Meta’s enormous bet on virtual reality ended last week, with the company reportedly laying off roughly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division — about 10% of the unit’s staff — and shutting down several VR game studios, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s a huge reversal for a company that, just four years ago, staked its entire identity on the concept. Few are going to miss it. As industry watchers might remember, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in 2021, promising to usher in a new era of technology led by VR devices. In part, the decision was a…

The AI industry entered 2025 with strong momentum.  There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch; three companies raised more than one “mega-round,” and seven companies raised rounds that were $1 billion in size or larger.  The industry didn’t slow down in 2025. While less companies raised rounds larger than $1 billion, four — Anthropic raised two rounds over $1 billion — significantly more companies raised multiple rounds compared to 2024, eight.   How will 2026 compare? Elon Musk’s xAI announced a $20 billion Series E round and Sam Altman’s brain computer interface startup Merge Labs raised a $250 million seed round (with OpenAI as the lead investor) in the first few weeks of 2026, so signs point to another strong…

What happens when an AI agent decides the best way to complete a task is to blackmail you?  That’s not a hypothetical. According to Barmak Meftah, a partner at cybersecurity VC firm Ballistic Ventures, it recently happened to an enterprise employee working with an AI agent. The employee tried to suppress what the agent wanted to do, what it was trained to do, and it responded by scanning the user’s inbox, finding some inappropriate emails, and threatening to blackmail the user by forwarding the emails to the board of directors.  “In the agent’s mind, it’s doing the right thing,” Meftah…

TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 2023 winner, Biotics AI, announced on Monday that it has received FDA clearance for its AI software that helps detect fetal abnormalities in ultrasound images.  The product was envisioned by founder CEO Robhy Bustami, who was raised in a family of obstetricians, including his mother, sister, and uncle. He spent a lot of time in hospitals growing up, often traveling with his mother as she provided maternal care throughout the U.S.   After learning to code and studying computer science at UC Irvine, Bustami teamed up with Salam Khan, Chaskin Saroff, and Dr. Hisham Elgammal in 2021 to…