Latest AI News
HCLTech Launches Autonomous Finance Platform Built on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise
The platform aims to automate finance and accounting workflows such as invoice processing, order management and financial planning.
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Razorpay Launches Payment CLI for Developers and AI Agents
The launch is part of Razorpay’s broader push to build AI-ready financial infrastructure and reduce manual workflows tied to payments management.
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Why DeepSeek Rejected Sequoia for Chinese State Capital
Chinese labs like DeepSeek are built on state-aligned capital, while their US peers chase valuations on the back of private VC cycles.
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Gujarat Partners With Meta for AI-Powered Citizen Services, Digital Infra
The chatbot, which will be available in Gujarati and English, is designed to help citizens access 20 government services directly through WhatsApp
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Anthropic Appoints Sangeeta Bavi to Lead Startups, Growth in India
Sangeeta Bavi will work closely with founders, startups, and growth-stage companies adopting Anthropic’s AI technologies.
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India Braces for the Mythos Threat
With Anthropic claiming Mythos identified over 10,000 critical vulnerabilities in just one month, Indian regulators and banks are bracing for a fresh wave of AI-driven cyber threats.
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GPT-5.5 Beats Claude and Gemini in New Long-Horizon Coding Benchmark
DeepSWE is a new benchmark for testing real-world AI coding capabilities.
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Byju’s Founder Raveendran Sentenced for 6 Months in Singapore Contempt Case
The court found that Raveendran had disobeyed multiple court orders related to the disclosure of his assets.
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DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
Last week, after Google announced its hugeoverhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.” “Google just isn’t Google anymore,” she said. It seems that others had the same idea. At I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, the company said its traditional list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, executes tasks, and runs background monitoring agents. The backlash has been sharp. Some have argued it willkill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviewssurface inaccurate responsesand take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word “disregard.” In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of theU.S. search market. During Google’ssearch antitrusttrial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinbergtestifiedthat Google’s exclusive default search contracts harmed its ability to pitch itself as the default on other browsers. “Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s Search overhaul. “As a result,their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.” Now it seems that DuckDuckGo is beginning to benefit as consumers flee AI. DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%. The search engine also said visits to its AI-free search page,noai.duckduckgo.com, averaged 22.7% WoW growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The page turns off every AI feature, like AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default. The company said the trend is stronger in the U.S., and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it usually sees a dip in traffic. DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product calledDuck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to make an account but providesaccess to models, including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo strips the user’s IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training. “Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.” DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI overviews, and an AI Image Filter that filters out AI-created images from search results. Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer, said both of those AI features are among the company’s most popular, despite their differing ethos. “People just want a choice,” Bazbaz said. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
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Neysa & Pipeshift Take On India’s Inference Problem
Together, these companies are building a system that lets enterprises run open-source models in single-tenant environments within India, without managing the operational overhead themselves.
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OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year
Popular AI gateway makerOpenRouter, founded in 2023, has raised a hefty $113 million Series B led by CapitalG, the growth venture fund of Google parent company Alphabet. While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Timesreportsthat it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money. This is a hefty increase from the estimated $547 million post-money valuation it hit a year ago, per PitchBook,after raising $40 million in Series A fundingin June 2025. That round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia. What a difference a year makes. Since then, AI work has shifted from training to inference to, now, agents. And OpenRouter’s AI gateway has soared in popularity in response. The gateway helps enterprises and other AI users select different models for different jobs to control costs or increase reasoning and accuracy for the task at hand. OpenRouter provides access to over 400 models, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek, it says. It claims 8 million global users and 100 trillion tokens processed per month, or about 25 trillion per week. That’s a 5x increase from the 5 trillion tokens it was processing per week just six months ago. OpenRouter’s success means that the AI model is increasingly becoming an invisible, swappable engine for AI tasks. Rather than a future where startups or enterprises standardize on a model of choice — perhaps creating a single all-powerful model maker in the process — the growth of OpenRouter indicates something else. Companies have no plans to get locked into a model vendor as they did with their various SaaS providers. The multi-model future is already here.
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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Early Bird ticket rates end May 29
Four days. That’s all that’s left to decide, not just whether you’ll be atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, but also how you’ll show up from October 13 to 15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West and how much momentum you create once you’re there. Right now, you cansave up to $410 on your Disrupt passbefore prices increase on May 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT. After that, rates go up, and so does the cost of missing the conversations, visibility, and connections that can accelerate what happens next for your company. Because at a certain point, growth is no longer just about building. It’s about being seen, understood, and taken seriously by the people who influence what comes next. You only have four days left to secure your savings.Choose your ticket typeand lock in the lowest available rates before prices rise. Mostfoundersdon’t struggle to generate attention. There are more channels than ever to get in front of people and more ways to create surface-level visibility. What’s harder, and far more important, is earning credibility. Investorsdon’t respond to visibility alone; they respond to confidence. Partners don’t engage based on awareness; they engage based on trust. Even early customers are making decisions about what feels established, what feels validated, and what feels worth their time. Across six industry stages, Disrupt is designed to show how companies earn trust at every phase of growth by putting founders, investors, and operators in environments where credibility is built in real time through practical, hands-on sessions.Visit the Disrupt agendato see the new sessions added to each stage. Builders and operators break down how companies actually scale. Learning from founders who’ve done it, and applying those frameworks, helps you speak with more authority when discussing growth, fundraising, and execution. Explore how leading companies are applying AI in practice. Hearing directly from builders and investors working at the frontier helps founders anchor their approach in what’s proven, not just what’s promised, strengthening credibility with both technical and business audiences. Beyond software, AI is reshaping the physical world. Hear from founders and operators building trusted, scalable systems in robotics, biotech, and edge environments where real-world constraints define success. Money is being rebuilt in real time. Explore how founders are shaping the future of finance through stablecoins, payments, and fintech infrastructure while cutting through hype to reveal what’s actually working in a digital economy. Software is transforming energy, climate, and industrial systems. Explore how founders are rebuilding infrastructure, from data center power to grid bottlenecks, while deploying smarter, scalable systems for a more resilient future. The main stage where top founders, investors, and operators define what matters next. Being part of these conversations, and referencing them, positions you within the broader narrative of where the market is heading. From October 13–15 in San Francisco,Disruptbrings together 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators in one concentrated environment built for evaluation and discovery. Across250+ sessions, roundtables, and discussions, and with300+ startups showcasing, companies aren’t seen once. They’re seen repeatedly in front of the same investors, partners, and media. That repetition is what turns visibility into credibility. A quick introduction becomes recognition. Recognition becomes familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. The founders and operators who gain the most from Disrupt aren’t just attending sessions. They’re building relationships, reinforcing their presence across conversations, and positioning themselves within the networks that shape what happens next in tech. For the next four days, you still have time tosecure your pass before rates increase. Savings of up to $410 end May 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you’re already planning to be there, the decision now isn’t whether to attend — it’s whether you show up ready to move things forward.Register here.
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