Image Credits:Eric Slomonson, The Photo Group 10:07 AM PDT · August 19, 2025 TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 lands in San Francisco from October 27-29, and the Expo Hall is already packed with early adopters, startup scouts, and enterprise buyers looking to discover what’s next. If you’re not there to show off your product, your competitors will
Firecrawl’s co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor to lead his Series A. He was in a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partner’s Abhishek Sharma at the Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park (a favorite VC haunt). While describing the future of the company, he was gesturing so
AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees Read More »
Anna Monaco has been building AI agents since before the term “AI agents” was even a thing. After building numerous chatbots, she started looking for other types of interfaces that made sense for AI agents and landed on spreadsheets. “I had this personal pattern, and I noticed that a lot of other people had this
Why Paradigm built a spreadsheet with an AI agent in every cell Read More »
The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone. We’re
A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs Read More »
In a moonshot move, AI search engine Perplexity has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion cash in an unsolicited offer, Reuters reported, and Perplexity has confirmed to TechCrunch. Perplexity tells TC the terms of the offer include a commitment to keep Chrome’s underlying engine, Chromium, open source and continue to invest in
Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it’s raised Read More »
Most organizations say they aren’t fully prepared to use generative AI in a safe and responsible way, according to a recent McKinsey report. One concern is explainability — understanding how and why AI makes certain decisions. While 40% of respondents view it as a significant risk, only 17% are actively addressing it, per the report.
Seoul-based Datumo raises $15.5M to take on Scale AI, backed by Salesforce Read More »
Cohere on Thursday announced that it had raised an oversubscribed $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. This is up from the $5.5 billion valuation it landed a little over a year ago when it raised its previous round, also $500 million. Toronto-headquartered Cohere was one of the first breakout LLM model makers
Cohere hits a $6.8B valuation as investors AMD, Nvidia, and Salesforce double down Read More »
Image Credits:Steve Jennings / Getty Images 7:00 AM PDT · August 14, 2025 There aren’t many founders who can say they’ve steered the same company from scrappy startup to publicly traded platform while keeping their edge — but co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie isn’t most founders. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 , happening October 27–29 at
Inside the Box: Aaron Levie on reinvention at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Read More »
Image Credits:Darrell Etherington with files from Getty under license 5:30 PM PDT · August 12, 2025 Sam Altman is in the process of co-founding a new brain-to-computer interface startup called Merge Labs and raising funds for it with the capital possibly coming largely from OpenAI’s ventures team, unnamed sources told the Financial Times. The startup
Sam Altman, OpenAI will reportedly back a startup that takes on Musk’s Neuralink Read More »
