TECH TRENDS AND LATEST HACKS

  This past Wednesday, 17 December, the governments gathered at the United Nations agreed on their vision for the future of the digital ecosystem, including the Internet. By adopting the outcome document of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 review, they reaffirmed their commitment to the conditions that have enabled the Internet to thrive: a model that allows for the inclusion of diverse expertise—the multistakeholderism approach—paired with a permanent mandate for the Internet Governance Forum. This decision is a significant victory and a recognition of the conditions that have made the Internet such a successful, collective project. The WSIS+20 Review in Retrospective The timing of this process was set 10 years ago, during  the WSIS+10 review . In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly requested an intergovernmental process, involving all stakeholders, to assess the implementation of the WSIS outcomes by 2025.  A lot has happen...

  Governments around the world are passing online age restrictions in an attempt to keep children and teens safe online. While often well-intentioned, age check requirements pose significant risks to people’s privacy, security, and access to an open Internet.   Strong protections and independent oversight are necessary to ensure these policies achieve the goal of improving online safety. Without this, age check requirements become entry points for data breaches and close off people’s access to online services.  The current global patchwork of requirements is also fragmenting the open, global Internet. A lack of common standards leads to incompatible systems across borders, unequal access to online services, and reduced trust in the Internet.  Everyone deserves a safe, secure, and trustworthy online experience. That’s why effective online age restrictions must mitigate these risks for everyone and guarantee young people have access to safe, age-appropriate conten...

  In September 2025, the Internet Society organized its first-ever Africa Cybersecurity (Encryption) Advocacy Workshop in Windhoek, Namibia, held alongside the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa ( FIFAfrica ), a leading regional convening on digital rights and governance that brings policymakers, advocates, technologists, and journalists together to shape an open, secure Internet.  Building on the success of  our earlier event in Brussels , our team developed this workshop in collaboration with steering committee members of the  Global Encryption Coalition . The three-day workshop equipped leading African civil society organizations with the technical grounding, policy context, and advocacy tools necessary to defend strong encryption and advocate for robust cybersecurity across the continent. Over three days, Internet Society staff, together with partners and regional experts, led high-impact discussions and practical sessions on encryp...

  Market research is a  $90 billion  industry that helps brands figure out how to best present themselves to potential customers. But that market insight isn’t cheap, nor is it quick.  Cashew Research  wants to change that using AI. Calgary, Alberta-based Cashew uses AI to develop market research plans and surveys for brands based on what information they are looking for — like what their brand recognition is for a specific population or how a marketing tagline resonates with customers. Cashew then sends the survey to real people and uses AI to summarize and digest the findings. Cashew was one of the 200 startups chosen for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition in 2025 and won the Enterprise Stage pitch competition at  TechCrunch Disrupt . “You can use an LLM to try to do deep research and get answers to your questions, or you could use a firm that’s going to be really expensive,” Addy Graves, co-founder and CEO of Cashew, told TechCrunch in describi...

  Naveen Rao, the former head of AI at Databricks, has raised $475 million in seed capital at a $4.5 billion valuation for his new startup,  Unconventional AI . The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC. The funding is a first installment toward the goal of up to $1 billion for the round,  Rao told Bloomberg . TechCrunch was first to report, back in October,  that Unconventional AI was seeking this mega funding  for Rao’s new startup, although the final valuation is marginally lower than the $5 billion sources told us he was seeking. If he does eventually raise as much as $1 billion, we’ll see how that impacts his company’s value. Unconventional AI is set on building a new, energy-efficient computer for AI. Rao previously  wrote on X  that his goal is to create a computer that is “as efficient as biology.” Databricks acquired Rao’s previous startup,  MosaicML in 2023 , for $1.3 b...

  It’s been quite the year for CoreWeave. In March, the AI cloud infrastructure provider went public in one of the biggest and most anticipated IPOs of the year that  didn’t live up to its hype. Another setback took place in October, when a planned acquisition of the cloud provider’s business partner, Core Scientific,  faltered  due to skepticism from the acquisition target’s shareholders.  In the meantime, the firm has acquired a number of different companies, its stock has  gone up  and  down , and it’s been both  criticized  and  lauded  for its role in the booming AI data center market.  In an interview at the Fortune Brainstorm AI summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, CoreWeave’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Intrator, defended his company’s performance from critics, noting that it was in the midst of creating a “new business model” for how cloud computing can be built and run. Their collection of Nvidia GPUs is so valuab...

  Fal, a startup that hosts image, video, and audio AI models for developers, has  announced  that it raised a $140 million Series D led by Sequoia, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Nvidia, and other existing investors. Its existing investors include Andreessen Horowitz, among others. The round, which was Fal’s third fundraise this year, valued the company at $4.5 billion, about three times what the company was worth when it raised its $125 million Series C in July,  Bloomberg reported . TechCrunch reported  in October that Fal raised a new round from investors, including Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins at a valuation of over $4 billion. We also reported at the time that the raise was around $250 million, according to our sources. This higher amount reflects the $140 million capital raised from the company and a secondary sale where existing investors sold shares, people familiar with the deal tell TechCrunch. Fal provides the infrastructure layer for multim...

SpaceX is planning to go public in mid-to-late 2026 and is looking to raise $30 billion at a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, according to a   new report   from Bloomberg News citing multiple unidentified sources. That would make it the largest IPO of all time, edging out Saudi Aramco’s public listing in 2019, which brought in $29 billion. It would also be a bit of a reversal for SpaceX, which previously considered spinning off its Starlink division for an IPO, while keeping the main company private. Bloomberg’s report comes just a few days after The Information was first to report that Elon Musk’s space company was  targeting  a late 2026 IPO. The Wall Street Journal also  recently  broke the news that SpaceX was engaged in another secondary share sale for employees that would peg the company’s current valuation at around $800 billion. Bloomberg’s report says SpaceX has “firmed up” that share sale in recent days and the valuation is above the $800 billio...

  Hinge CEO Justin McLeod is  stepping down  from his role to launch a new AI dating product called Overtone. Match Group, the dating giant that owns apps like Hinge, Tinder, and OkCupid, is backing Overtone with pre-seed financing and plans to take a “substantial ownership position,” according to a press release. With Match’s support, Overtone was incubated as a project inside of Hinge. McLeod and a dedicated team spent the year developing the idea of Overtone, which is described as “an early-stage dating service focused on using AI and voice tools to help people connect in a more thoughtful and personal way.” McLeod isn’t the only dating app founder branching out into new, standalone AI experiences. Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble, said  she wants to use AI  to make “the world’s smartest and most emotionally intelligent matchmaker in existence.” Somewhat infamously, Wolfe Herd  proposed  the idea last year of singles using AI to stand-in for th...