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…
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,…
