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7 days until TechCrunch Founder Summit: Save up to $100 on your pass before doors open

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The final countdown is officially on! In just 7 days, TechCrunch Founder Summit takes over Boston’s SoWa Power Station on November 4. Your chance to save up to $100 on tickets is running out, and the opportunity to learn and connect directly with experienced founders, investors, and startup leaders is almost here. Whether you’re launching

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Scimplify raises $25M to challenge China’s grip on critical materials with AI

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As manufacturers across industries strive to reduce their reliance on Chinese suppliers, Indian startup Scimplify has raised $25 million to expand its AI-powered approach to producing specialty chemicals and critical materials, with semiconductors, defense and energy emerging as key growth markets. The all-equity strategic round was led by Hitachi Ventures, with customers Henkel and Teknor

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Google Play now lets anyone build private, vibe-coded apps that run on Android

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Your vibe-coded applications can now be easily run on Android smartphones without having to first go public on the Google Play Store, the tech giant announced on Tuesday. A new feature will allow users to launch their own personal apps on their device via Google Play using their standard Google account, but they will remain

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Facebook is giving users more control over their algorithm

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Facebook is the latest social media platform to give users greater control over the algorithm that determines what appears in their feeds. Meta announced the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Your Algorithm,” on Tuesday, a feature it first launched on Instagram. The new tool allows Facebook users to influence the content they see in

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Forget rockets — Longshot wants to fire cargo into space from a gun. See it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

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Rockets are, infamously, a real pain in the butt. Our old friend physics forces rockets to be built with almost no room for error, and even then only a small fraction of their weight makes it to orbit. There are, at least in theory, other ways to do the job — space elevators, centrifuges, or

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Flox Intelligence is building AI to keep wildlife away from trains, airports, and roads

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When I was eight, I remember our train to Mumbai ground to a halt with a great noise. When we started moving again, a good eight hours later, someone pointed out a mangled tail, of all things, hanging from a branch close to the tracks. The train, you see, had apparently hit a wild bison

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Niobia takes the guesswork out of some of tech’s most expensive mistakes

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San Francisco-based startup Niobia is betting big on a critical but often overlooked part of battery and chip making: helping engineers understand how and why things go wrong. Its AI software flags production defects and lets engineers ask a chatbot what caused them, aiming to deliver answers in minutes rather than days. How it works

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Licube wants to be the fuel provider to the fusion power industry — see how at TechCrunch Disrupt

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If fusion power pans out, and there are signs that it will, the world will need a lot more lithium. That’s the bet behind Licube, a startup that has licensed technology from Hirosaki University in Japan, to purify lithium-6, the form of lithium that fusion plants need to make their own fuel, out of naturally

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The final Disrupt Stage lineup: Three days of conversations you won’t hear anywhere outside of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

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The biggest stage at TechCrunch Disrupt is where the people building the future come to talk about what happens next in the tech ecosystem. Across three days, from October 13 to 15, at Moscone West in San Francisco, the Disrupt Stage will bring together some of the biggest game-changing founders, CEOs, and investors shaping everything

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Just 5 years in, interactive chatbot platform Character.AI files for bankruptcy

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Only five years into its journey, Character.AI, which lets users create AI characters and have conversations with them, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following a slew of lawsuits and struggles to scale its popular platform. In a court document, the company said it had assets and liabilities between $50 million and $100 million. “Over

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