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Mark Zuckerberg has struck again. Meta Platforms acquires Singapore-based AI startup Manus. Manus has been the talk of Silicon Valley since it was brought to life in the spring with a highly slick demo video that went viral. The clip showed an AI agent that can screen job applicants, plan vacations, analyze stock portfolios, and more. Manas claimed at the time that it had surpassed OpenAI’s Deep Research. By April, just weeks after launching, early-stage company Benchmark had led a $75 million funding round, giving Manas a post-money valuation of $500 million. General Partner Chetan Puttagunta has joined the Board…
As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal. Just because you post something doesn’t mean your followers will see it. “I think 2025 was the year that algorithms completely took over, so followers became completely irrelevant,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch. This isn’t new to creators – Patreon CEO Jacques Conte has been beating this drum passionately for years – but throughout the year, the entire industry, from influencers to streamers, has responded to this phenomenon in different ways. Executives TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy…
Money was not an issue for the AI industry in early 2025. In late 2025, a mood check crept in. OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machine Labs raised a separate $2 billion seed round before shipping a single product. Even first-time founders are raising money on a scale that once belonged only to Big Tech. These astronomical investments were followed by equally incredible spending. Meta spent nearly $15 billion to lock up Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and countless more to poach talent from other AI labs. Meanwhile, the biggest AI companies…
One of the nicest comments people made about the power grid was, “There’s nothing.” Grids work best when they fade into the background. That obscurity has changed in recent years, as fires in California and freezes in Texas have heightened awareness of the power grid. But it wasn’t until 2025 that concerns about the power grid and the strain on demand, supply, prices, and natural resources came into the spotlight. Then a new group of startups appeared, selling software as a solution. Electricity prices here in the United States have increased by 13% this year. This is influenced by an…
OpenAI offers app integration with ChatGPT, allowing you to connect your account directly to ChatGPT and ask your assistant to take action. For example, when you integrate with Spotify, you can tell it to create personalized playlists that appear in the Spotify app. To get started, make sure you’re logged in to ChatGPT. Then, enter the name of the app you want to use at the beginning of the prompt, and ChatGPT will guide you through signing in and connecting your account. If you want to configure everything at once,[設定]Go to the menu,[アプリとコネクタ]Click. Browse the available apps and select the…
A vaccine to block the effects of fentanyl, including overdose, is expected to enter human trials in the coming months, possibly leading to the first-ever active treatment for opioid use disorder.Initial trials will focus on evaluating the safety of the vaccine, which was originally developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. The shot was previously tested in rats and showed promising results. The product has now been licensed from startup ARMR Sciences, which plans to begin enrolling patients in a Phase I clinical trial in the Netherlands in January or February 2026.“Our goal as a company is to…
TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield pitch contest attracts thousands of applicants each year. These entries will be narrowed down to the top 200, and the top 20 will compete on the big stage to win the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000 in prize money. However, the remaining 180 startups all surprised us in their respective categories and are competing in their own pitch competitions. Here is the complete list of Enterprise Technology Startup Battlefield 200 selectmen and notes on why they joined the competition. AI Thea What it’s about: Build systems that use multiple forms of AI to uncover “truth” and authenticate…
Dec 29, 2026Ravie LakshmananHacking News / Cybersecurity Last week’s cyber news in 2025 was not about one big incident. It was about many small cracks opening at the same time. Tools people trust every day behave in unexpected ways. Old flaws resurfaced. New ones were used almost immediately. A common theme ran through it all in 2025. Attackers moved faster than fixes. Access meant for work, updates, or support kept getting abused. And damage did not stop when an incident was “over” — it continued to surface months or even years later. This weekly recap brings those stories together in…
It was an ordinary day when Jay Gibson received an unexpected notification on his iPhone. “Apple has detected a targeted spyware attack on your iPhone,” the message read. Ironically, Mr. Gibson once worked for a company that developed the very type of spyware that could trigger such notifications. Still, he was shocked to receive the notification on his phone. He called his father, turned off his cell phone, and went to buy a new cell phone. “I was panicking,” he told TechCrunch. “It was a mess. It was a huge mess.” Gibson is just one of a growing number of…
Cybersecurity researchers have revealed details of what they say is a “persistent and targeted” spear-phishing campaign that published more than 20 packages in the npm registry to facilitate credential theft. According to Socket, the activity uploaded 27 npm packages from six different npm aliases and primarily targeted sales and sales personnel at organizations adjacent to critical infrastructure in the United States and allied countries. “Five months of operation turned 27 npm packages into durable hosting for document-sharing portals and browser-running lures that mimic Microsoft sign-in, targeting 25 organizations in manufacturing, industrial automation, plastics, and healthcare for credential theft,” researchers Nicholas…