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…

Sequoia Capital is reportedly joining a blockbuster funding round for Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, according to the Financial Times. It’s a move sure to turn heads in Silicon Valley. Why? Because venture capital firms have historically avoided backing competing companies in the same sector, preferring to place their bets on a single winner. Yet here’s Sequoia, already invested in both OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, now throwing its weight behind Anthropic, too. The timing is particularly surprising given what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said under oath last year. As part of OpenAI’s defense against Musk’s lawsuit, Altman addressed…

The weather in Las Vegas wasn’t looking good. The plan had been that each employee of YC-backed Bucket Robotics would carry parts of their booth in their luggage to the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to take the chance that one (or all) of their flights would be delayed. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed it up.  “It was… it was tight,” he said with a laugh on the show floor.   It took 12 hours driving in the rain, but the gear – and Puchalski – made it safely to Las Vegas, and so began the young company’s first-ever CES. San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics was just one of thousands of companies exhibiting at the annual tech conference, a speck of sand on a beach…

A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk’s X on mobile devices. While X still dominates Threads on the web, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android has continued to see an increase in daily active users over the past several months. Similarweb’s data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users on mobile devices. This appears to be the result of longer-term trends, rather…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for all things “future of transportation.” To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! It’s been a minute, folks! As you might recall, the newsletter took a little holiday break. We’re back and well into 2026. And a lot has happened since the last edition.  I spent the first week of the year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while I wrote about this last January, it’s worth repeating: U.S. automakers have left the building.  What has filled the void in the Las…

If you’re at all concerned about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants can feel alarming. It’s difficult to use one without sharing personal information, which is retained by the model’s parent company. With OpenAI already testing advertising, it’s easy to imagine the same data collection that fuels Facebook and Google creeping into your chatbot conversations. A new project, launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, is showing what a privacy-conscious AI service might look like. Confer is designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is arranged to avoid data collection, with the open-source…

If you’ve been following the billionaire exodus from California with some confusion, here’s what’s actually driving the nervousness: it’s not the 5% rate. As highlighted Friday in the New York Post, the proposed wealth tax would hit founders on their voting shares rather than the actual equity they own. Take Larry Page, who about 3% of Google but controls roughly 30% of its voting power through dual-class stock. Under this proposal, he’d owe taxes on that 30%. For a company valued in the hundreds of billions, that’s a lot more than a rounding error. The Post reports that one SpaceX…