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Founders, the battlefield is still open, but not for much longer. After overwhelming demand from founders around the world, TechCrunch has extended the Startup Battlefield 200 application deadline to June 8. If you thought you missed your opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage in October at San Francisco’s Moscone West, this is your final chance to step into one of tech’s most competitive startup arenas. Nominate a standout startup or submit your application before the deadline. Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images What is Startup Battlefield 200? Startup Battlefield 200 is where ambitious early-stage startups go from unknown to impossible to ignore. Selected founders will…

In the past, none of that mattered in a laptop this cheap. The MacBook Neo changed the rules, proving that design matters, even at this price. To get to this price, however, HP and Apple made very different compromises. The OmniBook 3 takes the approach of keeping 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage at the tradeoff of using a slightly thicker, plastic chassis. For the right person, that’s the right choice.The thicker chassis also makes room for some ports. On the left side, you’ll find an HDMI, a USB-A 2.0, and two USB-C 3.0 ports. The right…

A common theme runs through this week’s ads: take control of your life. That could mean prioritizing human connection (Etsy), managing finances (Coinbase), or cutting through the daily noise of news and information (NPR).That spirit carries over to Chobani’s celebration of a community rallying behind a rising athlete and The Vanderpump Hotel’s case for embracing a little well-earned overindulgence. Our Most Effective Ad of the Week, in partnership with EDO, goes to Disney’s entertainment portfolio.Keep scrolling for the week’s most notable ads.Primark | “The Get Away” by VCCPAfter opening a Manhattan flagship store earlier this month, the Irish retailer’s first global…

Join us for StrictlyVC Los Angeles 2026, an intimate evening bringing together leading investors and entrepreneurs for high-signal conversations from the front lines of venture capital and frontier technology. Taking place Thursday, June 18, at The Aerospace Corporation Campus in El Segundo, this edition continues StrictlyVC’s focus on direct access to the ideas and leaders shaping where technology and capital are headed next. Secure your spot here. For executives, investors, and founders navigating an increasingly complex market, this is an opportunity to step inside conversations that rarely happen in public and hear directly from the people driving change across defense, AI, and advanced industry. Who’s taking the stage We will…

For decades, the geography of the tech industry has felt largely fixed, with Silicon Valley dominating the global startup economy. While cities like London, Beijing, and Tel Aviv have competed for secondary influence, one of the most important conversations in artificial intelligence is happening somewhere else entirely: Paris. France has aggressively invested in artificial intelligence research and infrastructure, with startups like Mistral AI helping Europe become a legitimate force in the global AI race. At the same time, Europe’s startup ecosystem has matured significantly; its founders are increasingly willing to scale companies domestically instead of immediately looking to relocate to…

Prison calling service Pay Tel has secured a publicly exposed cloud server storing hundreds of thousands of driver’s licenses and other sensitive information about people who used its services, according to a cybersecurity firm that alerted the company to the security lapse.  Security researchers with UpGuard said in a blog post that they identified a Microsoft Azure-hosted storage server storing at least 300,000 driver’s license scans and other government-issued identity documents belonging to Pay Tel.  The server was unprotected without a password, allowing the data inside to be accessible from the web. Pay Tel provides tablets and other communication devices…

The most important market of the future could be in LLM tokens — and financial groups are rushing to build new infrastructure for them. China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange is currently designing a derivatives market for AI tokens, Reuters reports. The news comes as major derivatives exchange CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange (the owner of the NYSE) have separately said they’re working on launching futures contracts for renting GPUs. GPU markets are still maturing, but given the wide range of companies using, selling, and renting GPUs, there’s a robust market for spot prices on GPU rental, typically charged by the…

Anthropic has snagged $65 billion in funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation in its latest funding round, marking what could be the AI startup’s last private fundraising before debuting on the public markets. The Series H round was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, and others. Institutional investors including Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, and Fidelity Management & Research participated in the round.  Strategic infrastructure partners, including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, also joined the round. A portion of the round — $15 billion — is also…

Elon Musk’s X lets you write long-form content on the platform through its Articles feature, but only if you’re a paid subscriber or business. The decentralized social networking startup Bluesky has a different idea. On Thursday, Bluesky rolled out a new version of its app that integrates with Standard.site, a community project for building long-form content on the same underlying protocol that powers Bluesky. This means Bluesky users can now explore content beyond microblogs, or the short posts that Bluesky is known for. Instead, they can read articles, blog posts, and newsletters published across the wider network of AT Protocol-powered…

Waymo has nearly 600 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas, a figure that far outpaces emerging competitors Avride, Nuro, Tesla, and Zoox, according to data available in a new website launched by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. The automated vehicle tracker tool — part of a new law that requires AV companies to register with the DMV — gives the public the first accurate and easy-to-access accounting of how many autonomous vehicles are in Texas. The state law, which went into effect May 28, requires companies testing or deploying AVs in the state to share how many vehicles are in…

Blue Origin’s New Glenn mega-rocket just exploded during testing at a launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to live streams from NASASpaceFlight.com and SpaceFlight Now. Blue Origin later confirmed the explosion. Jeff Bezos’ space company was performing a static fire test ahead of an anticipated fourth launch of the new rocket in the coming weeks, which was supposed to carry Amazon Leo internet satellites to space. Blue Origin said in an X post Thursday evening that “[a]ll personnel have been accounted for.” The company didn’t say what went wrong, only that an “anomaly” occurred. In a statement, the Federal…

Glean, a company often described as the Google for enterprise, said it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a three-fold increase from the $100 million milestone it reached just 15 months ago. While many AI startups are growing at a blistering pace, Glean’s progress is particularly remarkable. After years of essentially being the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with rival products. “The first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given…

On Tuesday, with Donald Trump’s endorsement and the backing of the MAGA faithful, scandal-ridden Texas attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent US senator John Cornyn in a runoff primary to claim the Republican nomination for that seat.He then quickly set about painting his general-election opponent, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as insufficiently masculine.“My opponent is the most extreme radical that Democrats have ever nominated,” Paxton said in his victory speech. “He’s even running a vegan campaign, whatever that is. He goes by a few names that you may all have heard of. Some people know him as Tofu Talarico.…

Every year I read through thousands of Startup Battlefield applications. And every year, I see the same pattern: The founders who belong on this stage are often the ones who almost didn’t apply. They think they’re too early. They think they need more traction. They think the program is for companies further along than they are. So here’s what we’re actually looking for and how to make sure your application reflects it. The deadline to be considered was May 27, but with the competition heating up and the applications continuing to come in, we’ve extended it to June 8. You…

As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago in several states in search, it claims, of fraud or other malfeasance. But experts believe the goal may be more varied.The seizures began in January when FBI agents armed with a warrant raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and grabbed 600 boxes of ballots from 2020. This was followed in March by the Department of Justice obtaining ballot images from 2020 in Maricopa County, Arizona, and—citing claims about supposed fraud in 2020—demanding ballots from…

Asana has acquired the workflow automation company StackAI for $75 million, part of a larger effort to position itself as an AI-native workplace platform. StackAI’s founders, Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will join Asana as part of the acquisition. Asana framed the acquisition as part of its broader AI pivot, in which it seeks to build its platform into “the operating system for human-agent teams.” The announcement was announced Thursday afternoon to coincide with Asana’s earnings and investor call. Built as an AI workflow-automation system, StackAI designs agents to operate within existing business systems, pulling in data from systems like…