Author: Editor-in-Chief

Zehra Naqvi, 26, grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s. This was the era of Tumblr and Twitter. She would stay up all night breaking down the release dates of Marvel movies or analyzing the movements of One Direction members. She eventually gained a collective 250,000 followers across the two platforms. “Those early internet rabbit holes taught me how magical it felt to not just consume culture but to contribute to it,” she told TechCrunch. She went on to start a company at 12, study art history at Columbia, and then became a consumer investor at Headline Ventures.…

Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with gleaming meeting rooms and on-site baristas. So when early HappyRobot engineer Ari Polakof decided to strike out and start his own company, he didn’t exactly expect to wind up tapping on his laptop in a service bay alongside mechanics. “Very noisy, impossible to concentrate,” he laughed. But that’s part of the story of how Polakof’s new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai got off the ground last year. Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugaray, Flai is one of a number…

The space economy isn’t just about rockets and satellites anymore — it’s about building resilient infrastructure, deploying autonomous systems, and creating entirely new models for how we operate and defend assets off-Earth. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, taking place October 27–29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, the Space Stage is where these seismic shifts in space innovation come to life. Save big this week by registering as a group. Save up to 20% on your ticket if you register with a group of 4-9 before today at 11:59 p.m. PT. Or, if you’re going solo, secure your pass to save up…

Apple has removed ICEBlock and other apps from its App Store that allow users to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, following pressure from the Trump administration. The app, which went viral earlier this year, allowed users to lawfully share information about where they’ve seen ICE agents within a 5-mile radius of their location, and also share details of the clothing agents are wearing. According to various media reports, Apple said it removed the apps after it was contacted by “law enforcement” about “safety risks” associated with ICEBlock and similar apps. “We reached out to…

Amazon will restart its drone delivery service in Arizona beginning Friday as two federal agencies continue to investigate a crash that occurred earlier this week. Amazon suspended operations in the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro area — currently its only commercial market — following a crash Wednesday. Two of the company’s Prime Air delivery drones collided with the boom of a crane near its same-day site in Tolleson, Arizona, which sent them crashing to the ground. Amazon has been delivering packages, weighing up to five pounds, to customers via its Prime Air drone service in the West Valley of…

Amazon is rolling out a new feature that makes it easier to buy more throughout the week. The company said it’s now updating its Amazon Shopping app and website with a new addition that lets Prime members add items to upcoming deliveries with one tap, instead of having to create a new order. The feature is designed to better reflect how people actually shop on Amazon online. Instead of compiling an order with multiple items, they often remember things throughout the week they want or need, and then place multiple orders. Amazon has tried to work around the logistics headache…

Allan Brooks never set out to reinvent mathematics. But after weeks spent talking with ChatGPT, the 47-year-old Canadian came to believe he had discovered a new form of math powerful enough to take down the internet. Brooks — who had no history of mental illness or mathematical genius — spent 21 days in May spiraling deeper into the chatbot’s reassurances, a descent later detailed in The New York Times. His case illustrated how AI chatbots can venture down dangerous rabbit holes with users, leading them toward delusion or worse. That story caught the attention of Steven Adler, a former OpenAI…

The Department of Energy said Wednesday night it was canceling 321 awards worth $7.56 billion that were largely focused on clean energy. The agency hasn’t released a list of the 223 affected projects and, at the time of publication, it had not provided one. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said one of the canceled projects included $1.2 billion for the state’s hydrogen hub, the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems. Other states affected include Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. The states with canceled projects were…

The U.S. government shutdown could stifle deal flow, freeze visa processing for workers, and cause other problems for startups and the broader tech sector, especially if it lasts longer than a week, according to experts who spoke to TechCrunch. The U.S. government shutdown, which began Tuesday, is the first one in seven years. The unpredictability of the Trump administration coupled with a politically entrenched Congress makes it hard to predict when the shutdown will end. Out of eight shutdowns since 1990, four have happened during a Trump administration, the last one was for 35 days, the longest in modern history.…

Spacecoin says it reached a new milestone in its quest to build a decentralized communications backbone that could one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink. The company said this week that it successfully transmitted secured data via its first demonstration satellite, validating the spacecraft’s ability to execute encrypted transactions in orbit. The blockchain transaction, beamed from Chile to Portugal, served as a proof-of-concept for moving cryptographic signatures and encrypted data through space. “Can we send cryptographic signatures to space intact? Without it, we cannot build a decentralized network of communications satellites and fulfill the vision of building permissionless connectivity,” Spacecoin founder Tae…