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Super Early Bird pricing forTechCrunch Disrupt 2026ends February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT. This is your final window to lock in the lowest ticket prices of the year. If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, now is the time to act. Save up to $680 on your pass or secure up to 30% off with community passes.Register now before prices increase. From October 13–15, San Francisco’s Moscone West will become the global epicenter of tech. Disrupt is a curated, three-day experience built to maximize signal over noise — bringing together 10,000 founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders for 200+ expert-led sessions featuring 250+ influential voices. Across the ecosystem, past attendees consistently point to the same value: AtDisrupt, you’ll explore what’s next as300+ exhibiting startupsdebut new breakthroughs, feel the high-stakes energy of the intense startup pitch-off inStartup Battlefield 200, and engage incurated, high-impact networkingwith the people shaping the future of tech. The 2026 agenda drops soon. Visit theevent pagefor updates. Disrupt isn’t about wandering between sessions. It’s about intentional connections and curated experiences designed for how people actually grow in tech. Founders meet investors actively backing breakthrough ideas. VCs cut through the noise to discover startups aligned with their investment focus. Operators exchange real-world lessons on building, scaling, and shipping what’s next. Aspiring innovators get inspired with a front-row seat to tomorrow’s tech and invaluable insights from those shaping it. If you’re building, investing, or scaling in tech, Disrupt was built for you. Find your ticket match now and secure the lowest rate before it’s gone. Founders and investors can unlock specialized passes designed to support your goals: Founder Pass:Accelerate growth with the right insights, tools, and connections. Investor Pass:Discover standout startups and expand your portfolio through curated access. This deal ends in just one week. Lock yours in before Friday, February 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT.Register hereto saveup to $680on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass or save up to 30% with group passes.
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Peak XV raises $1.3B, doubles down on AI as global VC rivalry in India heats up
Peak XVannounced on Friday that it has raised $1.3 billion across new India and Asia-focused funds. The firm, which now manages more than $10 billion in assets, is sharpening its focus on artificial intelligence and cross-border bets amid intensifying competition for deals in the region. The capital will be deployed across its India seed and venture funds as well as its APAC vehicle. A majority is earmarked for India, with the firm expecting to invest the pool over the next two to three years, managing director Shailendra Singh said in an interview on Friday. Peak XVsplit from Sequoia Capital in 2023, in an effort to separate the India-focused portions of Sequoia’s portfolio. The firm now counts more than 450 portfolio companies across fintech, software, and consumer internet, spanning seed to growth stages. The firm’s new fundraise comes as New Delhi hosts theAI Impact Summit, drawing major technology players including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. At the event,General Catalyst outlined plans to invest $5 billionin the country over the next five years, sharply increasing its earlier commitment to the market. Singh said Peak XV is not trying to match rivals dollar-for-dollar, emphasizing that the firm’s priority is generating strong returns rather than maximizing assets under management. The firm will continue to size its funds based on where it sees the best opportunity to deliver “high-performing funds,” he said. He added that Peak XV is still building its presence in the U.S. and is selective about where it competes. “In the U.S. market, we are an underdog — and that’s great,” Singh said, adding that the firm is focusing on areas where its experience in software, developer tools, and fintech gives it an edge. The latest fundraise follows a period of leadership changes at Peak XV, including therecent departuresof senior partner Ashish Agrawal and investors Ishaan Mittal and Tejeshwi Sharma. Singh told TechCrunch the firm retains significant experience on its leadership team, noting that five of its seven managing partners have been with Peak XV for more than a decade. The broader Peak XV team includes more than 30 full-time investors, with about a dozen leading investments across its markets. Peak XV has returned more than $7 billion in cash to investors since inception, Singh said, adding that 35 of its portfolio companies have gone public. He declined to specify distributions since the firm’s split from Sequoia Capital. In September 2024, TechCrunch reported that the firm hadreturned about $1.2 billionin the year. Ahead of the current raise, Peak XV’s prior fund wassized at $2.85 billionin late 2021, before the firm split from Sequoia Capital. That figure was later reduced to about $2.4 billion as part of what Singh described as a disciplined approach to capital. The earlier pool included Peak XV’s India growth strategy, and Singh said the firm does not plan to raise a new growth fund until more of that dry powder is deployed. Singh expects to deploy the new capital primarily into AI, fintech, and consumer startups, while also seeing emerging opportunities in deep tech. The firm has made more than 80 investments in AI startups to date. He added that the U.S.-India ties are becoming increasingly important as more founders in the region build for global markets.
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AI’s promise to indie filmmakers: Faster, cheaper, lonelier
A Filipino man walks through the backyard of his childhood home in rural Hawai’i, his footsteps swooshing through the grass. Birds chirp, contributing to the tropical din, as he approaches a shrine at the base of a starfruit tree. He bends to inspect a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman, her hair in a 1950s side part. Suddenly, a gust of wind shakes the tree’s branches, knocking over the contents of the shrine. The man steps back, trips on a root, and hits his head. When he awakens, he’s in a dark, misty forest, a woman wearing a clay mask standing over him, brandishing a sword. “Who are you who dares to sleep under the sacred tree?” she asks in Ilocano, a Philippine language widely spoken in Hawaii’s Filipino community, while holding the sword at his throat. He replies that he’s lost and turns to flee. She chases, alternating between running and floating through the air. He falls again. She advances, sword held high. He throws a rock at her, shattering the clay mask and revealing half her face. “Mom?” he asks. This is the opening of “Murmuray,” a short film by independent filmmaker Brad Tangonan. Everything about this film felt like his previous work, from the tactile nature shots to the dreamlike desaturated highlights. The only difference? He made it using AI. Tangonan was one of 10 filmmakers to participate in Google Flow Sessions, a five-week cohort that gave creatives access to Google’s suite of AI tools to produce short films, including Gemini, image generator Nano Banana Pro, and film generator Veo. Each film differed in scope. Hal Watmough’s “You’ve Been Here Before” blended hyperreal, lifelike visuals with cartoonish stylization to playfully explore the importance of a morning routine, while Tabitha Swanson’s“The Antidote to Fear is Curiosity”is a more esoteric, philosophical conversation about our relationship with AI and ourselves. None of these short films, which were screened at Soho House New York late last year, felt like AI slop. Each independent filmmaker I spoke to said that, in the case of these films, AI had enabled them to tell a story they otherwise wouldn’t have had the budget or time to tell. “I see all of these tools, whether it be a camera you can pick up or generative AI, as ways for an artist to express what they have in their mind,” Tangonan told me after the screenings. This AI-is-just-another-tool-for-creators argument is certainly the message Google is trying to underscore. Google isn’t wrong; AI will increasingly be part of a creator’s toolkit as video generation products improve. In 2025, companies like Google, Runway, OpenAI, Kling, Luma AI, and Higgsfield progressed far beyond the uncanny, prompt-based novelties of the year prior. The AI video industry, with billions in venture capital dollars in tow, is now moving from prototype to post-production. This era of AI abundance that has provided tools to “democratize access” to the film industry also threatens to erase jobs and creativity, smothering them under an avalanche of low-effort slop. The existential stakes have pitted creatives against one another. Those who engage with AI risk being labeled as complicit; those who don’t risk becoming obsolete. The question isn’t whether the tools belong in the toolkit — they’re coming, whether we like it or not. Instead it is: What kind of filmmaking survives when the industry pushes for speed and scale over quality? And what happens when individual artists use the same tools to make something that actually matters? The arguments against AI in filmmaking are plentiful — and from some of the highest-profile names in the industry. Filmmaker Guillermo del Torosaid last Octoberthat he would rather die than use generative AI to make a film. James Cameron said in a recentCBS interviewthe idea of generating actors and emotions with prompts is “horrifying,” and that generative AI is only capable of spitting out a blended average of everything that’s ever been done by humans before. Werner Herzog said the films he’s seen created by AI “have no soul.” He added: “The common denominator, and nothing beyond this common denominator, can be found in these fabrications.” Cameron and Herzog’s thesis is that AI is taking the wheel of creation out of the hands of humans and couldn’t possibly be used to create a representation of their own lived experiences. “It’s very easy to be angry with AI as a concept in the machine, but it’s harder to be angry with someone that’s made something personal,” Watmough told TechCrunch. Tangonan, who describes “Murmuray” as a “family story,” agrees with that sentiment. “AI is a facilitator,” Tangonan said. “I’m still making all the creative decisions. When people see ‘AI slop’ online, it’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff. And, yeah, if you hand over the keys to AI, that’s what you’re going to get. But if you have a voice and a creative perspective and a style, then you’re going to get something different.” Using AI in filmmaking doesn’t mean just prompting a film into existence. Tangonan, for example, wrote the script for “Murmuray” without AI and gathered visual references for a shot list. He then fed that content into Nano Banana Pro to generate images that matched his style and served as the foundation for video generation. Filmmaker Keenan MacWilliam also took pains to ensure her short film “Mimesis,” a fictional guided meditation, was a “true extension of [her] visual language, rather than a ‘blender’ of other artists’ work.” MacWilliam wrote the script and recorded her own voice for the mock meditation, which was equal parts relaxing and funny. Onscreen, over a black, watery backdrop, psychedelic images of flowers and plants blended into each other, turned into smoke, morphed into seahorses, and swam away. The images all came from MacWilliam’s own collection of scanned flora and fauna — she travels with her scanner everywhere she goes. “I spent a lot of time learning how to make apps that were built with my own dataset, and then used those as reference points,” MacWilliam told TechCrunch, adding that she worked with her long-time composer and sound designer on the film. “I made a choice to avoid using AI for anything that I could have shot with a camera or ask my collaborators to animate. My goal was to unlock new forms of expression for my established themes and style, not to replace the roles of the people who I like to work with.” That was a common thread among the filmmakers I spoke to at the Google Flow event — the desire to use AI only in cases when it was not possible to rely on other humans, or when the strange nature of AI generations serve the story. For example, Sander van Bellegem’s “Melongray” explored the acceleration of life through trippy visualizations. In one shot, a salamander transforms into a balloon. It wasn’t part of his original storyline, but he was inspired by the way AI allowed him to push the limits of both his imagination and physics. Today’s film studiobudgets are being squeezedby rising filming costs, thepivot to streaming, and risk-averse corporate consolidation. That means big spends are saved for predictable revenue generators (see: the millionth Marvel movie) and originalmid-budget movieshave all but been abandoned. Adding AI to the mix risks exacerbating the scarcity mindset of studios to the point where they might try to replace anything that can be — actors, sets, lighting — art and quality be damned. However, the efficiencies AI brings could also lower barriers and make it easier for film studios to produce original work. Even Cameron noted in his CBS interview that generative AI could make VFX cheaper, which could lead to more imaginative sci-fi and fantasy films — expensive endeavors that are reserved for existing IP like “Avatar.” The shot in “Murmuray” where the woman is flying through the forest would have taken expensive VFX or very complex rigging on set, both out of budget for a short film, according to Tangonan. But even filmmakers who see the benefits in efficiency understand the risks to artistic expression. “I think efficiency in general is not the best friend of creativity,” MacWilliam said. For independent filmmakers, having so many powerful tools at their disposal is a blessing and a curse. It “democratizes access,” sure, but it also means working alone. The more youcando yourself, the less reason there is to collaborate. “I know I’m a one-man band, and I just made all this by myself…but that should never be the way that anyone tells a story or makes a film,” Watmough told TechCrunch, noting that an actor friend of his contributed the voice for his short. “It should be a collaborative process because the more people that are involved, the more accessible it is by everyone and the more it reaches and connects with people.” Directors make creative decisions, but not all of them. The filmmakers I spoke to found themselves suddenly playing set designer, lighting director, costumer — roles requiring expertise they didn’t have. It was frustrating and draining, pulling them away from the work they actually cared about. And upsetting to think about how an entire ecosystem could be upended so swiftly. The filmmakers I spoke to also said they’d rather not replace actors with AI, though some said AI-generated actors are an inevitability for smaller studios. The tools exist, and are increasingly getting better, to generate actors, their emotions, their movements. AI video startups like Luma AI, which last November raiseda $900 million Series C, are even building technology that allows you to shoot an actor’s performance once, and then use AI to change the character, costume, and set. “In an ideal world, I would work with real actors and some cinematographer and department heads and the full crew to make something amazing and use AI and complement that to be able to do things that we can’t do on set, whether for budgetary or time reasons,” Tangonan. “I think making any creative work that uses new technology always requires a certain kind of gut check and a willingness to have conversations around the work,” MacWilliam said. “These are tools,” she added. “How are you going to use the tool? Are you going to be ethical about it? Are you going to ask questions? Are you going to be transparent and share knowledge?” But many don’t see AI tools as neutral. Labor replacement aside, there are still copyright concerns. AI video generation startupRunwayhas reportedly scraped thousands of hours of YouTube videos and copyrighted studio content, while others — including Google, OpenAI, and Luma AI — have faced questions about whether they are doing the same, or training on copyrighted films and stock footage without permission. (Though some tools, likeMoonvalley’s Marey, are trained only on openly licensed data.) Then there are the environmental horrors —some estimates suggestgenerating seconds of AI video can consume as much electricity as hours of streaming. Unsurprisingly, many of the filmmakers I spoke to said they face stigma for experimenting with AI. “Whenever I do post things online, a lot of my filmmaking colleagues have a very knee-jerk reaction to it that we should all hold the line and not use any of these tools,” Tangonan said. “I just don’t agree with that.” If filmmakers are too afraid to discuss how AI can and should be used and what the ethical boundaries are, then the conversation risks being decided for them. Not by artists trying to use it responsibly, but by efficiency-crazed studios that care more about bottom lines than art. “The film industry is floundering because people aren’t innovating and everything costs too much. We need tools like this for it to survive,” said Watmough. “I think it’s essential that people engage with it because if we don’t, then it’s going to become something we don’t recognize, and that’s not sustainable.” Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Ilocano as a Hawaiian dialect of Filipino. Ilocano is a language from the northern Philippines and is widely spoken among Filipino communities in Hawaii.
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Toy Story 5 takes aim at creepy AI toys: ‘I’m always listening’
When the first Toy Story movie came out in 1995, Google didn’t exist yet and Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. No one could have predicted that over thirty years later, Pixar would still be making Toy Story movies, nor could anyone have known that the latest installation in the franchise would pit Buzz Lightyear and a balding Woody against an evil AI tablet called Lilypad. But sure enough,Toy Story 5confronts old-school toys like Mrs. Potato Head, Rex, and Slinky Dog against the sinister threat oftechnology. The trailer shows Bonnie, the young girl who inherited Andy’s toys when he left for college inToy Story 2, playing outside with her toys when a surprise package with the Lilypad tablet arrives for her. She becomes completely enraptured by the tablet, not even looking up from the screen when her parents tell her that screen time is over. TheToy Story 5trailer makes the Lilypad — or, Lily — out to be a sinister villain. When Jessie confronts the tablet about Bonnie’s wellbeing, Lily seems not to be paying attention, so the cowgirl demands that the tablet listen to her. “I’m always listening,” Lily says ominously, regurgitating Jessie’s impassioned speech in a computerized tone… and then translates it into Spanish. “Tech’s invaded our house,” Jessie tells Woody. “I’m losing Bonnie to this device.” Woody replies, “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.” CouldToy Story 5pull at the heartstrings of young children and get them to think twice about the consequences of excessive screen time? That may be a stretch. But at least it gives them something to watch that’s not as mind numbing as Cocomelon.
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Great news for xAI: Grok is now pretty good at answering questions about Baldur’s Gate
Different AI labs have different priorities. OpenAI has traditionally focused on consumer users, for instance, while its rival Anthropic tends to target enterprises. Elon Musk’s xAI, we discovered recently, has been placing particular emphasis on video-game walkthroughs. On Friday, Business Insider’s Grace Kay publisheda detailed and far-reaching report about xAI, the AI startup recentlyacquired by SpaceX, with particular emphasis on how Musk is making life difficult for employees. But this particular anecdote stood out: In one instance last year, a model release was delayed for several days because Musk was dissatisfied with how the chatbot answered detailed questions about the video game “Baldur’s Gate,” according to people familiar with the matter. High-level engineers were pulled from other projects to improve the responses before launch, they said. Of course, you can imagine the frustration of any respected and experienced engineer who shows up to work thinking he’ll be tackling fundamental problems of knowledge and machine intelligence, only to be sidetracked into helping a 54-year-old man beat his video game. But the anecdote raises an even more pressing question: Did Musk end up getting the gaming skills he wanted? To answer that question, our resident RPG-enthusiastRam Iyerput together a set of five general questions about Baldur’s Gate, which we ran against xAI and the three major models in a kind of quasi-benchmark that I’ve decided to callBaldurBench. In the interest of journalistic transparency, I’ve made all the chat transcripts public, so you can see them here:Grok,ChatGPT,Claude, andGemini. First, the good news: Grok actually gives pretty good information. Its responses were a bit dense with gamer jargon — “save-scumming” instead of saving and “DPS” instead of damage — but the answers were both useful and well-informed, provided you knew what it was talking about. Grok also really loves tables andtheorycraft, which is about what you would expect. There are lots of Baldur’s Gate guides out there and the models were generally drawing from the same ones, so the biggest differences were stylistic. ChatGPT prefers bulleted lists and sentence fragments, while Gemini loves toboldimportant words. The biggest surprise was Claude, which was particularly concerned about giving me information that would spoil my experience of the game. When I asked about good party compositions, it closed the guidance by saying “don’t stress too much and just play what sounds fun to you.” Thanks, Claude! It’s important to bear in mind, this is a subject area we know (thanks toBusiness Insider’s reporting) that xAI has specifically focused on reaching parity. So we shouldn’t read too much into the fact that, after the reported sprint, Grok’s advice turned out about the same as the other models. Still, it’s nice to know xAI can make it work if it tries. Loading the player…
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TryfactaConnex Says It Will Invest $7.7 Bn for 1-GW AI Data Centre Campus in Uttar Pradesh
The company said the project will combine compute capacity with dedicated energy generation to support large-scale artificial intelligence workloads.
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Dell Technologies Launches AI India Blueprint at India AI Impact Summit 2026
The company said the framework is designed to help India move from pilot projects to production-scale AI deployment by treating AI as shared national capability.
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UAE’s G42 teams up with Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India
Abu Dhabi-based tech company G42 has partnered with U.S.-based chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power via a new supercomputer system in India, the companies said on the sidelines of theIndia AI Impact Summitin New Delhi. The system will be hosted in India and follow local data residency, security, and compliance rules. The project aims to provide computing resources for AI applications to educational institutions, government entities, and small and medium enterprises. “Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness. This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security,” Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, said in a statement. Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also part of the project. Last year, MBZUAI and G42 releasedNanda 87B, a Hindi-English large language model built on Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B model, that is purported to understand casual speech in Hindi and English. “Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs,” said Andy Hock, chief strategy officer at Cerebras. The India AI Impact Summit this week saw several AI infrastructure initiatives being launched by both Indian giants and international firms. Indianconglomerate Adani pledged $100 billionto build up to 5 gigawatts of data-center capacity in the country by 2035. Reliance alsosaid it would invest $110 billionover the next seven years for gigawatt-scale data centers. OpenAI has teamed up with Tata Group to secure100 megawatts of AI computein the country as part of its Stargate project, and eventually scale it to 1 gigawatts. And India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the summit that the country plans to attract over$200 billion in infrastructure investmentover the next two years by rolling out a mix of tax incentives, state-backed venture capital, and policy support. So far, U.S. technology giants, includingAmazon,Google, andMicrosoft, have alreadycommitted about $70 billionto expand AI and cloud infrastructure in the country.
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OpenAI says 18 to 24-year-olds account for nearly 50% of ChatGPT usage in India
OpenAI seems to have found product-market fit with young Indians. The company said on Friday that users between 18 and 24 years of age accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in the country, and users under 30 accounted for 80%. The AI lab said Indians use ChatGPT mostly for work, with 35% of all messages relating to professional tasks, compared to 30% globally. In particular, the company’s coding assistant, Codex, is seeing strong traction: OpenAI said Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and weekly usage has increased by four times since the toolgot a Mac apptwo weeks ago. Users in India are also asking three times as many coding-related questions as the median. This is in line with findings from Antropic, which earlier this week said45.2% of Claude’s tasks map to software-related use casesin India. OpenAI said outside of work tasks, 35% of messages to ChatGPT from Indians requested guidance, 20% concerned questions about general information, and 20% were requests for the bot to produce or help with writing. India is OpenAI’s second-largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company has been actively trying to court Indians for its AI tools and services. The company offersa sub-$5 subscription tierin the country, and last year evenran promotional campaignsto spur adoption. “AI adoption is moving faster than our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Signals is our way of putting real-world evidence on the table, so India’s AI debate can be grounded in facts, not hype,” OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji said in a statement. OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, which is hosting a majorAI Impact Summitin New Delhi this week. The company is opening new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year, and has signed a major partnership with conglomerate Tata Group tosecure 100 megawatts worth of AI compute capacityand distribute ChatGPT Enterprise within Tata’s IT services subsidiary, TCS. The AI lab has signed agreements withfintech Pine Labs, travel platforms Ixigo and Makemytrip, and food and grocery delivery company Eternal. It has also partnered with educational institutes to distribute its toolsto more than 100,000 students over the next six years.
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General Catalyst to Invest $5 Bn Over 5 Years to Boost India’s Startup Ecosystem
This commitment, announced at the India AI Impact Summit, will target sectors including AI, healthcare, and fintech.
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Is SaaS Dead? Salesforce Leaders Think That’s a ‘Lazy Narrative’
Salesforce leaders Srini Tallapragada and Arundhati Bhattacharya talk to AIM about AI bets, digital labour and the future of CRM, on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit.
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Telangana Leads OpenAI Coding Tools Usage, Beating Karnataka, Tamil Nadu
India is the fastest-growing market for OpenAI’s Codex, as per new data called 'OpenAI Signals'.
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