents to teach their children financial literacy through prepaid debit card systems.

Image Credits:Google /

Kids can use their Android device or Wear OS devices to tap and pay wherever Google Pay is accepted. The tech giant sees the new feature as a way for kids to manage their own money without the need for an actual bank account.

The update is rolling out in the United States. It’s unknown when, or if, Google plans to bring the new capability to additional regions.

The new feature builds on Google’s announcement last year that parents and guardians in select countries can allow their children to use digital payments on Android devices under parental supervision. A payment card can only be added with parental consent, and parents receive an email whenever their child makes a transaction.

With last year’s update, kids also gained the ability to use Google Wallet to access supported passes, like event tickets, library cards, and gift cards.

This generation of twentysomethings is so disillusioned with swipe-based dating apps that they’ll try literally anything else — even an AI matchmaker. After dropping out of UC Berkeley, Ditto co-founders Allen Wang and Eric Liu set out to build something that would help their peers connect without having to spend hours each week navigating the messiness of apps like Tinder and Hinge.

“As Gen Z ourselves, we were firsthand witnessing the behavioral shift in terms of how people are connecting with each other,” Wang told TechCrunch. “We see that people are getting super tired of all the endless swiping and endless small talk, and they’re really looking for something more genuine in real life.”

Instead of a typical app, college students can sign up for Ditto by texting a certain iMessage number, along with a code. Then an AI chatbot introduces itself as Ditto, “a dating initiative built by college students who get it … no swiping, no awkward DMs, just real dates every Wednesday at 7 pm.”

Users text their way through an onboarding process, starting with basic biographical information like their name, gender, and birth date. Then Ditto gets into more specific questions to understand someone’s personality, interests, and dating preferences. Some users even upload photos of their celebrity crushes to give the AI a sense of their type.

The Ditto algorithm tries to match people not based on similar hobbies and interests, but rather what those hobbies and interests say about who someone is.

“If there’s this guy, and he’s really into rock climbing, skydiving, and outdoor sports, and this girl, if she’s into hip hop, streetwear, and skateboarding, then even though those hobbies don’t look similar on the surface, I can tell you deeper down, both are very adventurous; maybe they’re very individualistic,” Wang said. “So that’s actually the core reason why people will find chemistry with each other, and so basically our claim is that chemistry is actually predictable with the right signals.”

Then, every Wednesday at 7 p.m., Ditto messages users with their match for the week.

“It comes with the person, it comes with a time, it comes with a location, and the users simply just need to show up and date each other and come back. We’ll collect more feedback about the date, and then improve our understanding of the user, and send them to a better next date,” Wang said. “Right now people’s goal is really just to go out there and meet each other, so it’s actually removing a lot of friction for our users, so that we are doing the heavy lifting for them, and they just simply go there and then meet whoever.”

Ditto has 150,000 signups, and Wang says that out of all the matches that are connected via Ditto, about 20% of those matches end up going out on a date. (If that percentage sounds low to you, then you’ve probably never used Tinder.)

Ditto creates a collage-like graphic to introduce users to one another and explain why they might be a good match — it’s a popular aesthetic among Gen Z that other connection apps with young founders like Sonder have gravitated toward.

With any dating app, and especially one that minimizes the time between matching and going out, it can be hard to discern the safety of a situation — is the person you’re meeting really who they say they are? For now, while Ditto is only available at a few dozen colleges, there’s a built-in vetting process in which you know that someone is a student at your university with a .edu email. Ditto is focused on figuring out how to grow to more schools — and eventually beyond just college — while scaling safely. Even for the most established and well-funded dating apps, this is a challenging endeavor. But Ditto does have $9.2 million in seed funding to work with from investors like Gradient, Peak XV, and Scribble.

Wang said, “99% of the investors just reached out to us through inbound, because we were pretty big on LinkedIn and Twitter for a bit. Even Duolingo’s co-founder Severin [Hacker] reached out to me saying, ‘Hey, love your mission, I really like what you do, let’s hop on a call.’”

Ditto has been able to establish this notoriety through its irreverent marketing, like videos of robot stunts. Now based in San Francisco, Ditto has 12 full-time employees, but they’re also hiring a “chief yacht officer” to throw promotional parties (yes, this is a legitimate job listing).

“Our users are college students, and they can smell corporate marketing from a mile away,” Wang said. “But the stunts are the top of the funnel, not the product … Viral moments get college kids to look; a good first date is what makes them stay.”

Tesla and SpaceX said Thursday that “Terafab,” the advanced chip factory they are jointly developing, will be built in Grimes County, Texas, outside Houston, and that they will make an initial investment of $16.8 billion in the project.

The factory will be “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” Elon Musk, CEO of both companies, wrote in a post on Thursday. More than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned for the facility, according to SpaceX.

The companies say the facility will employ at least 3,000 people from Grimes and nearby Brazos County.

“The facility will be an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand of the future,” a post on SpaceX’s website reads.

The animus behind Terafab is that Musk’s vision of the future — one where millions of robots take over human jobs, robotaxis do all the driving, and satellites become data centers for AI training and inference — requires a phenomenal amount of computing power, far more than what current production rates support.

SpaceX alone has suggested in filings that it may spend as much as $119 billion on the project across a “multi-phase” construction plan — although the company didn’t talk about Terafab at all on its first earnings call earlier this week.

Intel has said it will contribute to the Terafab project, although it’s been cagey about its exact contributions.

“Terafab will be epic in both its mission and in its sheer size, designed to build new compute at an unprecedented scale and speed. A vertically integrated factory with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned. This facility will house the manufacturing, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory devices,” SpaceX writes on its website.

“Bringing these aspects together in one location will enable fast, recursive improvements and accelerate new compute deployed. Terafab will produce chips optimized for edge computing and inference for use in hardware like Tesla’s Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, along with high-power chips designed for operating SpaceX’s space-based data centers,” the company wrote.

SpaceX said in its post that it is “committing to the use of” water from the local Gibbons Creek Reservoir instead of local groundwater.

The announcement followed a heavily attended county meeting on Wednesday where hundreds of residents attended and raised concerns about millions of dollars in tax breaks awarded to the project, as well as a lack of transparency.

“We believe this agreement will strengthen our district, expand opportunities, and better prepare our students for their future,” Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Sarah Borowicz said in a statement released by the Texas Governor’s office. “There are defining moments in the life of a school district, and this is one of those moments. Our commitment now is to ensure that every opportunity created through this agreement is managed wisely, transparently, and always with students at the center of every decision.”

OpenAI’s motion to dismiss Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit, along with newly filed exhibits, reveals the company’s legal defense strategy. Rather than focusing on whether former Apple employees working at OpenAI had accessed certain information, the AI company argues that Apple’s own security practices and offboarding procedures weaken its claim that the information qualifies as legally protected “trade secrets.”

Apple’s complaint, filed in July, accuses OpenAI of orchestrating a scheme to obtain confidential hardware information from former Apple engineers. This week, Apple asked the court to expedite discovery, saying its internal investigation indicates some additional former employees may have participated in, or witnessed, the alleged theft of trade secrets.

In its motion, OpenAI argues that Apple allowed employees to use personal iCloud accounts for work and failed to properly revoke access after they left the company. It also submitted text message records showing that an Apple manager remained logged into the personal iCloud account of defendant and former Apple engineer Chang Liu after he left the company to transfer files, and later asked him for help with technical questions about Apple projects.

OpenAI also accuses Apple of omitting the consequences of its own “inexplicable information-management practices” from its original complaint, noting that the company failed to properly secure its systems when employees departed, creating confusion and unwanted access issues that Apple now characterizes as theft.

While this may sound a bit like a “the door was unlocked, so it wasn’t really stealing!” defense, this argument is meant to strengthen OpenAI’s argument that former Apple employees were simply trying to assist their prior colleagues. It could also help push the narrative that these weren’t truly trade secrets if they weren’t secured as such.

OpenAI argues Apple hasn’t specified which “trade secrets” or confidential components were allegedly stolen, referring to them instead as “generic categories of the product-development process—such as component manufacturing, product testing, vendor and supplier relationships, and distribution channels.”

OpenAI’s filing posits that Apple is using this lawsuit to slow down its competitor from innovating in AI-powered hardware, rather than focusing on its own product plans.

“OpenAI has no use, need or desire for Apple’s trade secrets,” the motion argues. “OpenAI is building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple. OpenAI does have an interest in hiring the best engineers, inventors, developers and creators—many of whom have decided to leave Apple and to come to OpenAI, attracted by the innovative and exciting work the company is doing. Apple might not like that,” it reads.

“…Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its

shortcomings in the market for talent and retaining its employees, and its failures to integrate AI into its products,” the motion says.

As eBay tries to keep up with competitors like Whatnot and TikTok Shop, the online marketplace is making a bigger push into live shopping after seeing record results.

During its second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, the company noted that eBay Live’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) jumped about eight times year-over-year across seven markets, along with increases in viewers, watch time, and items sold. It plans to expand eBay Live to more international markets in the coming weeks and months.

“These results reinforce our confidence that Live can deepen engagement, broaden discovery, and increase velocity across the broader eBay marketplace,” CEO Jamie Iannone told investors.

However, it’s important to note that eBay didn’t share the exact GMV number, making it difficult to assess how significant the growth is.

That said, eBay clearly sees Live as a key growth area, and the feedback from sellers and buyers looks promising. eBay reports that over 90% of sellers who stream regularly have seen their GMV grow, and those who use Live sell about three times more than those who don’t.

Buyers are also spending more. First-time shoppers in the collectibles category are dropping around 70% more than their non-Live shopping counterparts.

eBay launched Live as invite-only in the U.S. in 2022, then expanded internationally, starting with a beta in the U.K. in 2024, and it has since rolled it out in countries like Germany, Australia, France, Italy, and Canada.

Last month, the company moved past its invite-only model and now offers self-service onboarding for eligible sellers in over 300 categories, which include everything from electronics to fashion and collectibles.

The company also pointed to recent product improvements, including discovery features across its homepage and mobile app to make live events easier to find. Iannone added that eBay also simplified event creation, inventory preparation, and live item management for sellers, while improving “bidding responsiveness” to create smoother, faster livestreams.

The growth comes as live shopping in the U.S. moves beyond a niche trend, with more companies beginning to treat it more seriously rather than a side experiment. Even resale giant StockX recently introduced live shopping capabilities. Whatnot continues to find success, with a valuation of more than $11 billion. Additionally, TikTok Shop is reportedly testing a paid membership that offers free shipping and exclusive discounts.