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After a deepfake voice fooled her grandfather, this founder sprang into action

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When the call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather believed he was talking to his brother. The voice on the other end of the line said he’d been kidnapped and that the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom. Her grandfather paid, only to learn later that his brother had been somewhere else entirely, with no clue any of it was happening. The voice, it turned out, was a deepfake, an AI-generated imitation. “What stayed with me wasn’t the money,” Padmanabhuni says of the incident. “It was that…

Unclassified

Next five VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 contenders at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

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Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from around the world. Now comes the part everyone has been waiting for. Startup Battlefield 200 is almost here, and with today’s announcement, the judging panel is nearly complete. In just a couple of weeks, 200 carefully selected startups will gather at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to exhibit, meet investors, and compete for one of the most coveted opportunities in the startup world. Only a select group will advance to the live competition, where they’ll pitch in front…

AI Audio

Modulate raises $25M for its voice models and analysis suite

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Boston-based voice intelligence startup Modulate has raised $25 in new funding for its platform that uses an array of small models to offer enterprises transcription, emotional analysis, deepfake and AI music detection, and policy enforcement for voice agents in regulated industries. The funding follows a popular trend among investors in the growing voice AI industry: backing companies that are trying to make AI voices sound more human. It also rivals other companies trying to detect the intent behind human conversation by analyzing it, and those trying to protect people and…

Business use

The SaaSpocalypse that wasn’t, with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes

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Mike Cannon-Brookes on AI in the enterprise, Atlassian’s new org chart, and why chatbots aren’t the future of work. Today, I’m talking with Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is cofounder and CEO of Atlassian. Atlassian is one of those companies that every other company runs on — it makes important platform tools like Jira and Trello that allow people to organize and manage big teams, create shared databases of company information, and generally allow work to happen. As you’ll hear Mike say, all of Atlassian’s products are actually different expressions of a…

Coding & Development

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe vs OpenAI’s GPT-Transcribe

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Here's how each got to where it is, a real use case and working code for both, and a side-by-side on the numbers that actually matter.

Unclassified

Your final chance to grab your exhibit table at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is Oct. 2

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This is the last week and your final opportunity to book your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 exhibit table. Book your exhibit table by this Friday, October 2, at 11:59 p.m. PT. After that, all exhibit table bookings close for good. If you missed the original deadline, this is your final opportunity to put your startup on the Expo Hall floor, the center of the event. Disrupt takes place October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, bringing together 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders looking for the next breakthroughs and…

Finance

Insuretech Outmarket raises $34.5M just months after prior round

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Vishal Sankhala led product at a digital life insurance distributor Ethos before it went public earlier this year. In late 2023, the seasoned engineering executive, who had previously worked at Facebook and Uber, left Ethos and launched Outmarket, a startup that uses AI to help insurance agencies and brokers automate all their tedious paperwork. “Ninety-five percent of insurance in the U.S. and worldwide is still sold through [human] agents, and when you look at sort of like how the process is today, it’s very manual,” Sankhala told TechCrunch. “This is…

Automation & Agents

Viral AI agent Instinct raises $1B Series C at a $10B valuation

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It’s only been a month since AI assistant startup Instinct announced a fundraise that valued it at $2.5 billion, and now the company has already raised another $1 billion, from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue, valuing the company at $10 billion. The news of the company’s fundraising efforts was reported earlier this month by The Information. In a press release on Monday, Instinct confirmed this was a Series C round — a pretty quick growth round for a startup that launched its invite-only service in August 2026.…

Safety & Security

Nvidia says its new AI safety platform can contain rogue agents within ‘milliseconds’

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Nvidia is launching a new safety platform designed to contain and monitor AI agents, a move that comes in response to a wave of rogue hacking incidents, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an announcement on Monday, Nvidia says its new Open Agent Safety Platform can quarantine agents that

Business use

Launching Meta Enterprise Platform

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We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses. Meta already serves billions of people at scale and helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers. Today we are starting the next major pillar of our business, Meta Enterprise Platform, to help businesses use AI to grow and transform in new ways as well. Meta Enterprise Platform will use our strengths that few other companies have: advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses. Initially, we will focus on bringing…

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Coding & Development

3 Numba Tricks for Python Runtime Optimization

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When Numba code disappoints, it's nearly never the compiler, and usually ends up being the boundary around the compiled code: not crossing it, not making it wide enough, or crossing it during every run.

Governance

OpenAI Pauses Training Its Most Powerful Models After Rogue Agents Target Government

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OpenAI said it has paused training its most powerful artificial intelligence models as incidents of agents breaching websites’ security controls or posting to third-party sites continue to pile up. On Friday, OpenAI said it had notified “dozens” of bodies, including governments, universities, and public agencies, who might have been impacted by its models’ activities on the internet during training and evaluation. The company has identified cases of OpenAI agents breaching security controls and impairing the availability—or otherwise negatively impacting—websites and online services. A company spokesperson confirmed to WIRED it would…