July 08, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Figma acquires team behind a vibe-coding app: The Y Combinator-backed company started a vibe-coding platform and later built an agent-creation product. Read More

Meta just launched a new AI generator, Muse Image, and users are already pushing back over use of their photos: The new image-generating model has numerous use cases, including advertising and decorating, and creator-based opportunities. Read More

Apple to produce Made in America wireless chips with Broadcom: Apple has signed a $30 billion+ multiyear deal with Broadcom to design and produce more than 15 billion U.S.-made custom wireless connectivity chips for Apple products. 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

Venus Aerospace raises $90M Series B to build a new kind of rocket engine: Build a new kind of rocket engine, and the world will beat a path to your door. Read More

Hot French startup ZML releases free product to speed inference across lots of AI chips: ZML, a hot French AI startup endorsed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has now released ZML/LLMD, software that could make running AI less costly. Read More

Why the rise of open source AI isn't hurting Anthropic ... yet: Open source models’ success isn’t coming at the expense of frontier labs. Instead, they each seem to capture two phases of the same life cycle. Read More

Microsoft joins AI cost-cutting trend by relying more on its own models: Microsoft is the latest Silicon Valley giant to cut back on its AI spending. Read More

Blue Origin reportedly raising $10B at $130B valuation: Blue Origin is raising $10 billion at a $130 billion pre-money valuation from Coatue Asset Management, Bezos himself and other big-name investors, the New York Times reported. Read More

A message from TechCrunch Events

Your PC refresh strategy is already behind - free webinar, July 29

Thinking about stretching your PC fleet to wait out the price spike? The research says that's backward. Organizations that handle AI PC transitions best refresh consistently — not with a one-time buy. Join us for a free online webinar on July 29th at 10am PT/1pm ET to learn how to spec smarter for what's coming.

Last but Not Least

AI chip maker SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, 5 months after last mega round: AI chip maker SambaNova has raised at an $11 billion valuation months after Intel was rumored to be trying to buy it for about $1.6 billion. Read More

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