Tech

Cluely’s Roy Lee has a message for startup founders: you should be thinking harder about how to go viral. “Generally, if you’re not in deep tech, then you need to low-key deep focus on distribution,” Lee told the crowd at Disrupt 2025. But he also made it clear that not everyone was cut out for this kind of viral marketing. …

NBA champion Tristan Thompson announced at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that he’s partnering with global telecom company World Mobile to launch a community-owned mobile network called Uplift. The network offers unlimited data plans starting at $9.99 per month. Uplift is built on blockchain technology and a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN). With Uplift, every subscription will contribute to neighborhood-level network expansion, …

“The dead internet theory is real,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told Digg founder Kevin Rose, referring to the idea that much of the internet isn’t human — it’s mostly bots. The two entrepreneurs have since teamed up to re-envision how to build a social community in this world where, very soon, it will be hard to tell who’s a real …

YouTube is conducting a “voluntary exit program” with severance for U.S.-based employees, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The news was first reported by Sources. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told employees about the program via an internal memo on Wednesday. The memo also announced that the Google-owned company was reorganizing its product teams into three separate organizations that all …

For three days this week, 20 startups participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. Each was selected to represent the best of the Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. After all that intense pitching, we have a winner. These startups were hand-picked to compete in Startup Battlefield, and …

The rise of agentic coding tools has been a sea change for software engineers across the industry — but for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, it seems to have landed particularly hard. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he’s become increasingly comfortable taking a back seat in software development tasks. “AI has been a great force multiplier for somebody who’s …

The 2024 runner-up in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, geCKo Materials, returned to the stage at this year’s show to debut new products as it pushes deeper into commercializing its tech. Founder Dr. Capella Kerst revealed four new uses of geCKo’s super-strong dry adhesive: a semiconductor wafer handling tool, a robotic gripper for smooth surfaces (like solar panels or glass), …

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software as a service) companies. Instead, he believes that the more likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS plus agents, he said, speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday. “Generally, once you have a business process, you want to be able …

Waymo and Zoox robotaxis are a regular sight on San Francisco streets, and soon Uber, through a partnership with Lucid and Nuro, will descend on the city as well. It is exactly how San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie likes it. “I think we should be the testbed for emerging technology and AI and healthcare tech — and all of it,” …

Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing service provided by the company, is experiencing a significant outage on Wednesday. The problems started around 12 p.m. ET, and Microsoft has acknowledged the issue on the service’s status page. According to Microsoft, “We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change triggered this issue.” The company has not indicated when service will be restored. Multiple Microsoft …