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Nominal on Thursday announced a fresh $80M Series B extension round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund. This followed the company’s $75M Series B round led by Sequoia in September. Nominal offers software that helps hardware engineers test their designs and began as a picks-and-shovels type of startup for the defense industry. The three-and-a-half-year-old, L.A.-based company says that in the last 10 months, it has landed four of the five largest defense contractors as customers. CEO and co-founder Cameron McCord (pictured) is a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and Anduril alum, the defense tech company, which is…

In late November, Emily did something she hadn’t in a very long time: she got back on Tumblr and started discussing fandom. Specifically, Heated Rivalry, the surprise Crave smash hit series about a love story between two closeted hockey players, based on a queer hockey romance series that itself started out, in part, as gay Marvel fanfiction.In the early 2010s, Emily, who requested that only her first name be used due to fears over harassment, had been a huge Tumblr user. She went from Gossip Girl fandom to Glee fandom to Sherlock fandom to bandom (an umbrella term for fans…

This is TVNewser’s basic cable network ranker and cable news report for the week of Feb. 23, 2026.The early Saturday morning attacks by the U.S and Israeli military on Iran drove viewers to cable news networks as they all recorded double-digit growth in total viewers and the Adults 25-54 demo during primetime and total day. All three networks had over a million total viewers during primetime for the concluded week. Fox News grew by triple digits in the primetime demo and had the highest-rated Saturday since April 2003. NETWORKS:According to Nielsen big data + panel for the week of February 23,…

AI video generation startup Luma on Thursday launched Luma Agents, designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. Luma Agents are powered by the startup’s Unified Intelligence family of models, with architecture trained on a single multimodal reasoning system.  Luma Agents are being pitched as a new way of doing work for ad agencies, marketing teams, design studios, and enterprises. Luma says its agents are capable of planning and generating text, image, video and audio while coordinating with other AI models, including Luma’s Ray 3.14, Google’s Veo 3 and Nano Banana Pro, ByteDance’s Seedream, and ElevenLabs’s…

“Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries—including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others—will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025,” the archived webpage reads.As of Thursday, ByteDance apps like TikTok, CapCut (a video editor app). and Lemon8 (an Instagram-like social media platform) remain available on the US App Store, as they are covered by the January 22 deal to transfer TikTok’s US business to a group of investors led by Silver Lake, Oracle, and…

Meta is facing a new lawsuit over its AI smart glasses and their lack of privacy, after an investigation by Swedish newspapers found that workers at a Kenya-based subcontractor are reviewing footage from customers’ glasses, which included sensitive content, like nudity, people having sex, and using the toilet. Meta claimed it was blurring faces in images, but sources disputed that this blurring consistently worked, reports noted. The news prompted the U.K. regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, to investigate the matter. Now, the tech giant is facing a lawsuit in the United States, as well. In the newly filed complaint, plaintiffs…

It’s midrange phone season. Google’s $499 Pixel 10a goes on sale today, Apple announced its $599 iPhone 17e early this week, and now it’s Nothing’s turn.The UK company—from OnePlus founder Carl Pei—announced the Nothing Phone (4a) and Phone (4a) Pro at an event in London, hot on the heels of Mobile World Congress 2026.After four years on the mobile handset market, Nothing is still lacking a major presence in the US. That’s partly because it has mostly sold its phones through a confusing beta program for some time. Also, it doesn’t have any US carrier partners, which is how most…

Tinder-owner Match Group announced on Thursday that it will eliminate the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO), putting Hesam Hosseini out of a job after 18 years with the dating app giant. The move comes as the dating-app industry is facing burned-out users and losing popularity among Gen Z. Hosseini had been in the COO role since April 1, 2025, after a promotion, and continued to hold his prior role of CEO of Evergreen & Emerging Brands. His elevation at Match Group followed a shakeup in internal leadership, which also saw Match Group President Gary Swidler leave the company amid…

It’s always pleasing to see an array of physical buttons, and you get sizable ones too. You’re not going to miss these wide flat ones even when picking the pace up. The silicone strap has a nice stretch to it and while the button clasp is a bit awkward to get into place, this watch does not budge.Suunto has jumped on the flashlight trend, with an LED light strip sat on the front of the case. You can adjust brightness levels and there’s SOS and alert modes to emit a very noticeable pulsating light pattern. This is a light I…

On Thursday, NBCUniversal and HyphaMetrics announced a new partnership to provide NBCU with next-gen data measurement capabilities. Using HyphaMetrics’ UNIeVista Panel, NBCU looks to benefit from granular tracking of every media exposure in a home—from linear TV and streaming to gaming and user-generated content—on every screen, down to the individual, according to the companies.This is the first product for HyphaMetrics in seven years, following litigation with measurement giant Nielsen. HyphaMetrics was cleared in a patent infringement case against Nielsen last August.As a result of the new partnership, NBCU becomes the first official licensor of HyphaMetrics’ UNIeVista Panel and will have access to…

By now, every enterprise has a position on ChatGPT. Most have piloted Copilot. A growing number are exploring how large language models fit into their product and operational strategies. But the most useful AI tools for enterprise teams in 2026 aren’t the ones making headlines. While the boardroom conversation centres on the big platforms, a different category of AI tool is quietly solving the problems that actually slow enterprise teams down: the contract review that takes three days, the data question that requires a ticket to analytics, the video that never gets produced because editing is a bottleneck. These aren’t…

In a bid to stave off a major investigation by the European Commission, Meta said on Thursday that it would allow AI companies to offer their chatbots on WhatsApp via its business API for the next 12 months in Europe. The move comes a month after the European Commission told Meta that it intended to impose interim measures in order to stop the company from implementing its policy, which barred third-party AI chatbot providers from using the WhatsApp Business API to offer their services on the app. “For the next 12 months, we’ll support general-purpose AI chatbots using the WhatsApp…

Compare Top Workout HeadphonesHow to Keep Your In-Ear Buds From Falling OutAccordionItemContainerButtonTo a certain extent, how the headphones sound matters less than if they fit correctly. They can be the best-sounding headphones in the world, but I will find them irritating if they won’t stay in mid-run. So how do you keep your headphones from falling out? Here are a few tips and tricks that I’ve tried over the years.Dial it in. To put on your buds, pull open your ear a little bit and give it a little twist to fix it in place. If they don’t fit, don’t…

This isn’t David Park’s first rodeo. The veteran founder and TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus has certainly been battle-tested in the enterprise arena. On this episode of Build Mode, Park joins Isabelle Johannessen to discuss how he and his team are intentionally iterating, fundraising, and scaling Narada. This enterprise AI solution uses large action models to automate complex, multistep workflows across enterprise systems.   At face value, Narada has everything that would likely have investors banging down its door: a dream founding team of experienced researchers and operators from Stanford and Berkeley, big name enterprise customers, and a product that works. So in 2024, when Narada applied for Startup Battlefield, it surprised the team how…

HOKA’s max-stacked Rocket X Trail combines road race shoe energy with boosted grip from a 3-mm lugged outsole. If you’re looking for a fast shoe to go on the attack, this is it. It’s also fantastic for all round comfort. In testing, I laced up the Rocket X Trail and ran 3 hours (just short of 19 miles) fresh out of the box, across roads, forest gravel trails, some grass and through some serious water. It delivered efficiency and energy whether I was moving at marathon pace or with heavier, tired, ragged footfalls in the latter miles.The rockered, supercritical midsole…

KEF recommend giving the Muo at least a 10-hour run-in period, much in the same way you would break in the surrounds on a serious pair of Hi-Fi speakers. True to their word, and after a night of running in, the Muo started to sound less like a Bluetooth speaker, and more like a compact hi-fi component.Across some bombastic classical, and my usual mix of MF Doom, Waxahatchee, and Neil Young using Quobuz and Spotify from iOS devices and a Windows laptop, the Muo remains impressively composed. Definition between bass, mids, and highs gives your music the chance to breathe,…