Latest AI News
RIL AGM 2026: JioHotstar Gets GenAI Media Studio, AI Snapshot and Content Commerce Features
Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) announced several AI-powered initiatives for its media and entertainment business at the 49th Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Friday. The company outlined new features for JioHotstar, including JioStar GenAI Media Studio (JAMS), which is designed to streamline the content creation process. AI Snapshot, Content Commerce, and Multiview were also announced, with the aim of transforming how users discover, consume, and interact with content. During the annual meeting, RIL also highlighted the growth of its media ecosystem involving JioStar, Jio Studios, Network18, and JioHotstar.
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RIL AGM 2026: Jio Showcases AI Voice Agent for Calls, Jio TeleFrame AI Agents and JioBharat IQ Apps
Reliance hosted its 49th annual general meeting (AGM) of shareholders on Friday. During the keynote presentation, the Indian conglomerate showcased new AI innovations coming to its platforms. Reliance has announced that it will launch five new AI platforms in India, namely JioBharat IQ, AI Vyapar, JioHealth IQ, JioLearn IQ, and JioKrishi IQ. On top of this, the company has also revealed that it is integrating AI directly into the Jio network to bring an AI-powered agent, which can be triggered with a voice command during calls. The AI agent will be available in all regional languages in the country. Additionally, the company has also unveiled the Jio TeleFrame, its new family of AI agents.
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Frontier AI Models Just Months Away from Accelerating Cyberattacks, Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance Warns
A joint warning was issued by intelligence and cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US on Monday. In a statement, the alliance, commonly known as the Five Eyes, said that AI has the potential to dramatically accelerate cyberattacks in the coming months. The agencies have warned against frontier AI models that have developed the capability of both offensive and defensive actions sooner than previously anticipated, claiming that cybersecurity cannot be treated as a purely technical issue anymore.
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Firefox Now Lets You Shake Your Android Phone to Summarise Websites
Mozilla introduced a new Shake to Summarize feature on Firefox for iOS last year, allowing users to get a summary of a webpage with a simple shake or tap gesture. Now, the browser maker is bringing a similar feature to users with Android devices. The latest Firefox version for Android includes a Page Summaries feature that can generate an overview of a webpage. This is useful for users dealing with lengthy articles to get key points without having to read the entire content. Users can manually enable or disable the feature through the browser's settings menu.
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Nvidia wants to cut data center water use, but that’s not the same as fixing AI’s water problem
Nvidia just announced a warm-water cooling system that it says can dramatically reduce the amount of water a data center uses — eliminating “pretty much all water usage” inside the data center, according to an Nvidia executive in apress release. “The water consumption challenge for data centers is largely solved,” Josh Parker, chief sustainability officer at Nvidia, recentlytoldAxios. But that’s only part of the water story. As long as AI data centers run on fossil fuels — a choice tech companies areincreasingly making— the savings stop at the data center’s walls. The core issue is how Nvidia measures data center water use. According to its blog post, the company essentially draws a line around the data center. Anything inside gets counted, and anything outside gets ignored. To be fair, Nvidia’s system does appear to deliver on its facility-level promise — the coolant runs in a closed loop, filled once and recirculated for the life of the facility, meaning no new water is consumed to cool the chips. In favorable climates, the company says, that can amount to a 100% reduction in on-site water use. TechCrunch has asked Nvidia to clarify the matter, and we’ll update this article if we receive a reply. The problem is, water use outside of the data center — primarily in electricity generation and chip manufacturing — candoubleortriplethe total water footprint of a facility. That means Nvidia’s solution addresses about a quarter to a third of AI data centers’ total water consumption. The new system is clever, pumping coolant into racks at 45°C (113°F). That’s hot for humans but not for computer chips. After passing through a server, the coolant emerges at 55°C (131°F), Nvidia said, bringing a significant amount of heat away from the hardware. At that temperature, the outside air in most climates can draw heat off passive radiators without evaporative cooling or, in some cases, fans. A data center without fans or chillers would not only use less water, but it would also be more efficient and quieter. But no data center can operate without an electricity supply, and many types of power plants are themselves major water consumers. Fossil fuel power plants are one of the largest water users in the U.S., consuming 2.7 billion gallons per day,accordingto the U.S. Geological Survey — most of it for evaporative cooling. Natural gas power plants use 1.17 liters of water for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they generate, according to arecent study. Coal plants are even more water-intensive, using 2.2 liters per kilowatt-hour. Fossil fuel power plants collectively generate about half of all data center power today,accordingto the IEA. Hydropower dams, which supply around 10% of data center power, don’t consume water in the same direct way, but evaporation from their reservoirs amounts to 6.8 liters lost per kilowatt-hour generated. Geothermal, a source that tech companies are starting to explore, varies widely — it can be higher or lower depending on the specific technology. Some enhanced geothermal startups, like Fervo, havepledgedto use mostly “degraded” water that would otherwise go unused. Wind and solar power, on the other hand, use vanishingly small amounts of water, about 0.01 liters and 0.03 liters per kilowatt-hour, respectively — figures that include the water needed for manufacturing and cleaning solar panels. While renewables are providing a growing share of new electricity capacity, natural gas and coal are expected to provide more than 40% of new electricity needed to meet data center demand through 2030, the IEA projects. Without major changes to that trajectory, data centers will still consume large amounts of water, regardless of what Nvidia does inside its walls.
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AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire deal
What does an AI company do after one of those not-acqui-hire deals, where a rival pays investors a hefty IP “licensing” fee while poaching its critical talent? For AI chipmaker Groq, the answer appears to be raise more money from investors — who were said to have profited handsomely after a deal with Nvidia in December — hire more talent, and pivot. On Monday, Groqannounceda new $650 million funding round, confirmingearlier reports. The round was led by Disruptive, a Dallas-based late-stage investment firm founded by Alex Davis — who also serves as Groq’s chairman — and Infinitum, a Fort Lauderdale hedge fund. The raise comes roughly six months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s technology and hired away founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees. Groq did not disclose its new valuation. It was last valued at $6.9 billion following a$750 million roundin September. Ross, who came from Google, was known in the AI chip world for helping create Google’s AI chip, theTensor Processing Unit. He teamed up with another Google engineer, Doug Wightman, to launch Groq a decade ago. Wightman stayed on after the Nvidia deal and became CEO. Groq created a chip it called a language processing unit (LPU), used for inference, and sold it as part of a cloud service or an on-premises hardware cluster. With Nvidia now owning the IP for LPUs, the GPU giant announced its own hardware cluster, theNvidia Groq 3 LPXinference hardware system, at its GTC event in March. In response, Groq has pivoted to its neocloud business, it said. That business had been run by Madra after Groq acquired his AI data analytics company Definitive Intelligence, in 2024. It has grown to 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC and is serving over five million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of tokens each week, the company says. Groq has also been hiring replacement execs. It added Alan Rice as COO, previously at xAI and Meta, after a career in the U.S. Navy.It also added an entrepreneurial duo, Sinclair Schuller, who joins as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO. They previously worked together at Apprenda, an enterprise cloud software company founded by Schuller; they then co-founded Nuvalence, a software-engineering firm acquired by EY in 2024. Malhotra previously spent about a decade working on Microsoft’s cloud products. Whether Groq can succeed after almost selling itself depends on how competitive its inference cloud can remain, now that the key hardware IP is shared with Nvidia. Certainly, it has a shot. Inference-related tech is an area experiencing tremendous demand (andVC investment). But it’s also seeing increasing innovation and competition. Still, others seem to have survived these sorts of deals. Scale AI’s CEO Jason Droege toldForbesthat business has reboundedafter Meta did a $14.3 billion not-acqui-hireabout a year ago, and that the company is on track to do $1 billion in revenue. In the big-money game of AI, anything seems possible.
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The AI world is getting ‘loopy’
On Friday, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny made an appearance at Meta’s @Scale conference and, surprisingly, the first question from the audience was about loops. “Are loops the next hype cycle,” the questioner asked, “or are they for real?” Cherny’s answer was an emphatic, “Yes, they’re for real.” “Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,” he continued. “As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as important and as big a step.” Later in the talk (around the 32:00 mark in the YouTube video posted above), Cherny got specific about the loops he keeps running in his own work. One agent is continually looking for ways to improve the code architecture, while another looks for duplicated abstractions that can be unified. They submit pull requests like any other coder, and since the code is constantly changing, they never stop running. It’s a powerful idea, particularly with a figure as significant as Cherny behind it. With the shift to agentic AI, the focus for most users has been managing their agents as well as possible: establish clear goals, check in on discrete units of progress, and don’t let them stray too far beyond the prompt. The loop takes it a step further by authorizing a swarm of agents to work continuously in the background, endlessly. It’s a lot of trust to place in AI — but with models getting better fast, it could be the next step in getting AI to handle real work. The first thing to recognize is that this isn’t entirely new. Recursive loops — functions that call themselves in order to repeat an action, along with a condition that stops the loop — are a mainstay of intro computer science courses. These loops are following a non-deterministic logic — that is, it’s a subagent that chooses when to stop the loop instead of a clear condition — but the same basic approach is at work. As soon as programmers started using AI to complete tasks, some version of the recursive loop, with AI overseeing AI, was bound to come up. Unlike classic computing, agentic loops can be maddeningly simple. One of the most popular tricks isthe Ralph Loop(named for Ralph Wiggum), which basically sums up all the work that the model has done and asks if it’s accomplished its goal. It’s a way of dealing with AI models getting lost as they run for too long — essentially bouncing the model back and forth until the task is complete. Another way to think of loops is as part of the general push for more test-time compute. As OpenAI researcher Noam Brown observedearlier this month, contemporary models can solve nearly any problem if you throw enough compute at them. That means one way to ensure a problem gets solved is to just keep throwing compute at it until it’s finished. That’s particularly true for hill-climbing problems like improving a code base, where the model can just keep making incremental improvements until it reaches a given threshold. Or, as in Cherny’s example, it can just keep making incremental improvements for as long as there’s compute to spend on it. If that sounds expensive, it should. Like agentic AI before it, AI loops burn through tokens a lot faster than simple Q&A chatbots — and because the point is to keep the loop running all the time, there’s no ceiling to how much you can spend. That’s fine for Anthropic, which is ultimately in the token-selling business, but for everyone else, it may be a pricey way to work. Still, depending on the problem the agentic loop is trying to solve, and the right setup that allows for oversight of token spend, drift, and other classic AI issues, the benefits could be staggering enough to outweigh the costs.
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OpenAI launches new initiative to help find and patch open source bugs
OpenAIannounced a new initiativeon Monday designed to help the open source community improve its cybersecurity game and ward off bugs. “Patch the Planet” (which is a not-so-subtle allusion to “Hack the Planet,” the iconic catchphrase from the 1995 movie “Hackers”) will see OpenAI team up with the security companyTrail of Bitsto help open source maintainers secure their projects. OpenAI said security staff from Trail of Bits will work directly with open source maintainers to review potential code issues. OpenAI’s security tools — like Codex Security — will be used to assist in the process. “Many maintainers are already being asked to sort through more reports, more quickly, with the same limited time and resources,” OpenAI said Monday. “Patch the Planet is built to reduce that burden, not add to it: security engineers review findings before they reach maintainers, work with projects to develop patches and tests, and build reusable workflows that help teams continue improving security after the first fixes land.” In other words, Trail of Bits engineers will function more or less like code EMTs — there to help open source project maintainers identify and triage potential issues, all supported by OpenAI’s software. It sounds like an ambitious project, and it’s somewhat unclear how it will function in the long term, or how it plans to scale up (if at all). Open source projects are the digital bedrock upon which the commercial software industry rests, but, unfortunately, due to the decentralized and poorly monitored structure of that ecosystem, much of the software is insecure. Bugs in open source projects can turn into major problems for commercial codebases.The log4j debaclefrom several years ago — when a bad vulnerability was discovered in a widely used open source utility — is a good example. Much of the concern surrounding tools like Mythos (Anthropic’s highly publicized security tool) seems to stem from the fact that AI can now automatically identify existing bugs within codebases and set about creating exploits for them. While theautomation of cybercrimeis not new, these tools undoubtedly have the potential to make it significantly more convenient for bad actors. OpenAI is turning that formula on its head by using AI to help the open source community better protect itself. It’s hard not to read it as a competitive swipe at Anthropic, while also recognizing that it’s something the open source community desperately needs.
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The running list: major tech layoffs in 2026 where employers cited AI
Oracle disclosed Monday that it has reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in anannual financial regulatory filing. The revelation puts fresh numbers to what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, pointing to AI as both the engine of growth and the reason for the cuts. Tech layoffs hit theirhighest single monthin years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. We recently wrote about why that rationale is something companiesmay want to rethink, not least because for many of these companies, the roles they’re now cutting ballooned during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what’s really going on right now. Below is a running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor. GitLab— June 3, 2026. In one of the most recent cuts on this list, GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about14% of its staff, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur $30 to $35 million in restructuring costs. Google— ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google hasquietly cutemployees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number — the cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers. Intuit— May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminateroughly 3,000 jobs— about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure so it can deliver better products. Meta— May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (that theyreportedly hate). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success isn’t a given” in AI. Cisco— May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it’s cutting nearly4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Pattersonsaid: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.” Cloudflare— May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and thehighest single quarterin company history. CEO Matthew Princewrote that“the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition. General Motors— May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC thatAI played a role in the decisionbut that it wasn’t the only reason. GM’s statement said it was “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles. Coinbase— May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO, and said it would experiment with “one-person teams” combining engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically — “engineers useAI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.” PayPal— May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function by function.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.Microsoft— April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and is expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility”amid rising AI investment. Snap— April 16, 2026. Snap cut roughly16% of its global workforce— about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency. IBM— rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reported IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as aroutine rebalancingaffecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce. Atlassian— March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about1,600 jobs(10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”Dell— January 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about10%in fiscal 2026 — roughly11,000 jobs— to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with $569 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027. Oracle— March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobsvia terminal emails. The cuts came even as Oracle posted $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to $553 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts that would later total 21,000 over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing. Block— February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion andmake similar structural changes.”Salesforce— February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The companytold Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work.Amazon— January 28, 2026. Amazon cut16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strengthen[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
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Kiwibit’s AI-powered bird feeder is my new backyard buddy
Earlier this month, I got my hands on theKiwibit Bird Feeder 2 4K AI Camera, and it has become my favorite backyard accessory. Setting it up is pretty straightforward. Multiple mounting options allow you to place the feeder on a pole, window ledge, or tree. Its dual seed compartments are designed for easy refills and cleaning. The solar panel on top ensures you don’t have to worry about batteries running low. Durability and camera quality are also strong points. Other specs include support for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, cloud storage, built-in two-way audio with a microphone and speaker, and a 130-degree wide-angle lens. As soon as I installed it in the backyard, I connected the feeder to the companion Kiwibit app on my phone. This is where you can be notified when a bird stops by, watch recordings, and track all the visits. A few weeks into testing is when the real fun started. My phone buzzed with a notification every time a new visitor showed up, and I found myself eagerly waiting for updates. Even on extremely rainy days, I managed to entice a few birds, including a stunning northern cardinal that I’ve now come to anticipate seeing every morning. As of this writing, the device has successfully recorded visits from six species. I’ve been addicted ever since. I find myself eagerly checking the app every morning to see which feathered little guy stopped by. I show off the videos to almost everyone I know as if they’re my own pets. One amusing notification I keep receiving is “a nuisance animal detected” when squirrels raid my birdseed stash (which happens as often as you’d expect). The app uses Kiwibit’s proprietary bird-identification algorithm to identify over 10,000 bird species, such as blue jays, ravens, and mourning doves. The Activity tab is particularly useful, as it tracks the number of “visits” captured, videos recorded, and total species observed. You can also navigate through the calendar to view specific days. The Birds tab offers in-depth information on each species, featuring detailed descriptions from Wikipedia. However, I did notice that the system — which typically costs between $179.99 to $249.99 depending on the model — occasionally has trouble accurately counting “visits.” For example, if a house sparrow is feeding in front of the camera for several minutes, the AI might record it as multiple visits, even if the bird hasn’t moved that much. More expensive models are currently available at a discount forPrime Day at Amazonorvia Kiwibit themselves. Overall, testing the Kiwibit Bird Feeder 2 has been delightful. If you’re looking for a way to connect with nature while having some fun collecting bird species like Pokémon, give this smart feeder a try. Just be prepared for all the squirrels to visit, too. This post originally published May 29 and has since been updated to reflect new promotional pricing.
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Fika Jobs raises $4M to build a video-first hiring platform where AI agents interview candidates
The hiring process has long been criticized for its inefficiency and opacity. Candidates spend hours writing applications and submitting cover letters, only to disappear into what often feels like a black box. Generative AI has only made things messier, with employers increasingly relying on AI-powered screening systems to sift through an overwhelming number of submissions. Stockholm-based startupFika Jobsthinks there’s a better way. The company is building a video-first hiring platform that combines AI interview agents with short-form video profiles, creating something that feels like a cross between LinkedIn and TikTok. Instead of relying solely on resumes, candidates complete AI-powered interviews designed to showcase their personality and communication skills. Fika Jobs announced on Tuesday a $4 million pre-seed round, which will be used to continue developing the platform, grow the team, and prepare for a wider launch later this year. For job seekers, the process starts by connecting a LinkedIn profile. Fika’s AI reviews the candidate’s background and generates personalized interview questions. Candidates then complete a roughly 10-minute video interview with the AI agent, currently powered by Google’s Gemini models. After the interview, Fika automatically turns responses into short video clips and organizes them into a profile. Instead of applying to every new role, candidates maintain a live profile that employers can discover and revisit as new opportunities arise. The idea came from co-founders and brothers Jakob Dubois (CEO) and Alexander Dubois (CTO) while they were building their previous startup. “When we were building [social app] Gaff, we spent a lot of time recruiting and almost passed on a candidate because his resume did not really stand out,” Jakob Dubois told TechCrunch. “We ended up speaking with him anyway, and within minutes, his grit, drive, and ambition became obvious. Exactly the kind of person we wanted to hire.” That experience convinced the founders that some traits that employers care about most are difficult to capture on paper. Unlike most competitors (Alex,Maki, andMercor, among others) that focus on helping employers source, screen, and match candidates more efficiently with AI, Fika is building a platform where candidates maintain video-first profiles and employers browse a pool of people who have already been interviewed and evaluated by AI. If successful, Fika Jobs could help employers assess communication skills and cultural fit early in the hiring process, complementing traditional resume and application reviews. This approach may be especially valuable for early-career professionals and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, whose potential is not always apparent from a resume alone. Of course, video profiles introduce real bias risks that are also worth acknowledging. When employers can see a candidate’s race, age, gender, physical appearance, and accent before evaluating their qualifications, it opens the door to discrimination that a resume, for all its flaws, at least partially obscures. There’s a reason some companies have moved toward blind resume screening. The platform plans to open early access to candidates this week, with a broader public launch expected this fall. The company will initially focus on Sweden before expanding internationally. Fika currently has a small team but expects to reach around 10 employees by the end of the year. More than 100 companies are on the waitlist, say the founders, though they declined to disclose which ones. Separately, they said more than 50 companies have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel. The platform is free for job seekers. Employers pay nothing up front, but Fika takes 10% of a candidate’s first-year salary upon a successful hire. (The company notes that this is lower than the 20% to 30% placement fees often charged by traditional recruiters and headhunters.) The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo best known for creating the hit mobile game Candy Crush.
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4 days left to save up to $190 on TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026
Founders don’t grow alone. The best founders learn from peers facing similar challenges, gain insights from operators who have already scaled, and build relationships with investors who can help fuel the next stage of growth. You have just four days left to save up to $190 on your pass toTechCrunch Founder Summit 2026before Early Bird rates end on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. On November 4 in Boston, more than 1,000 founders and investors will come together for a full day of practical insights, peer-to-peer learning, and meaningful networking designed to help startups grow faster. This is TechCrunch’s flagship founder conference, built specifically for founders. Whether you’re preparing to raise capital, scaling revenue, hiring your next team members, or planning your next major milestone, Founder Summit connects you with the people and strategies that can help move your company forward. Register by June 26 to save up to $190 on your pass.Groups of four or more can save up to 30%. TechCrunch Founder Summitis designed to deliver practical takeaways you can put into action immediately. You’ll connect with: The conversations are candid, focused, and designed to help founders solve real business challenges.Register here to save up to $190. Founder Summitprogramming focuses on the decisions that shape a company’s future. Through breakout sessions and roundtable discussions, you’ll gain insights you can apply right away. Past topics have included: Whether you’re raising your first round or scaling toward your next major milestone, these sessions are built to help you make smarter decisions and move faster.Register here to save up to $190. Previous speakers have shared firsthand lessons on company building, fundraising, and growth, including: Additional speakers have included leaders from Sequoia Capital, NFX, Underscore VC, Glasswing Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Construct Capital, Greylock, and Precursor Ventures. The 2026 agenda is currently taking shape, with more founders, operators, and investors to be announced soon on theevent page. Interested in leading the conversation?Submit a topicfor a breakout or roundtable session for a chance to be voted onto the agenda by the TechCrunch audience. TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026is where founders come to gain practical insights, build valuable relationships, and accelerate growth. Join 1,000+ founders and investors in Boston on November 4 for a day of learning, networking, and conversations that can help shape your company’s future. Early Bird savings end in just four days, June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT.Register now to save up to $190on your pass and up to 30% when registering as a group before prices increase.
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