Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Triller reported $0 in media revenue last year, a new company filing reveals. Loading audio narration… That’s surprising for a startup that tried to challenge TikTok with its namesake app, and at one point claimed to have hundreds of millions of users (though its numbers have been disputed).Triller went public in 2024, raising over $420 million in capital and pitching investors on its short-form video app, a streaming platform for combat sports, and various marketing tools for brands.Despite once positioning itself as a hub for creators like Charli D’Amelio, brands like McDonald’s and Pepsi, and sports leagues, last year it…

Agentic AI is the tech industry’s newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers. To that end, OpenAI has now updated its agents software development toolkit (SDK), introducing a number of new features designed to help businesses create their own agents that run on the backs of OpenAI’s models. The SDK’s new capabilities include a sandboxing ability, which allows the agents to operate in controlled computer environments. This is important because running agents in a totally unsupervised fashion can be risky due to their…

Editor’s note: Because D’Souza’s proposal centers on transparency and accountability, we are publishing the full transcript of our conversation, which took place on April 14, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. You can read the related story here. Aron D’Souza: I actually took a lot away from our conversation that we had last week. And I think it’s very intellectually interesting — if you had all the resources in the world, how would you reinvent journalism, or let’s say truth-telling, to improve the quality of our society? Rebecca: Let’s start at the top. What is…

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, plans to put its stockpile of computing power to use in a new arrangement with coding startup Cursor, according to people familiar with the matter. Loading audio narration… Cursor plans to train its latest AI coding model, Composer 2.5, on xAI infrastructure, the people said. Cursor will use tens of thousands of xAI’s graphic processing units (GPUs), the chips used to train AI models, they said.The setup effectively turns xAI into a kind of cloud provider. By renting some of its GPUs to other companies, xAI could start generating revenue from its massive infrastructure while…

Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns. In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies. The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR. “Before Gen AI, it was impossible for someone…

LinkedIn’s Blake Lawit, the chief global affairs and legal officer of the Microsoft-owned professional networking site, confirmed in an interview at the Semafor World Economy summit this week that the company’s data shows a decline in hiring of around 20% since 2022. However, he pushed back at the idea that AI was to blame. “At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills. It’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked — because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is…

Since its launch in 2021, Gizmo, an AI-powered learning platform that transforms students’ notes into interactive study materials, has attracted more than 13 million users across over 120 countries. This is a significant jump from the more than 300,000 users the platform had when TechCrunch last covered it in 2023.  And, as user adoption increases, investor interest is following suit. The company recently secured $22 million in Series A funding, according to its announcement on Tuesday. The funding will go toward expanding Gizmo’s engineering and AI teams, as well as expanding its presence in the U.S. college market. The company,…

After helping lead the lawsuit that bankrupted media firm Gawker, Aron D’Souza says he saw something broken in the American media system: People who felt harmed by coverage had little recourse to fight back. His solution is software. D’Souza says his latest startup, Objection, aims to use AI to adjudicate the truth of journalism. And for the price of $2,000, anyone can pay to challenge a story, triggering a public investigation into its claims. (D’Souza is also the founder of the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-style competition that allows performance-enhancing drugs and is set to debut in Las Vegas next month.) Objection…

Google announced on Wednesday that it’s introducing a native Gemini app for Mac, catching up to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have had Mac apps for quite some time. “Now, you can bring up Gemini from anywhere on your Mac with a quick shortcut (Option + Space) to get help instantly, without ever switching tabs,” Google explained in its blog post. “Whether you’re drafting a market report and need to verify a date or building a budget in a spreadsheet and need the right formula, you can get an answer and get right back to work.” When using the…

When Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc got COVID despite being vaccinated and boosted, he tried to fund research for a better solution. What he quickly found out? You can’t just write a check in biotech. Regulators require a commercialization plan, and philanthropy doesn’t move science through clinical trials or get you a license on university IP. Now, he’s bootstrapping a cancer drug platform targeting pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 90% of its patients, and intentionally waiting to raise from his network until peer-reviewed papers can make his case.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Aloe Blacc to talk about what happens when a creator decides to build instead of just invest, how…