Author: GT

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies. Instead, he believes that the more likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS plus agents, he said, speaking onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday. “Generally, once you have a business process, you want to be able to define that in, effectively, business logic with deterministic systems — just because the risk of that changing any given day is very high,” explained Levie. “If you’re doing something mission critical — we’ve already seen great examples of either data being leaked because…

The 2024 runner-up in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, geCKo Materials, returned to the stage at this year’s show to debut new products as it pushes deeper into commercializing its tech. Founder Dr. Capella Kerst revealed four new uses of geCKo’s super-strong dry adhesive: a semiconductor wafer handling tool, a robotic gripper for smooth surfaces (like solar panels or glass), a curved robotic “end effector” for more irregular shapes, and an all-purpose gripper for robotic arms. The geCKo tech is inspired by the way real-life lizards use their feet to grip surfaces. Kerst positions it like a new form of…

The rise of agentic coding tools has been a sea change for software engineers across the industry — but for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, it seems to have landed particularly hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he’s become increasingly comfortable taking a back seat in software development tasks. “AI has been a great force multiplier for somebody who’s an expert,” said Yakovenko, describing his experience with agentic coding after more than 15 years developing software. “Now I can just watch Claude churning through its thing and I can almost smell when it’s going off the rails.” “If people…

For three days this week, 20 startups participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Each was selected to represent the best of the Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. After all that intense pitching, we have a winner. These startups were handpicked to compete in Startup Battlefield, and all of them presented a live demo in front of the VCs and tech leaders who judged the competition. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Charter…

CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025. Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty ImagesPalantir’s head of global communications said Wednesday that the company’s political shift toward the Trump administration is “concerning.””I think it’s going to be challenging, as a lot of the company is moving pro-Trum-, you know, is moving in a certain direction,” communications chief Lisa Gordon said in an interview at The Information’s Women in Tech, Media and Finance summit.”It’s concerning,” she said, while noting she’s a Democrat…

YouTube is conducting a “voluntary exit program” with severance for U.S.-based employees, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The news was first reported by Sources. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told employees about the program via an internal memo on Wednesday. The memo also announced that the Google-owned company was reorganizing its product teams into three separate organizations that all report directly to Mohan. The “Subscription Products” team will focus on YouTube’s subscription products across YouTube Music & Premium and OTT. The “Viewer Products” team will focus on the viewer experience across the main YouTube app, YouTube Kids, Learning, Trust…

“The dead internet theory is real,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told Digg founder Kevin Rose, referring to the idea that much of the internet isn’t human — it’s mostly bots. The two entrepreneurs have since teamed up to re-envision how to build a social community in this world where, very soon, it will be hard to tell who’s a real person online. Earlier this year, the two bought the remaining assets belonging to Digg, the long-shuttered news aggregation site originally founded by Rose that was a staple of the Web 2.0 era. Now again under Rose’s control, the new Digg…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Apple’s iPhone sales growth decelerated during its summertime quarter, but the trendsetting company still delivered financial results that exceeded analyst projections while continuing its efforts to catch up to its Big Tech peers in the artificial intelligence race.The performance announced Thursday was driven largely by strong initial demand for the premium models of the iPhone 17 lineup that went on sale last month. Although the iPhone 17 lacks the AI wizardry featured in rival devices recently introduced by Samsung and Google, Apple spruced up its latest models with a redesign highlighted by a sleek “liquid glass”…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman delivers a keynote address during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024.Noah Berger | Getty ImagesAmazon said Thursday that revenue in its cloud computing business increased 20% in the third quarter, exceeding analysts’ estimates.Revenue at Amazon Web Services for the third quarter totaled $33 billion. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected $32.42 billion, or growth of 18.1% from a year earlier. Operating income rose 9% from a year ago to $11.4 billion, also beating estimates and accounting for about two-thirds of Amazon’s total operating profit. AWS is the world’s…

NBA champion Tristan Thompson announced at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that he’s partnering with global telecom company World Mobile to launch a community-owned mobile network called Uplift. The network offers unlimited data plans starting at $9.99 per month. Uplift is built on blockchain technology and a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN). With Uplift, every subscription will contribute to neighborhood-level network expansion, while local hosts that are known as “AirNode operators” will earn a portion of network revenue by providing community coverage. The idea behind Uplift is to challenge the $2 trillion telecom industry’s centralized model by allowing users and local operators…