BuzzFeed debuts AI slop apps in bid for new revenue

1:10 AM IST · March 18, 2026

BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time,a Pulitzer Prize-winningjournalism division, isreinventingitself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch. At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Perettiintroducedthe company’s next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection. The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering. “We’ve been working on this secretly for over a year, and we’ve learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.” Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company’s new apps: BF Island and Conjure. The first product,BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech in and of itself, but that’s not the point. The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald’s CEOtaste-testing a burgeror the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t know what these are, you’re probably not the “very online” audience that’s being targeted.) The other app, Conjure, is similar to BeReal — the once-a-day temporary photo app — except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal didn’t stick, ultimatelyexiting to Voodooafterlosing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was “What lies between the trees and the moon?,” leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whispered, “What will you conjure?” We don’t get it, and clearly the audience didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter. Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an “AI spirit for a CEO.” (Again, what?) Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results. BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has “substantial doubt”about its ability to continue as a businessand was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these. But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced. As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem? Shouldis said that the app would evolve “and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today.” He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community. The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged. “In a way, software is the new content,” Peretti noted. Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.

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Riding an AI rally, Robinhood preps second retail venture IPO

Just two months after listing its first venture fund on the stock market, Robinhood is preparing to launch a second. The company hasfiled aconfidential registrationfor RVII, a standard regulatory step that allows it to work through the approval process before making details public. Unlike its first fund, which currently holds stakes in10 late-stage companies— Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe— RVII will cast a wider net, investing in growth-stage and early-stage startups.It’s a meaningful distinction, given that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk but also offer the potential for greater returns. The fundraising target for RVII has not yet been set, the company said in ablog post. For its inaugural fund, Robinhood sought to raise $1 billion but ultimately fellseveral hundred million shortof that goal. Despite the shortfall, the first fund has performed strongly. RVI — the ticker for Robinhood’s first fund, which trades on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) — debuting on the NYSE at $21 a share in early March and has since more than doubled, closing on Monday at $43.69. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the fund’s underlying startups has likely fueled the stock’s rise. The premise behind both funds addresses a longstanding gap in who gets to invest in startups. Under federal rules, only “accredited” investors — those with a net worth exceeding $1 million or annual income above $200,000 — can put money into private companies. That has historically locked ordinary investors out of the earliest and most lucrative stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII, are designed to change that, letting anyone invest in a portfolio of private startups through a regular brokerage account. “You can think of [Robinhood Ventures] as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no carry,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in aninterviewat The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference last week. Daily liquidity means shares can be bought or sold any day the market is open, unlike traditional VC funds, where capital is locked up for years. No carry means Robinhood doesn’t take a percentage of investment profits, as conventional venture firms typically do. Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have gone from early bets to companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and almost all of that appreciation has happened in the private markets, out of reach for most investors. Tenev's longer-term vision goes further still. “The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round — so, just first capital — retail should be a big chunk of that round, much like it now is in the public markets,” Tenevsaid at the conference. “And we should let those people in at the ground floor, so that they can actually benefit from this potential appreciation that’s increasingly happening in the private markets.” If that vision takes hold, it could fundamentally change how startups raise their earliest capital, with retail investors eventually sitting alongside venture firms, including in the earliest rounds, where the biggest returns are often made, a whole lot of money is lost, as well.

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There aren’t enough rockets for space data centers — Cowboy Space raised $275M to build them

The apparently insatiable demand for AI compute has data center entrepreneurs looking to the stars. There’s a key problem: There aren’t enough rockets to put data centers in orbit around Earth, and they’re too expensive. Most of the players are hoping that SpaceX’s Starship — expected to make its twelfth test flight as soon as this weekend— will solve the problem. But once the vehicle is operational it may be years before it is commercially available, given SpaceX’s internal satellite business. Thesame is truefor Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which failed to deliver a satellite during its third launch in April. That leaves space data center schemes either targeting the mid 2030s, like Google Suncatcher, or preparing to start off doing edge processing tasks for space sensors, likeStarcloud. In theory, there’s a third way: “We’re standing up our own rocket program,” Baiju Bhatt, the CEO and founder of Cowboy Space Corporation, told TechCrunch. He expects the first launch before the end of 2028. Today, the company announced the closure of a $275 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $2 billion, led by earlier backer Index Ventures, as a downpayment on that work. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC also participated. The company had previously raised $80 million from investors, including Index, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and New Enterprise Associates. Bhatt, a co-founder of online stock platform Robinhood, launched this startup in 2024 as Aetherflux, with plans to collect abundant solar energy in space and beam it down to Earth. The idea of space data centers led the company to pivot towards using its electricity while in orbit. Thepractical realitiesof that effort, in turn, led him to a rocket development program, and the company’s new name. Bhatt said he spoke to multiple launch providers to try and find a path where his company would only build satellites, but he couldn’t find enough launch capacity to truly scale an orbital data center business, or do so in a way where the unit economics could compete with terrestrial alternatives. "There's a lot of new rockets that are coming online, but as we look three, four years out, it's still very, very scarce, and I think that you're going to see a lot of the first party rocket providers actually specialize into their own payloads," Bhatt said. Of course, while bringing the rocket in-house is logical, it's also nuts. Only a handful of private companies in the West, mainly SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Arianespace, are consistently launching commercial rockets. Two others, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, have been struggling to drag their vehicles out of development hell for years. A number of startups, including Stoke Space, Firefly Aerospace, and Relativity Space, have worked for years and are still waiting to deliver operational systems. This evolution of the company will also bring Cowboy Space Corporation into direct competition with SpaceX and Blue Origin, the most advanced and well-funded players in the market. "The prize here, and the size of this market, is big enough that there's room for many players to succeed," Bhatt said "I see the demand for AI getting more and more acute, and I see the options on Earth getting more and more limited." One advantage, Bhatt argues, is the company's focus on this single market (data centers), and its unique design. Orbital rockets typically have a booster stage that flies the vehicle to the edge of space, and a second stage that carries the payload and delivers it to orbit. Cowboy Space plans to build its data centers directly into the second stage of its rocket. It's actually a bit of a throw-back: The first US satellite, Explorer 1, was built as the final stage of a rocket, filled with radio equipment and a few scientific instruments. Making the rocket purpose-built only to launch its data-center satellites should simplify the design process. The company expects each satellite to have a mass of 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms and to generate 1 MW of power for just under 800 onboard GPUs. That means its rocket would be slightly more powerful than the SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, though still smaller than its under-development Starship. Eventually, Bhatt says, he expects the booster to be reusable. Cowboy Space has hired veterans of the space industry, including former Blue Origin propulsion engineer Warren Lamont and former SpaceX launch director Tyler Grinne. The company also plans to build its own rocket engine, the most complex and expensive part of any launch vehicle. Cowboy Space is still working through key development needs, like facilities to test, manufacture and launch its rockets. The new vision comes with a new name for the startup, to emphasize its mission to "power humanity from the high frontier," although Bhatt admits "it gives me a reason to wear a cowboy hat and also grow this sick mustache."

10 hours ago

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Digg tries again, this time as an AI news aggregator

Digg is back from the dead. Again. Just months afterlaunching, therebootof Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing siteshut down in March, as the company shifted course. Originally redesigned as acompetitorto the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it wasn’t able to effectively manage the bot traffic invading its platform and hadn’t differentiated itself enough from the competition to make an impact. The startup laid off staff and said it was time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time on a new version of Digg in April. On Friday evening, the founderprevieweda link to the newly redesignedDigg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. a little project i've been hacking on:https://t.co/zTuwWy44lybugs expected. more topics soon. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news — specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in a space” and to surface the news that’s actually worth “paying attention to.” AI is the area it’s testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy,” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut. On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one “In case you missed it” headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren’t the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. As Roseremarked on X,when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman engages with a story about AI, it almost always sets off a chain reaction that includes deep discussion and propagation of that topic throughout X. The new Digg will be able to track that increased engagement. This might be something that’s interesting to data nerds, as it exposes the impact of X-based engagement with charts and graphs, and offers a way to track signal among what can, on X, often be a lot of noise. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough underlying value here for an everyday user, beyond seeing that yes, a@samatweet can make something go viral. The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues. For those who don’t have time to spend on X tracking breaking AI news, Digg could prove a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people would regularly turn to Digg over their preferred news app, RSS reader, or even their X “For You” feed, if they wanted to catch up on what’s trending — especially because there isn’t currently any discussion happening on Digg’s site itself. Digg may also struggle when it moves on to other topics, as AI news is one of the few areas where discussion still heavily takes place on X. Other verticals don’t have the same traction, especially after Musk’s takeover of the site formerly known as Twitter gave rise to an ecosystem of competitors, which now includes Meta’s creator-focused Threads. Many non-tech-related discussions are now happening off X, or off the public internet entirely. However, if Digg does end up gaining steam, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic to publishers whose businesses have been decimated bydeclining clicksthanks to Google’s changing algorithms andthe impact of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries Google displays atop search results, which often answer users’ questions before they ever click through to a website.

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OpenAI Launches $4 Billion Deployment Company Backed by Top Investors

The Deployment Company will function as a standalone business unit while remaining closely connected to OpenAI’s research and product teams.

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