Cluely’s Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: you should be thinking harder about how to go viral. “Generally, if you’re not in deep tech, then you need to low-key deep focus on distribution,” Lee told the crowd at Disrupt 2025. But he also made it clear that not everyone was cut out for…
India’s appetite for instant convenience — once confined to food and grocery delivery — is expanding into house help. That shift has helped Snabbit, an on-demand home-help startup, secure $30 million in new funding and lift its valuation to $180 million, up from $80 million five months ago. The all-equity Series C round — Snabbit’s…
“The dead internet theory is real,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told Digg founder Kevin Rose, referring to the idea that much of the internet isn’t human — it’s mostly bots. The two entrepreneurs have since teamed up to re-envision how to build a social community in this world where, very soon, it will be hard…
NBA champion Tristan Thompson announced at TechCrunch Disrupt that he’s partnering with global telecom company World Mobile to launch a community-owned mobile network called Uplift. The network offers unlimited data plans starting at $9.99 per month. Uplift is built on blockchain technology and a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN). With Uplift, every subscription will contribute…
The rise of agentic coding tools has been a sea change for software engineers across the industry — but for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, it seems to have landed particularly hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he’s become increasingly comfortable taking a backseat in software development tasks. “AI has been a great force…
How do you convert real agent traces into reinforcement learning RL transitions to improve policy LLMs without changing your existing agent stack? Microsoft AI team releases Agent Lightning to help optimize multi-agent systems. Agent Lightning is a open-sourced framework that makes reinforcement learning work for any AI agent without rewrites. It separates training from execution,…
Waymo and Zoox robotaxis are a regular sight on San Francisco streets, and soon Uber, through a partnership with Lucid and Nuro, will descend on the city as well. It is exactly how San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie likes it. “I think we should be the testbed for emerging technology and AI and healthcare tech…
The 2024 runner-up in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, geCKo Materials, returned to the stage at this year’s show to debut new products as it pushes deeper into commercializing its tech. Founder Dr. Capella Kerst revealed four new uses of geCKo’s super-strong dry adhesive: a semiconductor wafer handling tool, a robotic gripper for smooth surfaces…
Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software as a service) companies. Instead, he believes that the more likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS plus agents, he said, speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday. “Generally, once you have a business process,…
General Motors is laying off thousands of workers across multiple electric vehicle and battery plants in the U.S., according to multiple outlets. Around 1,200 employees at the company’s EV factory in Detroit, Michigan are being placed on “indefinite layoff.” Further cuts and temporary layoffs are being made at GM’s Ultium Cells battery factories in Ohio…
