TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is here! If you’re still on the fence about attending in person, dive into the extensive schedule of speakers, networking opportunities, workshops, after-parties, and more that’s available here. There’s still time to get a last-minute ticket, and we’re giving a 50% discount since there’s just one day left! If you’re not able…
Bending Spoons, one of Europe’s largest mobile app developers, announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to buy AOL from Yahoo, which is backed by private equity giant Apollo. Bending Spoons says it has secured a $2.8 billion debt financing package to support the purchase. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of…
Google announced this week it is working with NextEra Energy to revive a nuclear power plant in Iowa that had closed in 2020. NextEra has been looking for a partner to reopen the reactor for the past year, and it found one in Google, which has been steadily adding zero-carbon energy sources to power its…
Peter Williams, the former general manager at defense contractor L3Harris, has pleaded guilty to selling surveillance technology to a Russian broker that buys “cyber tools,” the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Wednesday. “The material, stolen over a three-year period from the U.S. defense contractor where he worked, was comprised of national-security focused software that included…
Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing service provided by the company, is experiencing a significant outage on Wednesday. The problems started around noon ET, and Microsoft has acknowledged the issue on the service’s status page. According to Microsoft, “We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change triggered this issue.” The company has not indicated when service will…
In this tutorial, we explore how we can build an autonomous agent that aligns its actions with ethical and organizational values. We use open-source Hugging Face models running locally in Colab to simulate a decision-making process that balances goal achievement with moral reasoning. Through this implementation, we demonstrate how we can integrate a “policy” model…
IntrCity SmartBus, a tech-enabled intercity bus platform in India, has raised $30 million in funding to expand its network across smaller cities and towns in the South Asian nation. The all-equity Series D round, led by A91 Partners, values the Noida-based startup at $140 million post-money. Intercity travel is accelerating in India as more people…
Small models are often blocked by poor instruction tuning, weak tool use formats, and missing governance. IBM AI team released Granite 4.0 Nano, a small model family that targets local and edge inference with enterprise controls and open licensing. The family includes 8 models in two sizes, 350M and about 1B, with both hybrid SSM…
For three days this week, 20 startups participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Each was selected to represent the best of the Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. After all that intense pitching, we have a winner. These startups were handpicked…
YouTube is conducting a “voluntary exit program” with severance for U.S.-based employees, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The news was first reported by Sources. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told employees about the program via an internal memo on Wednesday. The memo also announced that the Google-owned company was reorganizing its product teams into…
