Author: GT

Auston Bunsen had a lot of free time after his company QuickNode reached a certain size. That company, a blockchain developer platform, was founded in 2017 and subsequently raised more than $100 million in funding, according to PitchBook.   Then Bunsen started thinking about the fact that people would perhaps like to unlock their doors with their iPhone. “I eventually met with some folks at Apple and they decided to make a bet that I could help further their goals to enable every company to bring the power of Apple Wallet to their door,” Bunsen told TechCrunch.   Bunsen left QuickNode last October and decided to work on his new idea: AccessGrid, which builds…

TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is here! If you’re still on the fence about attending in person, dive into the extensive schedule of speakers, networking opportunities, workshops, after-parties, and more that’s available here. There’s still plenty of time to get a ticket, and with two days left, we’re offering a 50% discount. But if you’re not able to attend in person, the next best thing is to check out our livestream of the Disrupt Stage, which features some of our most prominent speakers and the highly anticipated Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition. We’re streaming via YouTube, so you can catch the embed…

Vinod Khosla has a bold vision for how society could be reconfigured to share the abundance created by AI technology. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Tuesday, the Khosla Ventures founder suggested the U.S. government could take a 10% stake in all public corporations and redistribute that corporate wealth to the public at large. As Khosla put it, the idea was spurred by President Donald Trump’s decision for the U.S. government to purchase a 10% stake in Intel. “When Trump bought 10% of Intel, I wondered if it wasn’t a good idea,” Khosla said onstage at Disrupt. “Take…

Owen Sakawa, the founder of Elloe AI, wants his platform to be the “immune system for AI” and the “antivirus for any AI agent.”   The idea, Sakawa said in an interview days before the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, where Elloe AI is a Top 20 finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition, is to add a layer to companies’ LLMs that checks for bias, hallucinations, errors, compliance issues, misinformation, and unsafe outputs.   “AI is evolving at a very fast pace, and it’s moving this fast without guard rails, without safety nets, without mechanism to prevent it from ever going off…

Elon Musk’s Wikipedia rival Grokipedia got off to a “rocky start” in its public debut, but Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales didn’t even have to take a look at the AI’s output to know what he expected.”I’m not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now,” Wales said at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on Tuesday.Wales had plenty of choice words for Musk, notably in response to allegations that there is “woke bias” on Wikipedia. “He is mistaken about that,” Wales said. “His complaints about Wiki are that we focus on mainstream sources and I…

Vram Ismailyan spent nearly 14 years at Wells Fargo, selling payment infrastructure strategies to Fortune 500 companies.  Despite being a top performer in the payments division, he felt constantly bogged down by the bank’s antiquated technology. “I spent at least five to 10 hours preparing for customer meetings,” he told TechCrunch. “I had to work through 10 or 15 different systems to gather information, make sense of it, and then put it into a PowerPoint.” Like his colleague, Kevin Miyamoto also struggled with Wells Fargo’s tech. Despite managing $900 billion in annual client payments, he managed his entire portfolio of…

It happened one day.   Jannae Gammage was working with the Small Business Administration as a technology consultant, helping companies get access to capital through traditional lenders, like banks and credit unions. She couldn’t stop thinking, however, that there was a problem: The ways in which lenders and businesses connected were woefully outdated, especially on the technological front.   “I was inside the mess, watching good businesses die, while trying to navigate legacy workflows,” she told TechCrunch. “My literal job was to find technology to solve this, and it didn’t exist. I couldn’t find anything.”   So she called up an old friend, Alaia Martin, and the two got to work. In 2022, the duo started working on Cyphr, a Kansas City-based company focused on making the lending…

For any company using software, there is often a difficult balance between patching systems as quickly as possible to prevent cyberattacks while also making sure the updates don’t break how those systems work.  That’s where the startup CyDeploy wants to help.   The company’s founder, Tina Williams-Koroma, explained to TechCrunch that the idea of CyDeploy is to use machine learning to observe and record the most important systems that a company runs, create a replica of them, and let the company using CyDeploy run tests on what she called a “digital twin” before deploying them on the real live systems.…

CleanSpark, a Las Vegas based bitcoin miner, is moving into artificial intelligence, beginning to develop AI data centers alongside its crypto-mining business. The company’s CEO laid out details of the recently announced strategy on CNBC’s “Crypto World” this week, and why it’s likely to become core to the business models of more crypto mining companies.One key example of why bitcoin miners can win in the booming data center market: CleanSpark recently won a 100-megawatt site in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and beat out the tech giant Microsoft for the contract, according to its CEO.How did a company with a market cap under…

When Yuk Chi Chan set out to build Charter Space in late 2021, it was after a long stretch of pain. As a mission manager at a satellite bus startup, he coordinated the company’s first demonstration mission — and he had to do it all with critical data scattered across Microsoft Excel. In addition to managing the internal engineering operations, Chan, a former space lawyer, had to essentially repackage the same critical engineering and program data for different external audiences. “It was all the same data. It was all about the same physical object,” he told TechCrunch. “I was like,…