Lightspeed is sharpening its India strategy around AI, targeting $250 million for a new early-stage fund as the venture firm bets the technology will drive the next wave of startups in one of the world’s largest markets. The Silicon Valley venture firm is already a major investor in AI companies…
ElevenLabs’ CEO on margins, IPO timing, and telling customers they’re talking to a bot
ElevenLabs builds the voice layer of AI, the models that turn text into speech that sounds human. Most people encounter it when they’re talking with customer service — often without realizing it. Klarna runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on it, for example. So do Deutsche Telekom,…
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026: Everything you need to know
TechCrunch Founder Summit is a full-day gathering in Boston on November 4 where founders across all stages connect with top VCs and experienced entrepreneurs to gain tactical insights on building and scaling their companies. It’s the latest in our long line of founder-centric events, which are smaller and more hands-on…
Databricks buys Row Zero and is scouting for more startups to acquire
Databricks announced on Thursday that it has acquired an early-stage spreadsheet startup called Row Zero. The story goes that Databricks’ finance team fell in love with Row Zero because it was a cloud tool that could scale beyond 1 million live spreadsheet rows. They were combining Row Zero with Databricks’…
Oracle sends force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate data center
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, a Stargate data center campus in New Mexico, Bloomberg first reported Thursday. Force majeure clauses, common in energy and commodities contracts, excuse a party from contractual obligations when events outside its control get in the way. Oracle…
DVD and Blu-ray special features are my film school (and they can be yours too)
Like many who recognize the limitations of streaming, I’ve begun to re-embrace physical media as the ideal format for watching movies. Yeah, it’s nice to know I genuinely own the content I’ve spent money on. On top of that, Blu-rays, DVDs, and 4K discs offer certain perks that typically aren’t…
Waymo is scaling fast. Here’s what the fleet data shows.
Waymo’s commercial robotaxi ramp-up looks expansive, both in geographic reach and in ridership. And by almost every measure, it is — until you pay attention to where the bulk of those robotaxis are actually showing up. The numbers over the past two years reflect the kind of commercial rollout you’d…
I made my Google TV Streamer faster and easier to use with one setting
When Amazon announced earlier this year that all future Fire TV Sticks would run Vega OS (Linux) instead of Android, I took that as my cue to move away from my Fire TV Stick 4K Max if I wanted the best Android streaming experience going forward, and the Google TV…
Meet Feather, the startup building the ‘Android of robotics’ for developers
If there is one thing robotics founders and investors agree on, it’s that the “ChatGPT moment” where a general-purpose robot can seamlessly adapt to any environment has not arrived. Opinions vary on whether the breakthrough is just around the corner or a decade away. Feather Robotics, a humanoid startup founded…
This HDMI problem was actually a smart TV problem the whole time
The HDMI format has been the standard for quite a while now, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I don’t have many complaints about the performance itself, but my issues lie more in how every cable looks the same. It’s tough to tell if your current cable supports variable refresh…