Latest AI News
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic Team Up Against Chinese AI Startups to Curb Model Distillation
This follows a February 2026 escalation when OpenAI formally warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek was attempting to replicate American AI systems.
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AI startup Rocket offers vibe McKinsey-style reports at a fraction of the cost
Indian startupRocketis betting that the next big opportunity is the part before vibe coding: having AI help people decide what to build. It has launched a platform that produces consulting-style product strategies. The startup, based in Surat, India, on Tuesday launched its platform, Rocket 1.0, which connects research, product building, and competitive intelligence in a single workflow. The platform generates detailed product strategy documents — including pricing, unit economics, and go-to-market recommendations. As AI-powered coding tools proliferate — from platforms likeCursor,Replit, andLovableto features such asClaude CodeandCodex— writing code has become significantly easier and faster. “Everyone can generate the code now… it has become a commodity. But what to build is something which everyone is missing,” said Rocket co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani (pictured above), adding that “running a business and just building a codebase are two different things.” TechCrunch briefly tested Rocket’s platform ahead of its launch and found that it generated product requirement documents in PDF format from simple prompts. These documents resemble consulting-style reports rather than vibe coding tools or chatbots, which largely focus on features and execution. However, some of the analysis appeared to be synthesized from existing data — combining known pricing models, user behavior patterns, and competitive insights — rather than based on independently verifiable information. This suggests users may still need to validate outputs before making business decisions. Virani said the platform can offer human support when users encounter issues. The product can also track competitors, including changes to their websites and traffic trends. Rocket draws on more than 1,000 data sources for its analysis, including Meta’s ad libraries, Similarweb’s API, and its own crawlers, Virani said. Rocket’s subscription plans range from $25 per month for building applications to $250 for strategy and research capabilities, and up to $350 for the full platform, including competitive intelligence. The $250 plan can generate two to three “McKinsey-grade” research reports alongside product builds, Virani told TechCrunch, positioning its higher-tier offerings as a lower-cost alternative to traditional consulting, which often costs thousands of dollars for similar strategy work. Rocket raised a$15 million seed roundin September from Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Together Fund. Since then, the startup says it has grown from 400,000 to over 1.5 million users across 180 countries. It also reported an annualized average revenue per user in the ~$4,000 range, though it did not disclose detailed paying customer numbers. The startup said it operates at gross margins of over 50%, with 20–30% of its customers being small- and medium-sized businesses. Rocket has a team of 57 employees and is headquartered in Surat, with operations in Palo Alto.
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Cursor Achieves 1.8x Inference Speedup on NVIDIA B200 GPUs
Cursor said warp decode assigns each GPU warp to compute one output, eliminating MoE overhead.
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Anthropic Hits $30 Bn Revenue Run-Rate, Overtakes OpenAI
Anthropic also secured additional compute from Google to support Claude and enterprise demand.
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Bengaluru Startup H2LooP Secures $2 Mn Seed Funding for AI Systems Engineering
H2Loop will use the funding for large-scale enterprise implementations across data centres, UAVs, and robotics.
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Beyond Text-to-Speech: Inside the Tech Making AI Conversations Sound More Human
Consumers, especially in the BFSI sector, are increasingly rejecting IVRs that sound more robotic. Now, firms are closing in on this gap by building voice AI models that interact just like humans.
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Income Tax Filing Season Is Here: Know 7 Ways ChatGPT Can Help You Prepare
The Income Tax Return (ITR) season in India officially starts in April. While taxpayers have until July 31 to complete filing out the previous financial year's earnings, it is always better to fill out the details as soon as possible. However, the tax season also comes with its fair share of complexities, leaving salaried employees racing to gather their investment proofs, while freelancers hunt for their invoices. Investors also struggle to reflect on the tax implications of the trades they made months ago.
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OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially $100M fund
A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has made its first close on its $100 million goal, the founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written a couple of checks. The fund is calledZero Shot(a play on the AI training term) and its co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming VCs almost by serendipity. Three of the founding partners hail from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, the former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer, is well-known as the host ofThe OpenAI podcast.Mayne also foundedInterdimensional, an AI deployment consultancy. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, who then became a VC and is a founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy. The alums are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, previously a founding partner at 01A,the growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fifth founding member of the fund is Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, who is also CEO at Mayne’s Interdimensional. The OpenAI alums have “been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked together at the model maker from before it released ChatGPT through its wildest growth years. After leaving, they all found themselves constantly being hit up to consult for VCs about emerging AI tech, and by founder friends wanting advice. That’s what propelled Mayne to start his consulting company. “Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and interested in doing companies,” Mayne said. The alums saw gaping holes between the many AI startups being funded and what the market really needed. “Maybe we should do our own fund, because we think we have a pretty good sense of where things are headed, and we have this great access to people who we think are incredible builders,” Mayne said, recalling the decision. After conversations with institutions and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on a $100 million initial fund. They’ve already written a few checks. Zero Shot backed early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-based management software platform to help enterprises automate tasks by first discovering what should be automated. Worktrace AI raised a $10 million seed round from notables like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, PitchBook estimates. The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on next-gen, AI-enhanced factory robotics. It recentlyraised a $13.5 million seed, led by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, too, which is still in stealth. Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many a VC. That helps them pick startups to back, but also identify which ideas to avoid. Mayne, for instance, is bearish on most iterations of vibe coding because he foresees that the model makers, with their coding expertise, are going to quickly make subscriptions to such platforms feel unnecessary. Morikawa tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of AI and robotics, he’s not a fan of the many “ergo-centric video data companies right now in robotics.” Those are startups working on embodiment training data for robotics. “There’s a lot of hoping and praying going on right now that someone in the research world will figure out how to transfer the embodiment gap,” Morikawa said of such video data, but “that’s nowhere near possible.” Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups doing “digital twins.” He’s done due diligence on a few, including building a reasoning model to test them, and has concluded that a regular LLM model works just as well, he said. “There is a real skill in knowing how to predict where these models will be going next, because it’s extremely not obvious. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said. In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot has some recognizable names who have agreed to be advisors, and will get a share of the “carried interest” that the fund returns. The advisors include Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s former head of people; Steve Dowling, the former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product leader at OpenAI.
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Iran threatens ‘Stargate’ AI data centers
Iran has warned of further attacks on data centers across the Middle East in response to ongoing threats and air strikes from the United States. Iran’s military said that if the U.S. went ahead with its threats to hit its civilian infrastructure, the country would retaliate with its own strikes against U.S.’ energy and tech infrastructure in the region, according to avideo released late last weekandshared widely on Sundayof Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari. The video released by Iran shows an image of a globe, then zooming in on the Stargate data center in the United Arab Emirates with the message of “nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.” Stargate is a$500 billion joint venturebetween OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build AI data centers, announced in January 2025. The initiative originally struggled to get off the ground due to allegedfunding troublesandcosts associated with tariffs, andsought to expandwith new data centers internationally. The latest threat comes afterU.S. President Trumpthreatened to strike Iran’s civilian infrastructure, like power plants and water desalination plants, by the end of Tuesday if Iran doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping channel that has choked global supply chain traffic since the start of the war in February. Several data centers in the region have already been hit by missiles as a result of the war. Iranian missilesstruck Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centersin Bahrain andan Oracle data center in Dubai. Iran alsothreatened tech companiesincluding Nvidia and Apple by name last week.
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Google quietly launched an AI dictation app that works offline
Google on Monday quietly released an offline-first dictation app called“Google AI Edge Eloquent” on iOSto take on the likes ofWispr Flow,SuperWhisper,Willow, and others. The app is free to download, and once its Gemma-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are downloaded, you can start dictating on your phone. In the app, you can see the live transcription, and when you hit pause, the app automatically filters out filler words like “um” and “ah” and polishes the text. Below the transcript are options like “Key points”, “Formal”, “Short”, and “Long” to transform the text. You can also turn off the cloud mode to use local-only processing. (When cloud mode is on, the app uses cloud-based Gemini models for text cleanup.) The Google AI Edge Eloquent can import certain keywords, names, and jargon from your Gmail account, if desired. Plus, you can add your own custom words to the list. The app displays the history of the transcription session and lets you search through all of them as well. It can show you words dictated in the last session, your word per minute speed, and the total number of words spoken. “Google AI Edge Eloquent is an advanced dictation app engineered to bridge the gap between natural speech and professional, ready-to-use text. Unlike standard dictation software that transcribes stumbles and filler words verbatim, Eloquent utilizes AI to capture your intended meaning. It automatically edits out ‘ums,’ ‘uhs,’ and mid-sentence self-corrections, outputting clean, accurate prose,” the company’s App Store description reads. While the app is currently only available on iOS, the App Store description references an Android version. (We have reached out to Google for more information, and will update the story if we hear back.) According to the description, Eloquent offers “seamless Android integration,” where it can be set as users’ default keyboard for system-wide access across any text field. Plus, the app will be able to use the floating button feature,similar to the one Wispr Flow uses on Android, for easy access to transcription from anywhere. AI-powered transcription apps aregaining popularity among usersas speech-to-text models get better. With this experimental app,Google is joining the trend. If this test is successful, we could see improved transcription features across Android, too.
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Meta to Fire 200 Employees, Phase Out Middle Manager Titles Amid AI Push: Report
Meta is reportedly laying off as many as 200 employees amid the company's ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) transformation. As per the report, these layoffs impact the company's US-based teams and not the global offices. Additionally, the social media giant is reportedly planning to phase out the middle manager positions to make the teams leaner and the hierarchy streamlined. Reports claim that the company is now hiring for “org lead” positions instead of the legacy manager roles in the mid-to-senior roles.
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Spain’s Xoople raises $130 million Series B to map the Earth for AI
Space data companies have argued for years that the private sector needs their products, but the real uptake has been from government buyers. Now, with artificial intelligence top of mind for business, one Spanish startup is trying to become the go-to source of ground truth for enterprise. Xoople(said like “zoople’) is developing a satellite constellation to collect precise data aimed at deep learning models. The startup was founded in 2019 and has spent the last seven years developing its tech stack around data collected by government spacecraft, and integrating with cloud providers. CEO and co-founder Fabrizio Pirondini told TechCrunch that the company has closed a $130 million Series B led by Nazca Capital. Other investors include MCH Private Equity, CDTI (a tech development fund backed by the Spanish government), Buenavista Equity Partners, and Endeavor Catalyst. The startup also announced Monday a deal with U.S. space and defense contractor L3Harris Technologies to begin building sensors for Xoople’s spacecraft, which are designed to collect “a stream of data that is going to be two orders of magnitude better than existing monitoring systems,” Pirondini told TechCrunch. L3Harris has built some of the most advanced commercial imaging systems on orbit. However, Pirondini wouldn’t share any details about the satellites, not even how many the company wants to build, except that the sensors will collect optical data. Those systems aren’t cheap, and the company continues to raise capital to fund its full development. Pirondini declined to share his firm’s valuation after the current fundraising round, except to note that “we are in unicorn territory.” The company has raised $225 million in total. The company’s focus on data quality is a key differentiator. Still, Xoople is entering a crowded space with several mature competitors, including Vantor, Planet, BlackSky, and Airbus in Europe, that are already operating satellites on orbit and developing AI-focused datasets. The twist for Xoople is its focus on enterprise platforms. “Our business model is all about embedding our data and our solutions directly to the ecosystem of those so that they can provide those services directly to their customers,” Pirondini said. Pirondini described use cases, including government agencies tracking transportation networks and damage from natural disasters, agribusiness monitoring crop health, or large firms keeping an eye on infrastructure projects or supply chains. Aravind Ravichandran, the CEO of Earth observation sector consultancyTerraWatch Space, told TechCrunch that Xoople’s decision to prepare its distribution strategy before it has its own data is intriguing. For now, it relies on publicly available data, like that collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 spacecraft. “They laid the distribution pipes before having their own data supply — embedding into Microsoft and Esri, the two platforms where enterprise, government and most GIS buyers already live, but neither has proprietary EO data,” Ravichandran said. “Google’s head start on geospatial AI models is the benchmark they’ll be measured against.”It’s not clear what balance Xoople will strike between providing raw data and developing its own analysis tools, but Pirondi hopes to build “Earth’s System of Record,” a project he expects will ultimately include the development of a true AI world model alongside partners.
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