Author: Editor-in-Chief

Microsoft is buying 100 megawatts of solar capacity from Japanese developer Shizen Energy, the latest in a string of renewable energy deals designed to power the tech company’s growing compute needs. The agreement, which the companies announced late last week, covers four different solar developments; one is already operating and three are under construction. The deal covers output from the plants for 20 years. Seattle-based Microsoft already operates two data centers in Japan. Microsoft’s compute capacity is slated to expand as the company invests $2.9 billion in the country over the next year. Solar has become a favored source of…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday announced the launch of AgentKit, a toolkit for building and deploying AI agents, at the firm’s Dev Day event. “AgentKit is a complete set of building blocks available in the open AI platform designed to help you take agents from prototype to production. It is everything you need to build, deploy, and optimize agent workflows with way less friction,” Altman said. The launch highlights OpenAI’s push to increase developer adoption by making agent building faster and easier. It also signals a competitive move against other AI platforms racing to offer integrated tools for building autonomous agents for enterprises…

Healthcare is awash in single-use plastics. In U.S. healthcare facilities alone, more than 2,800 tons of plastic packaging and products are thrown out every day. Few people are more aware of this than Eddie Yu. Early in the pandemic, Yu founded a company that made disposable masks. One day, his niece was with him while he was sorting recycling, and she asked him whether his mask was also recyclable. “I told her that actually we can’t recycle the mask,” he told TechCrunch. “She just interrupted me and said, ‘Oh, then you make a lot of trash every day.’” The little…

The U.S. holiday shopping season is expected to bring in $253.4 billion in online sales this year, up 5.3% year-over-year, according to a new report from Adobe’s e-commerce connected division, Adobe Analytics. Adobe Analytics develops its predictions by analyzing over 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, encompassing 100 million SKUs across 18 product categories. Its analytics software is used by a majority of the U.S.’s top 100 online retailers, giving it deep insights into online shopping and consumer behavior. The company forecasts that Cyber Monday will again be the biggest shopping day of the year, up 6.3% year-over-year to…

Exhibit tables at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West, are one of the most in-demand opportunities of the year — and they’re disappearing quickly. We expanded the floor just two weeks ago to add more tables due to overwhelming demand, and they’re already close to selling out. Once these final spots are gone, there’s no more room to expand. This is your chance to put your startup directly in front of 10,000+ founders, investors, decision-makers, and press — all under one roof. Don’t wait until your competitors are already there, capturing the spotlight. The last…

Dr. Tom Kelly is a trauma surgeon, and everywhere, he sees doctors drowning in administrative work. He wanted change, so he set out to build it. “We wanted to build an AI care partner that would stand alongside clinicians and take care of the admin so that individual providers, like me, can feel empowered to deliver the care which we dedicated our lives to,” he told TechCrunch. Dr. Kelly teamed up with Waleed Mussa, with whom he had worked at a previous startup, and founded Heidi Health in 2021. The company began launching products in early 2024. In just 18…

Firefly Aerospace on Sunday said it had agreed to buy defense analytics firm SciTec for about $855 million in cash and stock, paving the path to its goal of becoming a significant player in the national security market. Firefly will pay around $300 million in cash and $555 million in new shares, and the deal is expected to close by the end of 2025. Princeton-based SciTec sells missile-warning and tracking systems, space domain awareness tools, and analytics to defense and intelligence customers. Earlier this year, Space Force awarded the company a $259 million contract to develop a ground system for…

 Dedicated animal rights activists convinced  slaughterhouse owner to spare one lamb from being killed over the Easter weekend. The Toronto-based activists had come to Newmarket for a break-of-dawn vigil last week, organized by Katie Barber of Aurora’s Animal Rights Advocates, at King Cole Ducks, Canada’s largest duck slaughterhouse. Photo: Louise Jorgensen At the same time, a few decided to reach out to a neighbouring lamb slaughterhouse. During a spur-of-the-moment visit, Anita Krajnc and Paul Bali made their appeal for “this small Easter mercy” to Newmarket Meat Packers co-founder Gino Plastino and his son. Krajnc founded The Save Movement, a network…

OpenAI and Jony Ive face significant technical challenges as they work to develop a screen-less, AI-powered device, according to the Financial Times. Back in May, OpenAI acquired io, the device startup founded by the legendary Apple designer with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for $6.5 billion. At the time, Altman declared that Ive and his team would help the company “create a new generation of AI-powered computers,” while Bloomberg reported that the first devices to emerge from the deal were scheduled to launch in 2026. The FT now says that OpenAI and Ive aim to create “a palm-sized device without a…

An app called Young Minds wants to give parents control over what their kids do on the internet, while also protecting their children’s privacy and teaching them good online habits. The startup was founded by Nino Dvalidze (pictured), an entrepreneur and a mother of two from the United Kingdom. Dvalidze told TechCrunch that the idea for Young Minds came from conversations with fellow parents, who are also worried about how to keep their children safe, while also allowing them to have access to the internet, which, she admitted, is “enormously helpful in terms of education and exploration and connection with…