Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
You can spend months trying to get in front of the right people. Or you can show up where they’re already looking. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, more than 10,000 founders, investors, and operators will gather at Moscone West from October 13–15. And at the center of it all — where deals start, conversations accelerate, and new companies get discovered — is the Expo Hall. If startup visibility, traction, and real conversations matter, you should be on the Disrupt exhibit floor, not on the sidelines. Get your exhibit table at Disrupt before your competitor does. Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photograpy Why exhibiting at Disrupt works Disrupt isn’t a passive audience; it’s an active ecosystem. Investors, operators, and…
Self-driving has been “almost here” for over a decade. But somewhere between DARPA challenges and a handful of driverless trucks hauling freight between Dallas and Houston, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson’s story changed. The self-driving truck company started commercial driverless operations last April and is now scaling from a handful of trucks to hundreds this year. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Urmson at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The pair dug into the long road from lab to highway and how physical AI differs from the LLM boom everyone else is chasing. Listen to the full episode to hear about: What “verifiable AI”…
Regents on Wednesday unanimously appointed Susan Ballabina as president of Texas A&M, putting her in charge of the state’s largest public university as it continues to deal with the fallout from its last president’s resignation.Ballabina, who assumes the role on May 11, most recently served as executive vice chancellor for the Texas A&M University System, overseeing day-to-day operations across its 12 universities and eight state agencies. Prior to that, she was former Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III’s chief of staff. Regents named Ballabina the sole finalist April 13. State law required them to wait 21 days before finalizing…
Two days. That’s all that’s left to lock in your place — with your partner, co-founder, or colleague — at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Right now, you can buy one pass and get 50% off a second of the same ticket type, but that offer ends May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT. After that, prices go up, and the opportunity to show up with more perspective, more context, and more clarity disappears with it. At this stage, the advantage comes down to how quickly you leave with a clear sense of what to do next, which is why securing your pass now and deciding who to bring with you matters more than waiting. Image Credits:Slava…
Chinese AI companies may not be swimming in as much cash as their Western rivals, but their open source models are still facing no shortage of interest from those who don’t mind a performance hit in exchange for cheap inference. And investors are taking notice. Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based AI lab developing the popular Kimi series of open-weight large language models, has raised about $2 billion at a valuation of $20 billion, according to a post by Huafeng Capital, which advised some investors who participated in the round. The round was led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan’s VC arm,…
It only took solo venture capitalist Zal Bilimoria five phone calls to raise his latest $50 million fund. Loading audio narration… The former Andreessen Horowitz partner, who left the firm a decade ago to start VC firm Refactor Capital, said the new fund brings his total assets under management to nearly $300 million and will allow him to keep writing $1 million to $2 million checks into pre-seed and seed-stage startups.Bilimoria describes himself as a generalist hard-tech investor, with an interest in startups tackling big physical-world problems. He is looking at biotech companies working on fertility and immunity, as well…
For the last few years, apps like Google’s NotebookLM, Hero, and lately Adobe Acrobat have given users the ability to create podcasts based on existing material like documents, daily schedules, and articles. Now, Spotify is letting you access these podcasts within its app, but you’ll need some programming tools to do so. The company said that if you already use a tool like OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code, or OpenClaw, you can use Spotify’s new CLI tool, which is in beta, to create the podcast and import it to Spotify to consume later. “People are already starting to use their…
Spotify said on Thursday that its interactive AI DJ feature now supports four additional languages: French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Until now, the feature, which you can interact with to request songs and get AI-powered spoken commentary, was only available in English and Spanish. The company said the AI DJs have different names and personalities to suit their respective languages: Maia, Ben, Alex, and Dani. Besides expanding support for new languages, the company is bringing the feature to Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, South Korea and Switzerland. The AI DJ is now available in more than 75 countries.…
Among longtime history teacher Karalee Wong Nakatsuka’s most prized possessions are two nearly identical T-shirts with very different meanings.One comes from Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, celebrating our Founding Fathers’ signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and their fight for freedom from the British Crown.The second is from Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln 89 years after the Declaration’s signing. The Civil War, fought to free the nation’s nearly four million enslaved people, had effectively ended five days before the president was shot.Both T-shirts bear the slogan: “Created Equal.”It’s not lost…
If you’re applying to work at Airbnb, the CEO may be reviewing your application. Loading audio narration… Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Invest Like the Best” podcast that a chief executive’s No. 1 job is hiring.”A lot of CEOs think it’s their job to hire their executives, and their executive team hires their team,” Chesky said. “I think that is fatal.”He said he spends about five hours a day recruiting and is involved in the hiring process for the top 200 people in the company.”The first and last call I make every day is the…