TECH TRENDS AND LATEST HACKS

  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...

  Aircraft startup  Boom Supersonic  said Tuesday it will start selling a version of its turbine engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe. Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom’s 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about a turbine factory next year, with first deliveries occurring in 2027. To commercialize its Superpower stationary turbine, Boom raised $300 million in a round led by Darsana Capital Partners with participation from Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, Bessemer Venture Partners, Robinhood Ventures, and Y Combinator.  Profits from the sale of Superpower units will go toward funding continued development of the company’s Overture supersonic aircraft, Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl told TechCrunch. It’s an arrangement that Scholl likens to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The satellite internet service is  ...