Wall Street is once again whispering about a potential Discord IPO. Discord, the popular chat and community platform, filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC and has pinned its hopes on a debut in March, sources told Bloomberg. The company hired top-tier tech IPO bankers Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as its underwriters. Should the tea leaves continue to look positive for this offering, the public could be getting a peek at Discord’s finances next month. But we’ll have to wait and see. Even if investors are gung ho, it’s not clear yet that 2026 will become a better market…

Skylight may have started as a digital picture frame, but today, the company is more focused on helping families stay organized with shared calendars, lists, meal planning tools and more. At CES 2026, the company debuted its latest product: the Skylight Calendar 2, which offers a sleeker design than the original 15-inch calendar, but smaller than the 27-inch wall-mounted Calendar Max. Like its larger counterpart, the new digital calendar app and family organizer also lets you swap out the frame for different colors to better match your home’s decor. The biggest selling point isn’t the digital screen itself, but the…

Caterpillar is diving deeper into incorporating AI and automation into its fleet of construction machinery through a partnership with semiconductor giant Nvidia. The construction equipment giant is piloting an AI assistive system in its mid-size Cat 306 CR Mini Excavator. Dubbed “Cat AI,” the system was built using Nvidia’s Jetson Thor physical AI platform, and is being demoed at CES on Wednesday. Brandon Hootman, vice president of data and AI at Caterpillar, told TechCrunch that Cat AI was built on a fleet of AI agents and can help answer a machine operator’s questions, allow them to access resources, offer safety…

Smart home startup Quilt introduced a three-zone heat pump on Tuesday that promises to maintain efficiency even in the kinds of demanding conditions that stymie traditional incumbents. The three-zone unit does what it says on the label: one outdoor unit is now capable of driving three indoor heads, as they’re known in the HVAC world. It’s a product that will make large installations simpler and cheaper while minimizing the footprint outside the home, and it’s key to the startup’s plans for expansion, which were recently turbocharged by a $20 million Series B focused on expanding sales. But the real story…

The bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and its extensive library of hit TV shows and films like “Harry Potter,” “Game of Thrones” and the DC Comics titles, is dragging on. The studio on Wednesday said its board had unanimously rejected Paramount Skydance’s revised $108.4 billion bid, calling the proposal a “leveraged buyout” that would saddle the company with $87 billion in debt. In a letter to shareholders, WBD urged them to reject the offer, saying the “extraordinary amount” of debt Paramount would need to raise heightens the risk of the deal falling through, and instead recommended they vote…

Spotify is lowering its eligibility criteria for podcasters to monetize their videos on the platform, dropping the minimum episode requirement to three, minimum consumption hours to 2,000, and engaged audience member threshold to 1,000 over the last 30 days. When the company introduced its partner program to monetize video content last year, creators needed to have published 12 episodes, hit 10,000 consumption hours over the prior 30 days, and had at least 2,000 people stream their content in the last 30 days to be part of the program. The program pays podcasters according to the number of premium users who…

Articul8, an enterprise AI company spun out of Intel in early 2024, has secured more than half of a planned $70 million funding round at a $500 million pre-money valuation, according to its CEO, as it looks to capitalize on growing demand for AI systems in regulated industries. The Series B funding round is structured in two installments, with the first led by Spain’s Adara Ventures, Articul8 founder and CEO Arun K. Subramaniyan (pictured above, center) said in an interview. He declined to disclose the size of the initial installment, but said the company expects to close the round in…

Mario Götze will go down in soccer history as the player who scored the winning goal that made Germany the 2014 FIFA World Cup champion. But he is also an increasingly seasoned angel investor. Companion M, Götze’s personal investment vehicle, now has a portfolio of more than 70 companies, two of which became unicorns in 2025 — Danish fintech Flatpay and German AI startup Parloa. But the athlete also learned some lessons along the way about vetting opportunities. “I only agree to invest if the startup and its founders check all the boxes,” he told TechCrunch. The boxes can be…

LMArena, a startup that originally launched as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, announced on Tuesday that it raised a $150 million Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and the university’s fund, UC Investments. The startup bolted out of the gate as a commercial venture with a $100 million seed round in May at a $600 million valuation. This new round means it raised $250 million in about seven months. LMArena is best known for its crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards. Its consumer website lets a user type a prompt…

Intel is looking to double down on gaming hardware with a new chip and platform for portable gaming devices. The platform will include hardware and software, Intel vice president and general manager of PC products, Daniel Rogers, announced at CES on Monday. It will be built off of the company’s Intel Core Series 3 processors, known as Panther Lake, which was announced last year and is now being rolled out in a variety of PCs. This future platform includes a chip specifically for handheld gaming devices, according to reporting from IGN, which was confirmed by TechCrunch. These Panther Lake chips…