TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition narrowed thousands of applicants down to 200 top contenders. Among them, these seven space and defense startups stood out for their innovative approaches to propulsion, AI, and navigation.
A rumor claimed Asus would start selling its own RAM by the second half of 2026 to combat ongoing shortages. The company has now flatly denied those plans, stating that building a memory chip factory is a multi-year, high-risk endeavor that wouldn’t solve the current supply crisis.
The story of a covert Chinese lab building a working EUV lithography machine is falling apart. A new analysis reveals the prototype is a nonfunctional collection of mismatched parts, incapable of making a single chip.
Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is back with a new venture, Dazzle AI. The startup just raised funding at a $35 million valuation and plans to launch its first product within months. Mayer shut down her previous company, Sunshine, to focus on this new AI effort.
Venture capital is pouring into the creator economy, but the focus has sharply split. About $1.2 billion went to AI content creation startups like Synthesia, while social shopping platforms like Whatnot pulled in hundreds of millions more. The funding boom highlights two competing visions for the fu
Researchers have created the world’s smallest programmable, autonomous robot. At just 200 by 300 micrometers, it’s smaller than a freckle and can operate for months powered by light.
The open-source firmware project Coreboot has dropped its year-end update, and it’s packing some serious hardware support. Version 25.12 brings official backing for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1E80100 and a proof-of-concept for next-gen AMD Turin, signaling a major push into modern platforms.
TSMC is struggling under the weight of overwhelming AI demand from clients like NVIDIA and AMD. The chip giant faces severe labor shortages and skyrocketing capital spending as it races to expand capacity. This “one-man show” in the foundry market is creating major bottlenecks.
According to a science journalist, we consistently misread science fiction by either fetishizing its dystopian tech or treating it as a literal blueprint. Both mistakes blind us to the genre’s real power: to question the world as it is.
Manufacturing is entering a new era powered by agentic AI. Systems that adapt in real-time are cutting defects and downtime, with giants like BMW and Tesla leading the charge. The financial stakes are massive.
