Author: Editor-in-Chief

Bryan Onel’s father was a locksmith. As for Onel, he described himself as the digital equivalent. Ethical hacking was Onel’s hobby growing up. He studied AI at university and then turned that hacking hobby into a profession. “I spent a decade performing penetration tests for over 150 companies across all sectors,” Onel tells TechCrunch, adding that he kept easily breaking into companies that had passed their security checks. Onel realized that security often fell within two brackets: Painful but effective, or painless but ineffective, he said. Most companies were doing the bare minimum in cybersecurity and compliance, as it often…

Chatbot platforms like ChatGPT and Poe have allowed users to create repeated prompts in the form of GPTs and apps. Lately, browsers like Dia and Opera Neon have added a way for people to get repeated tasks done in the form of skills and cards. Now, meeting notetaker Granola is bringing its own spin with a feature called Recipes, which lets you create a prompt shortcut you can use again and again. You can invoke a recipe by using “/” in Granola chat and typing its name. You can create your own recipes by typing in a prompt and giving…

On Tuesday, a new SPAC from VC and All-In podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya became a public company. Dubbed with the lofty name “American Exceptionalism,” it raised $345 million with a mission to acquire one or more startups in the fields of energy, AI, crypto/DeFi, or defense, then convert those companies into publicly traded entities. But Palihapitiya wants retail investors to know: He strongly advises you not to buy the stock, even though he has reserved a tiny fraction — just over 1% — to be traded on the public markets for retailer investors, while 98.7% has already been sold to…

Einride, the Swedish startup known for its unusual-looking electric and autonomous pods that are designed to carry freight, said Wednesday it has raised $100 million from several new and existing investors, including its largest shareholder, EQT Ventures. The raise included an undisclosed strategic investment from quantum computing company IonQ. Neither Einride, nor its investors, disclosed the company’s post-money valuation. The funding comes as Einride adjusts to a new CEO and tries to scale its three business products: electric big rigs, autonomous pod-like trucks that navigate fixed routes, and planning software designed for shippers. Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said the funding…

A rapper who campaigned for Donald Trump at a 2024 rally in New York City has been sentenced to five years in prison on attempted murder and conspiracy charges. Michael Williams, the 27-year-old rapper known as Sheff G, received the sentence in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty to two counts of second-degree attempted murder and one count of second-degree conspiracy in March. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office argued that Williams used earnings from his music career to fund gang violence in the New York City borough. In addition to serving five years in state prison, Williams has been ordered to five years of…

Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and general partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV), has one simple answer for anyone claiming that investing in fintech has lost some of its attractiveness. “The world of finance is huge. About 20% of global GDP is financial services, and it’s still not digital enough,” he told TechCrunch. Many financial transactions are still handled manually, and Better Tomorrow Ventures — led by Mohnot (a former general partner at 500 Startups) and NerdWallet co-founder Jake Gibson — aims to help change that. “The massive digitization opportunity is still ahead of us,” Mohnot told TechCrunch. The firm’s limited partners…

The footage was striking: A food delivery worker scrambles with his e-bike across a bridge in Chicago, chased by a cadre of armed, masked federal agents. “Get him!” one yells, before the worker ultimately slips away. The viral clip became a rallying point this week for critics of President Donald Trump’s deportation machine, which has spread to multiple U.S. cities and swept up citizens in the process. For Mike Peregudov, the co-founder of e-bike subscription service Whizz, it was a visceral representation of the abject fear delivery workers have described to his team for weeks in Chicago. That’s because threat…

Enterprise giant Salesforce is looking to ride the vibe coding wave — where developers describe what they want in natural language and AI agents write the code — with its new AI-powered developer tool. Salesforce announced its new vibe coding offering, Agentforce Vibes, on Wednesday. This new coding tool helps developers work autonomously on Salesforce apps and agents by handling much of the technical implementation automatically. Agentforce Vibes can help developers from the app idea phase to building to observability with enterprise security and governance controls baked in. This new tool includes an autonomous AI coding agent named Vibe Codey. This agent is already connected to a company’s existing Salesforce account, which allows it to reuse an org’s already-written code, and follow its coding guidelines, to create apps that match existing products. Dan Fernandez, the vice president…

Canada’s second largest airline WestJet said the personal information of 1.2 million passengers was stolen in a cyberattack and data breach earlier this year. The airline disclosed the number of affected passengers in a filing with Maine’s attorney general, which confirmed 240 residents in the state were also affected. According to the notice, the stolen data may include passenger names, dates of birth, postal addresses, and travel documents, including passports and government-issued identity documents, as well as other passenger accommodations, such as requests and complaints. WestJet said information related to customer rewards may have also been taken, including points balances…

The U.K. government is still trying to gain access to encrypted iCloud data, according to the Financial Times after British officials allegedly filed a new secret order demanding Apple build a backdoor On Wednesday, the British newspaper reported that the U.K. Home Office sent an order to Apple earlier in September requesting that the tech giant creates a system to let officials access encrypted cloud backups of British citizens. Privacy activists have warned that complying with such an order would be a mistake, and something that would impact the privacy of users worldwide. When reached via email, Apple’s spokesperson Julien…