July 15, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models: Anthropic-backed Ode launches as AI labs bet that embedding forward-deployed engineers inside enterprises is the key to accelerating enterprise AI adoption. Read More

OpenAI's first hardware device is reportedly a screenless speaker that can move: The device is weirdly described as involving "mechanical elements that can move on their own" and the Bloomberg report includes the detail that the device is designed to "feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT." Read More

A SpaceX vet raised $65M to pull wire harnesses out of the Cold War era: Someone has to bundle all the wires that go into rockets, missiles, and satellites. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

India bets billions on breaking China's grip on smartphone manufacturing: New Delhi announced a $6.5 billion smartphone manufacturing program and a $13.3 billion semiconductor push to deepen India's electronics supply chain. Read More

Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse: Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, Israeli identity management startup Oak is emerging out of stealth with $60 million in seed funding. Read More

Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet: The guy behind TCP/IP is working on a standard for identifying AI agents in the wild. Read More

Indian AI coding startup Emergent becomes a unicorn with $130M Series C: The startup has reached a $120 million annualized revenue run rate and more than 200,000 paying customers. Read More

OpenAI researcher Miles Wang in talks to launch AI drug discovery startup valued at $2B: The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences. Read More

Last but Not Least

Spotify expands parent-managed accounts to users on its free tier: The feature was previously only available to paid subscribers. Read More

Check out some of our other newsletters:

StrictlyVC

TechCrunch Events

TechCrunch Mobility

Want to adjust your daily newsletter schedule? You can do it right here

Got a tip?
Get in touch securely.

Want to advertise on TechCrunch?

Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter.

Unsubscribe

Member Center

501 2nd Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94107