Author: Editor-in-Chief

AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships. Perplexity and Getty have been working together for more than a year, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Though it was never announced, Getty was part of Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program, a plan to share ad revenue with publishers when…

Apple CEO Tim Cook signaled to investors the company is still open to acquisitions and partnerships to move things forward on the AI front. The comments were made this week during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. The exec also offered a brief update about Apple’s next-generation, AI-powered Siri, saying the service was still on track to launch in 2026. “We’re making good progress on it, and as we’ve shared, we expect to release it next year,” Cook said during his opening remarks. One analyst on the call also asked Cook if Apple was still pursuing a three-pronged approach when…

Lidar-maker Luminar is warning shareholders that it will run out of cash in early 2026 and has announced a 25% cut to its workforce to help staunch the bleeding — its second layoff of the year — according to a Friday regulatory filing. It’s not immediately clear how many workers will be affected. Luminar started the year with around 580 employees, but the company did not specify the size of the layoff earlier this year. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company also announced its chief financial officer, Thomas Fennimore, is stepping down on…

Bending Spoons’ four cofounders this week joined the billionaire ranks. CEO Luca Ferrari’s stake in the Milan-based tech conglomerate is now reportedly worth $1.4 billion, while cofounders Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Francesco Patarnello each hold stakes worth $1.3 billion, according to Forbes estimates based on shareholder data published by the Italian Business Register. The valuations come on the heels of Bending Spoons’ latest funding round: $270 million from investors including T. Rowe Price and earlier backers Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, and Fidelity, plus a $440 million secondary share sale by existing shareholders. It’s unclear whether any…

Social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon start testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization on its main Discover feed and others. The news was shared alongside a host of other conversation control updates and changes, which include smaller tweaks to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and other ways to prioritize more relevant conversations to the individual user. With the “dislikes” beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users “dislike” posts, the system will learn what sort of content…

Meta signed three deals this week to procure nearly 1 gigawatt of solar power as it races to power its lofty AI ambitions. The trio of agreements brings Meta’s total solar purchases to over 3 gigawatts of capacity this year. Solar is cheap and quick to build, and as a result, it has become a go-to power source for tech companies as their data center fleets multiply in size. Meta yesterday announced two agreements in Louisiana that see it buying the environmental attributes of a combined 385 megawatts of electricity. Both projects are expected to be completed two years from…

On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our senior producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to show me her new tattoo: a classic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak got a matching cursor, while Theresa Loconsolo got a smiling moon. I guessed that at some point during all the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca wandered off to some trendy San Francisco tattoo shop to cement their friendship with appropriately tech-themed ink (and maybe Theresa was there too?). That seemed like a more logical explanation than the reality, which is that they got these tattoos at Disrupt — yes,…

On Friday morning, University of Pennsylvania alumni, students, staff, and community affiliates received several emails from hackers purporting to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). “We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic,” read the email. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will be leaked).” A PARTIALLY REDACTED EMAIL SENT BY HACKERS WITH ACCESS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA EMAIL SYSTEM.IMAGE CREDITS:TECHCRUNCH (SCREENSHOT) This message was sent from a variety of different Penn-affiliated email accounts, such as the GSE, as well as purporting to come from several senior members of staff across the…

U.S. telecommunications giant Ribbon has confirmed that government-backed hackers had access to its network for almost a year before getting caught, according to a public filing. The telco giant said in a 10-Q disclosure last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that a suspected “nation-state actor had gained access to the company’s IT network” as early as December 2024. Ribbon said it notified law enforcement and that it believes the hackers are no longer in its network. The Texas-headquartered Ribbon provides phone, networking, and internet services for companies, enterprises, and critical infrastructure organizations, such as energy and transportation…

Peter Williams, the former general manager at defense contractor L3Harris, has pleaded guilty to selling surveillance technology to a Russian broker that buys “cyber tools,” the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Wednesday. “The material, stolen over a three-year period from the U.S. defense contractor where he worked, was comprised of national-security focused software that included at least eight sensitive and protected cyber-exploit components,” read the DOJ’s press release on Wednesday. “Those components were meant to be sold exclusively to the U.S. government and select allies.” TechCrunch previously exclusively reported, citing four former Trenchant employees, that the company was investigating a…