Latest AI News
SingleStore CEO Raj Verma Says Databricks is Late to Unified Databases
SingleStore claimed it has been running unified operational and analytical workloads in production since 2019.
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Keralam Bets Big on AI, GenZ Startups, Geospatial Intelligence in Revised Budget 2026
One of the headline announcements is a ₹50 crore programme designed to nurture young entrepreneurs and innovators in Keralam.
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India's Compliance Maze: How TeamLease RegTech Is Using AI to Tame a 13,000-Change Beast
Enterprises in India face up to 11,000 compliance instances annually from over 3.2 million regulatory websites. TeamLease RegTech is deploying AI to shift compliance from reactive record-keeping to predictive, intelligence-driven risk management for businesses nationwide.
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Meta Strikes Fresh Data Centre Agreements With Crusoe: Report
The latest deal reflects Meta’s ongoing efforts to expand its AI infrastructure as demand for large-scale computing resources continues to grow.
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Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed DeductiveAI for up to $85M
DeductiveAI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, has agreed to be sold to enterprise software company Elastic for up to $85 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Deductive, which was founded in 2023, came out stealth last November when it announced a$7.5 million seedround led by CRV with participation from Databricks Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, and PrimeSet. The investment valued the startup at $33 million, according to PitchBook. Elastic and Deductive did not respond to multiple requests for comment. TechCrunch will update this article if either company responds. The sale marks a speedy exit for Deductive, which is operating in a fast-growing sector known as AI site reliability engineering (AI SRE). Building AI-powered SRE tools has become an important area, driven by the massive influx of AI-written code. Replacing manual debugging with AI enables human SREs to shift focus from constantly fixing outages and other problems, to spending more time on helping with product development. The acquisition reflects a broader trend in which established tech incumbents are looking to buy AI-native startups to integrate agentic technologies into their existing product suites, the source told TechCrunch. Elastic, which went public in 2018, is best known for Elasticsearch, the search and analytics engine that helps organizations store, search, analyze, and monitor large amounts of data in near real time. The company’s observability software — essentially tools that let engineers monitor software systems and detect security threats — could benefit from Deductive’s tech. According to the source, integrating Deductive’s AI technology into Elastic will enhance its observability platform by giving customers tools to automatically monitor performance and resolve system failures in real-time. Deductive was co-founded by Rakesh Kothari, who was previously VP of engineering at Lightspeed-backed business analytics startup ThoughtSpot, and Sameer Agarwal, who formerly worked at Apache Software Foundation and Meta. Agrawal was one of the founding engineers at Databricks. While Deductive reached roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR,) according to the source, the startup’s growth lagged behind Resolve AI, one of the sectors’ perceived early winners. The two-year-old Resolve was co-founded by former Splunk executive Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal. Greylock and Lightspeed-backed startup was last valued at$1.5 billionwhen it raised a $40 million Series A extension in April.
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Almost half of U.S. singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says
Dating app giant Match Group — which owns apps like Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid — conducted astudyto determine how U.S. singles really feel about the relationship between AI and dating. Turns out, people don’t want AI messing with every aspect of human life. Across the industry, dating apps are experimenting with AI. Bumble introduced adating assistant named Bee, and Tinder isspendingso much on AI tools that it’s slowed its hiring process. Meanwhile, Hinge’s CEOstepped downlast year to launch a more AI-focused dating app altogether. But according to Match’s survey of 1,000 people aged 18 to 39, 47% of singles have a negative view of AI’s use in romantic contexts. This perspective varies depending on what the AI is being used for. About 40% of singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app, and that figure rises to 51% among women ages 18 to 24. However, only 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds said that they had used a companion app over the last three months, and only about a third of those users said they were seeking genuine connections with those chatbots. While Match says that people harbor a “near-universal” disapproval of actually dating an AI, like in the movie “Her,” that doesn’t mean that respondents are wholly opposed to AI features within apps. Some 64% of respondents said they could see how AI might help them in their dating journey. If we’re being pedantic,technically, every major dating app has already used some form of matching algorithm since before we knew what a GPT was. This survey refers to the new crop of AI features that basically every app is introducing, which help users punch up their profiles, choose photos, and keep conversations flowing. What dating app developers should take away from this survey is that people are not entirely closed off to AI; they just don’t want to be in a relationship with a robot, nor do they want to feel as though their dating experiences are overly inundated with technology that feels inauthentic. “Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but hands off for the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they’ll use it to help them punch up a profile or for help figuring out what to say when a conversation goes quiet, but the actual connection is still theirs to create.” Hopefully, this message reaches dating entrepreneurs like Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who suggested that dating app users could havepersonal bots that date other users’ bots. It’s pretty normal nowadays to say you met your partner online, but “his bot asked my bot out, and our bots hit it off” will never be a socially acceptable meet-cute.
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OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO
OpenAI is bringing on some big names to the team in the lead-up to its public debut: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball. Shazeer, a co-lead at Gemini and the founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI,announced his departure on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, leaving only for a three-year period when he left to co-found Character AI. Two years ago,Google re-hired Shazeerin a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to the startup’s technology. The move is the latest in a series of shufflings between the top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is credited for being one of the foundational minds behind modern generative AI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture. Before leaving Google, Shazeer had also reportedly been stirring the pot when it came to political issues. According toThe Information,Shazeer voiced opinions on internal messaging boards on transgender identity and Israel’s war in Gaza that resulted in management deleting his posts. Whether those controversies will follow him to his new employer remains to be seen. In the meantime, OpenAI is also shoring up its policy credentials by bringing Ball to the team. Ball had a brief stint last year in the White House, where he helped publish America’s AI Action Plan before stepping down to rejoin the techno-libertarian think tank the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow. “I am pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I’ll be joining OpenAI as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures,”Ball wrote on X on Thursday. “Our mandate will be to help the company’s leadership shape frontier AI policy.” Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, high-agency team” will focus on “matters pertaining to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the U.S. Federal Government), and society,” Ball wrote in ablog post. The Strategic Futures team will cover both public-facing policy and internal governance, he added. That last is important — Ball noted that “almost by necessity,” AI labs will have to lead on AI governance decisions. “In other words,internal governancewill be more central to the future of AI than most people realize,” Ball wrote. Ball’s decision to join OpenAI — arguably an AI favorite in the administration — comes as Anthropic battles once again with the U.S. government. Late last week, President Donald Trump ordered anexport control ban on Anthropic’s latest models,Fable 5 and Mythos 5, leading to the AI firm being forced to take the models down entirely to avoid noncompliance. For anyone who had “government interference” on their S-1 risk factor bingo card, Ball is what it looks like when a company locks in its insider status while a rival is squeezed. TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.
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Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs
Snap will be spinning off an internal generative AI video team into a separate company. The new company — dubbed Dotmo — will focus on developing AI models that can create interactive gaming experiences, Snap told TechCrunch. Snap cited the high costs of conducting such work internally as one of the reasons for the spinoff. While technically a separate company, Dotmo will retain its close ties to the Snapchat creator. For one thing, Snap will provide Dotmo with a license to adapt its technology for gaming and interactive entertainment platforms. At the same time, the initial Dotmo team will consist of a group of current Snap staff who are leaving Snap to launch the new venture. Additionally, while Dotmo won’t be funded by Snap directly, the company says that Bobby Murphy, its chief technology officer, will act as lead investor and will have a significant personal stake in the new firm. Though a financial backer, Murphy will continue to work for Snap full-time as its CTO and continue to lead its GenAI research and development initiatives. In exchange for the talent and the technology license, Snap will get a large equity stake in Dotmo, the company said — a position that could prove rewarding if the company prospers in the future. Dotmo may also eventually seek outside funding, Snap said. The move marks Snap’s second major spinoff effort this year. Earlier in 2026, Snapspun off Specs into a new companyto focus exclusively on the development of its smart glasses line. (Snap’s recent unveiling of Specswasn’t exactly a home runfor the company. Snap’s stock tanked afterconcerns were raisedabout the hefty price tag attached to the new smart glasses, which is around $2,200.) Snap also underwent a round of layoffs earlier this year, during whichsome 1,000 jobs were cut. Dotmo represents a different kind of spinoff than the Specs operation, in that its team will be focused on developing digital experiences that aren’t currently a part of Snap’s core business priorities, a Snap representative said. However, it could still be considered a partner in the future if the fit seems right, they added. Spin-offs can be a cost savings strategy for companies, although they can serve a variety of other purposes — like showing off a particular asset, generating investor attention, or providing operational flexibility to the team involved. In spinning out Dotmo, Snap may be reducing the financial burden associated with its AI efforts, while still maintaining exposure to any potential upside through its equity stake.
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AI inference startup Baseten reportedly raising $1.5B months after its last mega-round
AI inference company Baseten is close to finalizing a stunning $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion valuation,the Wall Street Journal reports. Just five months ago, the startup announced that it had raised a$300 million Series Eat a $5 billion valuation. And that round was just nine months after raising a$150 million Series D. If finalized, this latest round would represent a 160% increase in valuation in less than half a year. However, the WSJ reports that this is asplit-priced round, a tactic startups are using to boost their headline valuation and make lead investors look good on paper. Some investors in this latest funding round are reportedly coming in at a $13 billion valuation, while others at $11 billion, sources told the Journal. This deal is said to be co-led by Spark Capital, Sands Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Wellington Management. Launched in 2019, Baseten is a startup benefiting from what The Next Wave hailed the “inference gold rush,” in which VCs are pouring enormous amounts of money into companies building the inference layer. Inference is what the model does after a user submits a prompt. Baseten promises to handle inference quickly while controlling costs by routing requests to the best-for-task model, especially to competent, less-expensive open source alternatives.
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A tech worker-backed PAC is bringing a $5M knife to Big Tech’s $100M gunfight
Loading the player… A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly. And the Guardrails Alliance, a new super PAC dedicated to supporting AI legislation, aims to leverage that discontent. Democratic operatives Shaunna Thomas and Leah Hunt-Hendrix launched the Guardrails Alliance on Thursday with backing from tech employees, labor unions, and other groups, according toThe New York Times. “Our fundamental belief here is that people still do have the power to stop this autocratic takeover of the Trump administration and the tech sector,” Thomas told the NYT. Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom. The PAC has about $5 million at its disposal today and plans to raise $15 million this cycle — small potatoes compared to deep-pocketed adversaries like Leading the Future, which has more than $100 million from tech leaders like OpenAI president Greg Brockman. Guardrails will buy ads to support Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate who becameLeading the Future’s first targetand is running in the primaries next week. On Thursday, Boresshared an adfeaturing the parents of Adam Raine, the teenager who died by suicide after months of prolonged conversations with ChatGPT. Bores is also receiving support from another pro-legislation super PAC,Public First Action, which has backing from Anthropic. While OpenAI has tried todistance itselffrom Brockman’s donations, many employees are reportedly unconvinced, and several have voiced concerns on social media about Leading the Future’s attacks on Bores. This year, tech workers have also mobilized todemand their chiefs end contractswith U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and urge the Pentagon towithdraw its designation of Anthropicas a supply chain risk — a label critics say was imposed without due process in retaliation for Anthropic’s limits on its technology being used for mass surveillance and autonomous warfare. “This is not about matching [Leading the Future] dollar for dollar,” Thomas said. “What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about the way the anti-regulation AI tech sector is trying to manipulate elections.” TechCrunch has reached out to the Guardrails Alliance.
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General Intuition in talks to raise $300M at around $2B valuation
General Intuition, the New York-based startup building a foundation model that trains AI agents how to move through space and time, is in talks to raise around $300 million, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The raise comes eight months afterGeneral Intuition spun out of Medal, a platform for uploading and sharing video game clips, with a $134 million seed round. The fresh funds would bring the startup’s valuation up to just over $2 billion, sources say. Sources tell TechCrunch General Intuition has secured funds from backers, includingJeff Bezosand Eric Schmidt, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. Pim de Witte, who co-founded Medal, founded and leads General Intuition alongside co-founders Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, and Vincent Micheli — researchers who bring expertise in world modeling and simulation. The startup trains embodied AI and world models using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users. The startup’s pitch is that such a dataset — unique because it allows AI to learn from interactive, first-person gameplay — is the perfect base to teach machines deep spatial-temporal reasoning, allowing them to perceive, anticipate, and interact in real time in simulation. That dataset hasreportedlyattracted the attention of OpenAI, which previously attempted to acquire Medal. And sources say OpenAI hasn’t been the only big AI lab to come knocking. The world model space that General Intuition is playing in is heating up. Startups likeRunway,Decart, andWorld Labshave all recently released world models, and Google’s Genie 3 recently beganintegrating Google Maps datafor more real-world simulation capabilities. All of these companies see gaming and robotics training as near-term commercial use cases, but General Intuition takes a different approach: It builds world models to train agents, not to sell them. The agents are the product, and the startup’s unique dataset gives it a path to viability. General Intuition will use the funds to scale up its compute capacity so it can release a new product by the end of summer or early fall, according to a source familiar with the matter.
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‘Queer Eye’s’ life coach Karamo Brown launches Kē, a wellness app featuring his AI digital clone
Karamo Brown, famous for his pep talks on Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” has jumped into the wellness and AI space with his new app,Kē. After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey—from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth—Brown wants to help others do the same. Kē offers a slew of features designed to support users, including personalized fitness plans that cater to users’ existing workout equipment and schedules, as well as nutrition guidance by suggesting meal plans based on the food users have at home. Users have the flexibility to request adjustments to their fitness and meal plans through an AI chatbot, making it easy to customize their experience. Plus, each workout is paired with guided instructional videos to ensure correct form. On the mental health front, Kē includes a meditation section with videos targeting various emotions, helping users manage stress and anxiety. There’s also a community section for users to engage in supportive groups focused on shared experiences, such as sobriety or wellness discussions. But what really sets Kē apart is its “AI Karamo” feature that lets users talk with a digital version of Karamo. They can ask questions and get advice in real-time, delivered in his voice. Powered by AI startupDelphi,the clone pulls from all sorts of material from Brown—like interviews, podcast episodes, and other clips—to ensure it represents him as authentically as possible. (Arnold Schwarzenegger also has his own digital clone with Delphi.) “My best friend and sister to this day still talk to the AI clone when they can’t get hold of me,” Brown told TechCrunch. Brown’s new app reflects a bigger trend, where more celebrities are getting on board with AI. For example, stars likeMatthew McConaughey and Michael Cainehave partnered with ElevenLabs to license their voices for digital replicas. However, many celebrities are publicly expressing their concerns andtaking actionagainst the rise of AI, particularly regarding the unauthorized use of their likenesses and voices in creating digital clones. There has also been a bit of concern about fans forming one-sided emotional attachments to celebrity chatbots. Brown emphasizes that Kē isn’t meant to replace real relationships; instead, it’s a tool to aid in personal development and encourage people to reach out for real support when needed. “If someone is struggling with a sensitive issue, it can direct them toward appropriate resources and remind them to seek support from real people in their lives… At the end of the day, this is meant to be a tool that helps people reflect, learn, and grow, and it’s not a substitute for human connection,” Brown said. When asked if there’s a limit on the frequency of interactions with his digital clone, Brown replied, “People can talk to it as much as they need. That said, the goal isn’t to keep users talking to the AI indefinitely. It’s designed to help people make progress in their lives.” He also mentions that there are safeguards in place to keep interactions safe, with a team of humans overseeing the app. (However, users should keep in mind that using the AI feature means they’re sharing their conversation data with Delphi, so it’s smart to avoid disclosing sensitive info.) He adds, “When AI first started becoming part of the conversation a few years ago, I was honestly pretty skeptical. But the technology has evolved significantly, and what changed my perspective was seeing how thoughtfully companies like Delphi have approached it.” In the future, Delphi plans to introduce agentic capabilities to Kē to perform tasks on users’ behalf. For instance, if AI Karamo gives you advice on your workout routine, it may one day be able to go into the “My Plan” tab for you and adjust it immediately. Kē is now available oniOSandAndroiddevices. The subscription costs $14.99/month after the 3-day free trial.
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