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AI Is Creating More Data. The Next Big Skill Is Knowing What To Do With It
The University of Cincinnati's online MS in Business Analytics is a STEM programme offered through the AACSB-accredited Lindner College of Business.
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The man who built Apple’s stores doesn’t buy Silicon Valley’s bet on AI shopping
While Silicon Valley is spending billions to make AI agents shop for us, the man who pioneered Apple’s retail stores thinks the industry is overestimating how much of shopping people will hand over to machines — and believes physical stores will continue to thrive. Ron Johnson, 66, has heard predictions about the demise of physical retail before. He joined Apple in 2000 to build its retail business as online shopping was beginning to take off, and went on to help create a store network that became central to how Apple sells its products and connects with customers. “AI is a new technology that will improve the online shopping experience,” Johnson said in an interview. “But I don’t know that it’s going to change which way we shop.” Johnson’s view comes as some of the world’s biggest tech companies are trying to push AI deeper into shopping, betting that agents can automate more of how we find and buy items — a concept commonly calledagentic commerce. Google is making that push with itsUniversal Commerce Protocol, a standard designed to help AI agents take consumers from product discovery to checkout. OpenAI, meanwhile, isturning ChatGPT into a shopping destinationwhere users can research, compare, and, in some cases, even buy products without leaving the chatbot. Asked whether he could imagine someone letting an agent choose and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without ever visiting a website or store, Johnson was unequivocal: “Honestly, nobody’s going to do that.” Buying a laptop, he argued, is too personal a purchase to simply delegate to an AI agent. Buyers want to feel its weight, see the display and decide which size works for them. AI may narrow the choices, Johnson told TechCrunch. He added that many consumers would still want to experience the product themselves before spending that kind of money. “AI will never be able to have you physically experience a product,” Johnson said. Instead, he expects agents to better inform consumers before they walk into a store. “They’ll just become more informed shoppers when they come to the store.” Johnson’s conviction stems from a decision Apple made more than two decades ago. Apple’s physical stores, he said, were designed not only as places to buy Macs, but also as places where people could try products, learn how to use them, and return for help when something went wrong. Some of those bets are revisited inShop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius, Johnson’s new book about building Apple’s retail operations alongside Steve Jobs. Competitors, he said, borrowed Apple’s glass-heavy design, open layouts, and even versions of the Genius Bar, but often missed the people. “The secret sauce for Apple has always been its people, the people in the store, and how they treat the customer,” Johnson said. Apple Store employees are not paid on commission, Johnson said, unlike the sales culture common across much of retail. The idea, he said, was to remove the pressure to sell and instead have employees figure out what a customer actually needed. After leaving Apple, Johnsontook overJ.C. Penney in 2011 with an ambitious plan to reinvent the struggling department-store chain. He wasoustedless than two years later after sales plunged. Johnson now says he tried to change too much, too quickly, without bringing employees and customers along. Apple’s stores had effectively been a startup that evolved alongside the company’s products. J.C. Penney, on the other hand, was a turnaround that required a different approach. “I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation,” he recalled. Johnson laterreturned to the startup world, founding Enjoy Technology, an e-commerce company that brought technology products and setup services directly to customers’ homes. The startupfiled for bankruptcy in 2022and sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion. For all his skepticism about how AI will reshape shopping, Johnson remains bullish on the technology itself. “I’m a real believer in AI. I’m an AI optimist,” he said. He believes Jobs would have embraced AI, too, but not as a substitute for human judgment. “There’s no substitute for human intuition,” Johnson said, recalling Jobs’ belief in bringing smart people together to debate problems and find new ways of looking at them.
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Meta’s AI agent has been blocked from using Amazon.com
Sunday night, users of Meta’s AI assistant Muse started getting a strange error message when they tried to buy goods on Amazon.As spotted by GeekWire, the error message read: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” In other words, Muse isn’t welcome as a shopper — and anyone trying to buy something on Amazon through the AI agent will have to find it somewhere else. It’s easy to see the block as a tête-à-tête between tech giants. Amazon hasits own cohort of foundation models, after all, along withone of the most popular inference platforms on the internet. As long as they’re under no legal obligation to open the doors to Muse, why would they? But there are also substantive reasons Amazon might not want to be in the agentic commerce business just yet. If Muse makes a bad order, Amazon is going to be the one to clean it up — dealing with both the angry customer and the angry vendor. Muse hasone of the lower hallucination rates, as AI models go, but it’s still pretty far from zero. Even if Amazon sees an opportunity in agent-driven commerce, they may want to wait a few more release cycles before rolling anything out.
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Meta’s Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch
Meta’s latest AI app, Muse, could be the social giant’s next major hit, new data suggests. According to just- released estimates from market intelligence providerApptopia, Muse’s app on mobile devices has been downloaded more times during its first 12 days on the market than ChatGPT was in the 12 days after its debut. (This data compares the U.S. and Canada markets only.) Muse also has more daily active users than ChatGPT had at the time, the firm found. Until now, it had been difficult to make an exact apples-to-apples comparison between these two apps, given that they had pursued different launch strategies. When ChatGPT arrived on mobile, it was made available globally, but only on iOS. Muse, meanwhile, is available across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play, but only in the U.S. and Canada. To better align the numbers for comparison, Apptopia looked only at the iOS data for the U.S. and Canada for both apps during the first 12 days of their respective launches. In this subset of the data, Muse has now seen 1.8 million downloads to ChatGPT’s 1.3 million. Overall, Muse has seen 2.8 million total installs globally in its first 12 days, the firm also said. Its growth hasn’t yet stagnated, either; Muse has moved up from its original position as No. 2 overall on the U.S. App Store immediately after its launchto now No. 1, asBusiness Insider reportedon Friday. That jump put the app higher than ChatGPT, the outlet noted. Another firm,Appfigures, said at the time that Muse had then crossed 1 million downloads. In addition, Apptopia’s data indicates that Muse’s U.S. daily active users are now higher than they were for ChatGPT at the same point after its launch. When comparing just the U.S. mobile app daily active users, Muse comes in higher with 642,000 daily users compared with 231,000 for ChatGPT at the time. To be fair to the fact that Muse is available across both iOS and Android, while ChatGPT launched on iOS only, Apptopia narrowed the comparison to iOS alone. Yet, even here, Muse is coming in higher, with 359,000 daily active users on iOS, still above ChatGPT’s figures from that time period. Apptopia can only provide third-party estimates about an app’s downloads and active users; it doesn’t have direct access to Meta’s internal figures. But even if these numbers are only correct from a general “ballpark” perspective, they indicate that Muse could have a shot at becoming Meta’s newest top app. Meta already perfected its cross-promotion strategy when it launched Instagram’s Threads, whichnow has 500+ million users,thanks to heavy marketing and integrations in Meta’s largest apps, including Instagram and Facebook. Muse is likely to get a similar push, given that the AI app can connect with both of those platforms. It also works inside WhatsApp, so that could give it another boost. While Apptopia doesn’t have visibility into Meta’s cross-promotion efforts or ads directly, it did note that over 95% of Muse’s users are also Facebook users and 63% are Instagram users. Meta, which has been asked for comment, has not yet shared public figures related to Muse’s early adoption. Correction: An earlier version of this article referenced the analytics firm Appfigures as a source for data from Apptopia. This has been fixed.
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Discover what’s next: 5 days left to save up to $200 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket
With five days left to save up to $200 on yourTechCrunch Disrupt 2026pass, each day we will list a reason why you should join 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators at San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 13-15. Grab your ticket savings before prices go up on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Plus, get a second of the same ticket type at 50% off.Register now. Part of the value of Disrupt has always been finding breakouts early. The startup you haven’t heard of yet. The technology moving from experiment to real product. The founder attacking a problem in a way you hadn’t considered. Or an emerging category that suddenly looks much bigger once you see several companies building around it. Startup Battlefield 200puts 200 TechCrunch-selected early-stage companies in one place, giving you three days to see what a new generation of founders thinks is worth building, and what investors are looking to add to their portfolio. Early-stage startups can be useful signals. Look across enough of them, and you start to see where founders are finding opportunity, which technologies are becoming accessible, which old problems are being attacked in new ways, and where completely new markets might be taking shape. At Disrupt, all 200 Startup Battlefield startups exhibit, so you can go beyond the company description. Meet the founders. See the product. Ask why they’re building it. Find out who they’re building it for. Understand what they think the rest of the market is missing. For investors, that can mean new deal flow and emerging categories to watch. For founders, it’s a chance to see what other early-stage teams are building and how they’re approaching the market. For operators and tech leaders, it can mean discovering a future supplier, partner, or solution before it reaches the wider market. Sometimes discovery is about finding a company. Sometimes it’s about spotting the pattern behind several of them. From the top 200 companies, 20 will take theDisrupt Stageto pitch live in front of leading investors and the TechCrunch community. One will ultimately take home the Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in equity-free funding. Explore all the Startup Battlefield onstage sessions on theDisrupt agenda. But the value of watching goes beyond who wins — you get to see emerging companies explain why their problem matters, why their approach is different, and why they believe they can build something much bigger. Then you hear the questions investors ask in return. For anyone building, backing, or evaluating startups, it’s a fast way to understand what turns an interesting idea into a company people want to pay attention to. Don’t miss this intense pitch competition and the opportunity to see who’s making waves next in the tech industry.Register now to save up to $200, and bring your colleague, co-founder, or partner with you at 50% off their ticket. Startup Battlefield alumniinclude companies that went on to become familiar names across the technology industry, including Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare, Fitbit, Mint, and Trello, with a collective total fundraising of $32 billion since this program started. Nobody knows which members of the 2026 class will follow that path. Discovery is most valuable before the answer is obvious. Meet these 200 hand-picked startups. Talk to companies outside your usual sector. Watch the finalists pitch on the Disrupt Stage. Look for the technologies, business models, and problems that keep appearing. You might find your next investment, partner, or product. You might spot an emerging market before it reaches your everyday feed. Or you might simply find one startup that changes how you think about what comes next. CurrentTechCrunch Disrupt 2026ticket savings end September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.Register nowto save up to $200 on your pass and save 50% on a second pass. Or bring a group of four or more to save up to 30%. Five days to save. A multitude of reasons to join 10,000+ tech leaders in San Francisco. Learn more about all of Disrupt’s activations and the reason it’s been the startup epicenter for at least 15 years.Grab your ticket before prices go up.
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OpenAI forms math advisory group as its AI resolves more than 100 open problems
On Monday, OpenAI announced a new independent advisory group hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Called theAdvisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, the group is meant to give mathematicians more input into the company’s math-oriented research. “This group will serve as a bridge to the mathematical community and broader public, giving mathematicians a voice in how we move forward,” the post reads. The announcement comes after the abrupt publication ofa solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. As part of the announcement of the new group, OpenAI also claims that the same internal model has resolved more than 100 additional open problems across most areas of mathematics. Many prominent mathematicians have taken issue with the frenzied pace of those results. Earlier this month, 25 Fields Medal-winning mathematicians signedan open letterarguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. True to its name, OpenAI’s new group will mostly serve in an advisory capacity, assessing the significance of new results and coordinating their release. While members won’t be paid, they can offer unsolicited advice, go public with their views, and control their own membership, giving them a measure of independence from the company. However, the group won’t be given leeway to slow down or redirect OpenAI’s ongoing mathematical research. As the blog post puts it, “the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.” The Institute for Advanced Study emphasized this point in its own announcement. “Although we will give advice, we do not have decision making power at any AI company, and the responsibility for the decisions made by any company will rest with that company,”saidthe institute in a press release. Nine prominent mathematicians have been named as initial members of the group. Notably, only one of the members — IAS’s Camillo De Lellis — also signed the Fields Medalists’ letter.
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Meet the next wave of VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
For founders, Startup Battlefield 200 is one of the biggest moments of their careers. For everyone else in theTechCrunch Disrupt 2026audience, it’s one of the best ways to learn how great companies are actually evaluated by VCs. This startup pitch competition is as intense as you’d expect. From October 13–15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, every hand-picked founder has six minutes to make their case, but the most revealing moments often come after the presentation ends. That’s when the judges start asking the questions every investor, customer, and future employee will eventually want answered. Can this team execute? Is the market big enough? Why now? What’s defensible? Those conversations are as valuable for the thousands of founders watching from the audience as they are for the companies on stage. That’s why we’re continuing to build one of the strongest judging panels in Startup Battlefield’s history. Today we’re excited to introduce another group of five top-tier investors who’ll help identify the companies with the potential to become tomorrow’s breakout success stories. Join the Startup Battlefield contenders and VC judges on the main stage, alongside 10,000+ tech leaders attending Disrupt, and watch the next generation of startups compete for their place in TechCrunch history.Register now to save up to $200on your pass before prices increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Without further ado, meet the next batch of investors who will judge which early-stage founder walks away with the $100,000 prize. Get to know these judges, along with the first 10 already announced on theDisrupt agenda. Vaibhav ‘Dr.V’ Agrawal, Co-Founder and General Partner, ODDBIRD VC Dr.Vis the co-founder and general partner ofODDBIRD VC, a pre-seed fund he founded in 2024 to back AI companies reindustrializing the West — with a focus on health and bio, critical supply chains, and real-world automation. A trained physician with an MBBS degree, Agrawal also holds an MBA from Stanford and previously served as a General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners India, where he backed early-stage startups beginning in 2016. His current portfolio includes Anterior, a healthcare AI company that has raised $64 million from NEA and Sequoia. Anu Bharadwaj, Partner, ICONIQ Growth Anu Bharadwajis a partner atICONIQ Growth, where she focuses on enterprise software and AI companies. Before joining ICONIQ, Bharadwaj served as President and COO of Atlassian for nearly 12 years, where she led the product, engineering, and enterprise business across Jira, Confluence, and the Atlassian Cloud platform as the company scaled to billions in annual revenue. She previously held leadership roles at Microsoft and holds a B.Eng. in Computer Science from R.V. College of Engineering. Sho Sho Leigha Ho, Partner, General Catalyst Sho Sho Leigha Hois a partner onGeneral Catalyst‘s seed team, where she invests in early-stage founders. She serves as a board observer at Together AI. She joined General Catalyst in 2024 as its youngest partner. Her public investments include Graylark, Autoscience, Standard Kernel, and The Interaction Company of California (Poke), which Cognition acquired in July 2026. She holds an A.B. from Harvard and is based in San Francisco. Miloni Madan Presler, Partner, IVP Miloni Madan Presleris a partner atIVP(Institutional Venture Partners), where she partners with first-time founders building inflection-stage technology companies in enterprise software, healthcare, and security, from Series B through pre-IPO. She brings a disciplined growth equity and private equity perspective to company building, shaped by earlier roles at Summit Partners and Warburg Pincus. Presler holds a degree in Economics and Finance from Johns Hopkins University and speaks four languages. Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Partner, Eclipse Ventures Aidan Madigan-Curtisis a partner atEclipse Ventures, where she invests in AI, IoT, computer vision, and software solutions for manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and climate transition. Named one of Business Insider’s 22 Investors to Know in Robotics and Physical AI, she leads Eclipse’s Carbon Optimization framework to track real emissions reductions across the firm’s portfolio. Before venture, Madigan-Curtis was a senior executive at Apple — scaling Apple Watch manufacturing from zero to millions of units per week — and then VP and General Manager at Samsara, where she helped grow the company from pre-revenue to over $1 billion in ARR. She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford University. TechCrunch Disrupt 2026is happening October 13-15 in San Francisco, bringing 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and founders together to meet the next generation of breakout startups, connect with the leaders who could change their startup’s trajectory, and get a front-row seat to where the industry is headed.Save up to $200 on your ticketbefore rates increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Save an additional 30% when youregister as a group.
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From first users to billions: Google’s Robby Stein joins TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
Getting people to try your first product is one challenge. Changing a product that billions of people already rely on is another. The ambition is still to move fast, test ideas, and build something better. But when every update carries consequences at a global scale, the instincts that helped you get started may need an update of their own. That tension is at the center of the Builders Stage session “From MVP to Billions of Users: How Product Decisions Must Change at Scale,” a fireside chat atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Led by Robby Stein, vice president of product for Google Search, this session explores how product teams balance speed with trust, and innovation with reliability, when their decisions affect billions of users. Disrupt returns to Moscone West in San Francisco, October 13-15, bringing together 10,000+ startups, investors, and tech decision-makers. Hear how product decision-making evolves as the stakes get higher —register for your ticket now to save up to $200 before prices increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Save up to 30% more if you grab group passes for four or more. How do you keep experimenting when users expect your product to work every time? How do you introduce something new without undermining what people already value? And which early-stage instincts should you hold on to as your company grows? Robby Stein’s session tackles the shift from building a first minimum viable product to making decisions inside one of the world’s largest product organizations. The conversation focuses on what changes when moving, while maintaining trust and delivering a reliable experience. For founders, the value isn’t in copying Google’s processes. It’s in examining the decisions behind them: where speed creates an advantage, where greater care becomes essential, and how to recognize when the way you build needs to evolve alongside the product. Learn these valuable insights from Stein, and250+ other speakersacross200+ sessions, by registering for your pass.Register now to save up to $200before prices increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Stein’s experience isn’t limited to working inside a technology giant. He co-founded and led Stamped, a social recommendations startup acquired by Yahoo, and later spent five years leading consumer products at Instagram. There, he helped build and scale the products and teams behind Stories, Feed, Direct Messaging, and Reels. Before returning to Google in 2024, he was head of product at Artifact, an AI-powered newsfeed. That career brings both the founder’s perspective and the experience of developing widely used consumer products to the conversation. For anyone working through the transition from an early product to a growing platform, it’s an opportunity to hear from someone whose work has spanned both environments. Register now to save up to $200 on your passbefore prices rise on September 25 and lean in on this session at Disrupt in October. Today, Stein works on generative AI products and experiences within Google Search. That places him at the intersection of introducing new technology and evolving how people find information. The scale is substantial. In May, Google reported that AI Mode had surpassed 1 billion monthly users, a year after its debut. Earlier this year, Stein also outlined updates that let people move from an AI Overview into a follow-up conversation in AI Mode, describing a search experience designed to accommodate both quick answers and deeper exploration. That work provides a timely backdrop to the session’s central question: How do you keep pushing a product forward without losing the qualities that make people depend on it? For founders introducing AI into their own products, it’s a useful way to think beyond what the technology can do and consider how people will actually experience it. Register nowto hear from one of the leaders making waves in the tech market, whose company has more than 1 billion users.Save up to $200 on your passbefore September 25. You don’t need a billion users for these questions to matter. Whether you’re refining your first product, expanding a growing platform, or rethinking an established experience, the next stage of growth is a reason to examine the decisions that got you this far. Join the conversation at Disrupt, then keep it going with founders, investors, and operators acrosssix industry stages, roundtables, breakouts, the Expo Hall, Startup Battlefield, and countless networking opportunities. Your product is evolving. Make sure your approach to building it evolves, too.Secure your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026before September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT to save up to $200. Save 30% more for groups of four or more.
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Google’s $899 Googlebook is a bet that you’ll buy a new laptop for Gemini
After first unveiling its new AI-powered laptop, dubbed Googlebook,in May, Google on Monday said the new device is now available for pre-order for $899. Meant to offer a step up from traditional Chromebooks,Googlebooksrun on Android OS with a desktop version of the Chrome browser and other familiar ChromeOS elements. However, the real pull for the new devices is that they’ll prominently feature Gemini’s latest capabilities in a new format: the laptop. Google is trying to offer a laptop with unique features like an AI-powered cursor, vibe-coded widgets, and support for AI-enhanced dictation. The latter is a feature called Rambler, which cleans up messy, rambling brain dumps into readable text. The move is a bet that AI, specifically Google’s Gemini, could be enough of a draw to get people to buy a new laptop that bakes in AI instead of running them via desktop apps you install or access through the browser. In addition, the devices could eventually replace Chromebooks, bringing millions of former Chromebook customers to Gemini AI. On the Googlebook, Google is trying to reinvent the “point-and-click” experience of desktop computing to now include an AI element: the cursor serves as a conduit to Gemini. The company suggests various ways this could be used, like highlighting content on a webpage for Gemini to work with, asking Gemini to see if an email you’ve hovered your cursor over is suspicious, or selecting images and then asking Gemini to visualize them together. In practice, this feature isn’t very different from Android’s “Circle to Search,” which allows smartphone owners to use gestures like circling, highlighting, or tapping to connect with Google Search, which of course, also includes AI. While it’s a clever way to take advantage of the ways people use their phones, Circle to Search on its own didn’t inspire a mass exodus to Android. Similarly, Magic Cursor, as the AI pointer is called, won’t likely be a main selling point for the Googlebook, especially now that we have AI agents that can take over your computer and browser to do tasks for you. Google’s Rambler, however, may be one of the best of the AI features in this upgrade, as it meets a surprisingly useful need. However, this, too, isn’t enough reason to buy a new device, as it feels more like a feature that’s nice to have than a necessity. Vibe-coding widgets are a minor addition, as well. Other Googlebook features, like Gemini Spark and Gemini Live, also don’t require special, new hardware. What’s more interesting about the Googlebook is how it’s seemingly part of Google’s longer-term plan to capture a large part of the K-12 market that currently relies on Chromebooks, and push them towards the company’s Gemini AI. There are somewherearound 50 million Chromebooksin schools, used by students and educators, Google has said. In May, thecompany told TechCrunchthat its current Chromebooks would continue to be supported, though many would become eligible to transition to the new Googlebook experience in the future. The $899 device will include 12 months of Google AI Pro, which gives you 5TB of cloud storage, Gemini Advanced tools, and 3 months of YouTube Premium, Adobe Photoshop and more. The devices will receive regular updates for up to 10 years, Google said. Googlebook pre-ordersare open now on the Google Store, Best Buy, and other retailers. Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S., and October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia. Flagship devicesin the new range are being built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo, with materials like aluminum, magnesium alloy and carbon fiber. They feature up to 2.8K OLED displays, haptic glass trackpads, and backlit keyboards. Under the hood, they’ll run on processors from Intel and Qualcomm paired with dedicated NPUs. Google says the device will offer up to 14 hours of battery life.
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Where will the next breakout startup come from? Benchmark’s full partnership weighs in at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
What does one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture firms think founders are getting wrong? AtTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we’re putting all five Benchmark general partners on one stage to find out. Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle, and Eric Vishria will come together for the Disrupt Stage session “What We Believe Now.” This is the first time the entire current Benchmark partnership has appeared together on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco. Rather than another conversation about where venture capital has been, the focus is on where it goes next: where the next generation of startups will come from, which assumptions founders should reconsider, and which opportunities the partners believe are still hiding in plain sight. And 2026 is an especially interesting year to ask them. Benchmark has spent decades building a reputation around concentrated early-stage investing. This year, it made one of the biggest changes in its own playbook — raising approximately $2 billion across a $750 million flagship fund and its first $1.25 billion growth fund. The market changed. Benchmark changed with it. Now we want to know what the firm thinks will happen next. Sit front and center to get tomorrow’s venture insights at Disrupt.Register now to save up to $200before prices increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.Save an additional 30%on group passes for four or more. AI has reshaped the venture market with extraordinary speed. According to the OECD, AI companies captured 61% of global venture capital investment in 2025 — $258.7 billion of $427.1 billion invested overall. Yet that capital was far from evenly distributed: deals worth more than $100 million represented roughly 73% of total AI investment value. That creates a strange environment for founders. There is huge appetite for technology businesses, alongside growing competition for a relatively small number of companies investors believe can become category leaders. Is the next billion-dollar company another AI application, or is the application layer already overcrowded? Does defensibility sit in models, infrastructure, proprietary data or distribution? Are some of the best businesses being overlooked because everyone is chasing the same themes? And when founders can build products faster than ever, what actually makes one company investable? There probably won’t be complete agreement onstage. That’s the point. Hear this complex discussion among five VC heavyweights on the Disrupt Stage.Register now to save up to $200before prices increase on September 25. Benchmark’s partnership brings together experience from founding companies, backing enterprise software, investing in frontier technology, and helping businesses navigate IPOs and acquisitions. Jack Altmanjoined Benchmark this year after founding Lattice and subsequently building his own venture firm, Alt Capital. Before Altman joined Benchmark, Alt Capital had raised $425 million across its early-stage investing activities. His path gives the discussion an unusually direct founder-to-investor perspective. Peter Fentonbrings one of venture’s longest track records. His investments span consumer and enterprise companies, including current AI bets such as Sierra, Digits and Sema4.ai. He has served as a director through seven successful IPOs, including Twitter, Elastic, New Relic, Zendesk and Yelp. Chetan Puttaguntafocuses on early-stage enterprise software and has backed companies including MongoDB, MuleSoft, Elastic, Modern Treasury, Legora and Stytch. Everett Randlebrings experience investing across stages and categories, with investments that include Anthropic, SpaceX, Rippling, Flock Safety, Gumloop and Chainguard. AndEric Vishriafocuses on early-stage infrastructure and enterprise software, with investments including Amplitude, Confluent, Fireworks.ai and Cerebras Systems. Before becoming an investor, he was himself a startup CEO, co-founding RockMelt before its acquisition by Yahoo. Put those perspectives together andthis session, “What We Believe Now,”becomes less about a single Benchmark thesis and more about how experienced investors disagree, update their assumptions, and decide where conviction is warranted. Hear this session live in October andsave up to $200when you register before prices rise on September 25. Cerebras is a useful example.Vishria recently told TechCrunchthat he almost didn’t take his first meeting with the AI chip startup in 2016. Hardware was outside Benchmark’s comfort zone, and what Cerebras wanted to build looked extraordinarily difficult. By the third slide, he had changed his mind. Benchmark went on to co-lead the company’s $25 million Series A. A decade later, Cerebras went public, with Benchmark holding a 9.5% stake at the IPO. That story encapsulates something important about venture investing. The best opportunity does not always arrive looking like the consensus winner. Sometimes it challenges the investor’s existing thesis. Sometimes the technology is too early. Sometimes the market does not obviously exist yet. And sometimes knowing when to change your mind is more valuable than being right from the beginning. Expect that kind of thinking to surface on the Disrupt Stage. Register before September 25 to save up to $200 on your pass.Prices will increase after. For founders, there may be no more useful part of the session than hearing what Benchmark believes entrepreneurs are currently misreading. Not because Benchmark is automatically right, but because understanding how sophisticated investors assess markets, teams, and opportunities gives founders another way to interrogate their own assumptions. Investors can compare those frameworks with their own. LoB leaders can see which shifts venture firms believe are durable enough to shape the companies they work for – and where capital may flow next. For students, aspiring founders, and anyone simply trying to understand where technology is heading, it’s a rare opportunity to hear five investors with very different experiences work through their ideas in the same room. And those ideas matter well beyond the venture industry. Investment decisions are ultimately bets about which technologies, business models, and founders have the potential to shape the next decade. Register now to save up to $200before they increase on September 25, 11:59 p.m. PT. A lot can change in the world of tech in twelve months. AI capabilities move. Markets emerge. Categories disappear. Companies that looked inevitable suddenly don’t, while businesses few people were watching break through. Having a thesis matters. Knowing when to update it matters more. Join Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria on the Disrupt Stage and hear what Benchmark believes now – and what might convince them to change their minds next. Disrupt 2026returns to San Francisco’s Moscone West, October 13–15, bringing together more than 10,000 founders, investors, operators and innovators across six stages, roundtables, breakouts, Startup Battlefield, theExpo Hall, and more. The next great company may already be being built. Find out where some of Silicon Valley’s most experienced investors are looking for it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.Register now to save up to $200before prices increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.Save an additional 30%if you register with a group of four or more.
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With Tabby, a former accountant is using AI to make accountants obsolete
In May of 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant, overseeing a team of 20 people and handling more than 2,000 returns a year. “We did bookkeeping, accounting, sales tax, taxes, everything,” Ali says. It was a stable business, and one that would have been easy to stay in. But Ali started to notice something. His work was increasingly dictated by the frictions of accounting software, which was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He became frustrated with specific accounting software like QuickBooks, and soon he became frustrated with the entire idea of SaaS-based accounting. “I realized that small businesses don’t need better accounting software,” Ali told TechCrunch. “They need less accounting software. They need something that just does it for them.” Now, Ali is building just that. His product, Tabby, is designed to be a real-time bookkeeping interface, handling clients’ paperwork as it gives them up-to-the-minute data on their business’s profit and loss. Using Plaid to import live account data, Tabby uses AI to quickly build a real-time dashboard for a business’s financial health. There’s also a version of Tabby for accounting firms that want a smarter alternative to Quickbooks, but Ali’s goal is to go direct to the end user as often as possible. As Ali sees it, products like Tabby have a chance to automate away the work of bookkeeping once and for all, turning it into a monthly charge on the order of internet access or payroll services. If successful, it could seriously change the calculus of operating a small business. “You can say Quickbooks digitized bookkeeping,” Ali told TechCrunch, “but we want to make [that visible software layer] nonexistent.” So far, it seems to be working. Fourteen months in, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses using the platform, with roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people — Ali, his technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist — and in the process of raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. When I spoke to Ali, his team was just preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product. There’s plenty of competition in the accounting space, particularly now that AI has shaken up the ___. Ali has his eyes focused on Quickbooks, which is still the biggest player — but he’ll also be facing well-funded startups likethe Sequoia-backed Rillet, as well as the major labs’own finance tools. It’s a daunting task, but Ali thinks that Tabby can carve out a niche by focusing on the same small-to-medium-sized firms that helped his accounting business thrive. “Everything we see is making us believe that there’s a path for other players, because the space is big,” Ali told TechCrunch. “There’s 30 million more businesses.” Learn more about Tabby and the other innovative startups involved in our prestigious Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt,happening October 13-15in downtown San Francisco.
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Adobe Warns Indian Enterprises are Still Not Ready for AI Agents
According to Adobe’s India AI and Digital Trends research, 65% of Indian consumers already use AI for personalised product recommendations.
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