Tech Market & VC news — Thursday 05 November 2026

TechCrunch 22:40 UTC

Airbnb says its upcoming AI agent will help travelers plan trips, compare options, manage bookings, and get assistance throughout their stay.

Wired Business 21:37 UTC

As Anthropic maintains its vow to keep ads out of Claude, the rest of the AI chatbot industry is racing to win over advertisers without antagonizing users.

TechCrunch 21:15 UTC

Serve Robotics announced alonsgside its third-quarter earnings that it will launch a new business line called Physical AI Services to offer customers its connectivity and data tools.

YourStory (India) 20:31 UTC

What if booking a cab, sending a message or managing a meeting required nothing more than a flick of your thumb? Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based startup Aina believes the next phase of artificial intelligence will be less about asking…

Fast Company Tech 20:31 UTC

The midterms are shaping up to be a record-breaking election for Democrats, who have flipped states including South Carolina and Texas. But the election has also shattered records for private political spending. By some estimates, super…

CB Insights 20:18 UTC

Ben Colman , CEO of Reality Defender , tells CB Insights how they view the market, customer needs, and their company. How do you define the market you compete in and what is a customer basically buying from you? We work in deep fake and…

Fast Company Tech 20:00 UTC

Anthropic is developing its artificial intelligence systems around twice as quickly as it was a year ago amid the CEO’s calls to slow down the technology’s pace of improvement, according to an analysis released Thursday by an independent…

TechCrunch 19:48 UTC

Meta's AI agent can now take calls as a customizable animated avatar, ahead of the launch of a Tamagotchi-like wearable designed to bring Muse to life.

TechCrunch 19:12 UTC

Meta warns that growing political opposition to data centers could threaten future AI investments, as communities push back against massive infrastructure projects.

TechCrunch 19:06 UTC

OpenAI's newest cybersecurity model comes out as AI labs face scrutiny of their work to protect digital infrastructure.

TechCrunch 18:48 UTC

A joint U.S. government statement says the hacks are affecting the food, transportation, and healthcare industries after reports of global mass hacks.

TechCrunch 18:02 UTC

Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference on Wednesday, the executive touted how the company had been gaining ground in the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic had already successfully made inroads.

TechCrunch 18:00 UTC

Stephen Ward, a former Secret Service agent and Home Depot CISO, is preparing a second fund of roughly $250 million for Brightmind Partners.

TechCrunch 18:00 UTC

With Personal Finance in Claude, users can connect their bank and card accounts through Plaid and ask questions about their finances.

TechCrunch 17:52 UTC

The Los Angeles-based startup has now raised more than $650 million, and is working on electric trucks, emergency vehicles, and a driverless platform for the military.

TechCabal (Africa) 17:22 UTC

OPay’s October 9 Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectus suggested that the company did not expect to require approval from Chinese regulators to list on the New York Stock Exchange. But a last-minute regulatory inquiry from China…

TechCrunch 17:11 UTC

Following years of fundraising, acquisitions, and expansion, food delivery startup Wonder is moving closer to becoming a publicly traded company.

Fast Company Tech 17:00 UTC

Welcome to AI Decoded , Fast Company ‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company , covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive…

TechCabal (Africa) 16:44 UTC

LG leads South Korea’s laundry and refrigeration markets, and is now pushing connected appliances in the Middle East and Africa, where it already sells other products like home entertainment devices. But where power cuts are common…

Wired Business 16:26 UTC

Alexis Ohanian is trying to figure out what’s next for user-generated content now that so much of the internet is “compromised.”

TechCrunch 16:16 UTC

As AI floods math with unchecked proofs, Axiom Math is betting on verification. The startup’s AI agents just formally verified the Stacks Project, one of the field’s biggest libraries.

TechCabal (Africa) 16:04 UTC

Web3Bridge, the Nigerian developer training organisation that has trained blockchain engineers since 2019, is expanding into startup incubation and plans to charge entrepreneurs for its new founder residency programme. The shift is a bet…

Crunchbase News 16:00 UTC

Siggy has raised $6 million in pre-seed funding to build a mental health service that uses AI to collect patients’ histories and track progress between appointments with licensed clinicians, the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively…

EU-Startups 15:47 UTC

The European Commission has adopted the 2027 European Innovation Council (EIC) Work Programme, allocating €1.8 billion to support DeepTech startups, scale-ups and researchers across Europe. The funding package aims to help promising…

TechCrunch 15:44 UTC

Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider said posts and likes doubled during to the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday.

TechCrunch 15:40 UTC

Zipline raised $1.5 billion and ramped up its partnership with Walmart.

TechCrunch 15:33 UTC

The app will offer personalized product recommendations, shopping through livestreams and short-form videos, app-exclusive deals, in-app checkout, order tracking, and customer support.

TechCrunch 15:19 UTC

The deal is expected to support the development of DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform aimed at developers building AI models and agents.

YourStory (India) 15:06 UTC

In February 2026, India moved its GDP base year to 2022-23. The National Accounts of India brought in new data sources and reassessed the size of the informal economy. The exercise carried a lesson that policy debates often forget…

TechCrunch 15:00 UTC

The move puts Edits in more direct competition with ByteDance's CapCut, the video-editing app Meta sought to challenge when it launched Edits last year.

TechCrunch 15:00 UTC

ElevenLabs said more than 25 million tracks have been generated using its music models.

TechCrunch 14:42 UTC

Aina's ring can also take calls and help you dictate notes on your Mac.

TechCabal (Africa) 14:03 UTC

Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, chairman of Nigerian tier-1 lender Access Bank Group and financial services holding company Coronation Group, argues that African financial institutions must move beyond financial stability to productive finance…

Crunchbase News 14:00 UTC

Dropbox announced Thursday plans to acquire Tigris Data for $350 million in a transaction the company told Crunchbase News would mark its largest acquisition since its founding in 2007. Founded by former Uber engineers, Sunnyvale…

TechCrunch 14:00 UTC

The system can supposedly answer queries four times faster, with 20% fewer errors and 90% fewer tokens used.

TechCrunch 14:00 UTC

Today’s portable devices are too hungry to run on traditional solar panels, but RadianX says its perovskite cells promise to make charging obsolete in some cases.

YourStory (India) 13:43 UTC

Shiprocket, an ecommerce enablement platform for MSMEs, turned profitable in the second quarter of FY27, reporting a net profit of Rs 60 lakh for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, against a net loss of Rs 20.3 crore in the…

YourStory (India) 13:35 UTC

Cosmoserve Space, a Hyderabad-based spacetech startup, has raised $6 million in a seed round of funding from Rebright Partners of Japan, Aranya Holdings, and Naandi Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investors AUM…

YourStory (India) 13:15 UTC

Daksham Capital, a multi-family office and private wealth management group, has raised Rs 125 crore as the first close of its Daksham Growth Ventures (DGV) Fund I. According to a statement, DGV Fund I has a target corpus of Rs 300 crore…

TechCabal (Africa) 13:04 UTC

In car importing, business owners must find the vehicle and pay the auction house, which could be in another country. This proved harder than expected for Sheriff Adedokun, a serial entrepreneur who founded Clea, a cross-border payments…

TechCrunch 13:00 UTC

While frontier AI models have solved a remarkable series of outstanding mathematics problems and made progress in the life sciences, they have yet to truly plumb the complex physics in advanced materials.

Wired Business 13:00 UTC

Potential Sciences, a startup backed by the UK government, is betting that training AI models on computer-generated biochemical data can speed up the plodding process of developing new drugs.

YourStory (India) 12:52 UTC

Media-focused Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company Amagi registered a sharp increase in net profit in the second quarter of FY27, while revenue grew 27% year-on-year. Amagi's net profit for the second quarter (July-September) of FY27 stood…

EU-Startups 12:10 UTC

Munich-based aviation startup VÆRIDION has raised €30 million in a Series A2 funding round and selected for a €94.5 million grant from the European Commission’s Innovation Fund, bringing the combined value to €124.5 million. The investment…

Crunchbase News 12:00 UTC

Construction companies are struggling to find enough workers. For startups, that means venture investors are pouring money into companies betting that robots can help close the gap. Companies spanning construction and robotics have raised…

TechCrunch 12:00 UTC

Agility arrives on the Nasdaq today as the first publicly traded pure-play humanoid robotics company.

EU-Startups 11:50 UTC

Green Voltis , a Stockholm-based route-to-market (RTM) optimiser that uses AI to operate and trade battery storage across European power markets, has raised €13.5 million in a Series A round, with Lochpine Capital as the sole investor. The…

YourStory (India) 11:38 UTC

AI agents are starting to run real parts of a business, from finding customers to processing complaints. For banks, fintech companies, and enterprises, that raises a basic question: how far can an agent be trusted to act on its own? Pine…

EU-Startups 11:31 UTC

Europe’s startup ecosystem is home to a growing community of women business angels who back promising founders, support early-stage innovation, and help shape the next generation of successful companies. Beyond providing capital, these…

YourStory (India) 11:13 UTC

AI models are becoming increasingly accessible, but turning them into products that work reliably remains a challenge, particularly when enterprises are dealing with fragmented data infrastructure. At TechSparks 2026, Michael Cronin, Vice…

Fast Company Tech 11:04 UTC

Bluesky is a niche Twitter-clone frequently accused of being an echo chamber for progressives. After the blue tsunami of this week’s midterms, however, its inhabitants don’t seem to be echoing themselves so much as the vast majority of…

Stratechery 11:00 UTC

Listen to this post: Good morning, This week’s Stratechery Interview is with Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi . Goodarzi took a very non-traditional path to Silicon Valley, joining Intuit in 2004 after working at Siemens and Honeywell. After…

TechCrunch 11:00 UTC

Amazon has made Uber Eats its official restaurant delivery partner for Prime members in the United States.

YourStory (India) 10:41 UTC

Venture capital funding into business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce companies in India dropped 33% in the ten months of the year, according to a report by Tracxn. The report titled 'India B2C E-Commerce' noted that, between January 1, 2026…

EU-Startups 10:33 UTC

Founded in 2021, AppliedAI builds Opus, the AI transformation platform that rewires how enterprises run and ties every change to the bottom line. Many companies have tested AI, but few have scaled it across their workflows and systems…

Fast Company Tech 10:25 UTC

Mike Harrington and Darrin Massena think that making an app with AI is still too hard. While you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to build something for you, that demands at least some awareness of programming frameworks and hosting options. AI…

YourStory (India) 10:16 UTC

As AI changes how software is developed, tested, and deployed, developers are having to learn new tools and adapt to new ways of working. From autonomous coding agents and multi-agent systems to AI-powered infrastructure and cybersecurity…

EU-Startups 10:07 UTC

Key points: Why existing agricultural drones on the market fell short on reliability, and why ABZ decided to build its own hardware from the ground up How technology is transforming the day-to-day work of farmers, even in a sector that…

Fast Company Tech 10:00 UTC

Connie Collins, a 25-year-old sex educator, walked through the unlocked door of a stylish apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to find a man lying naked and face down on a bed. “I put on a strap and just started strapping away at him,” she…

Fast Company Tech 10:00 UTC

“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” wrote a New Mexico judge who ordered tech giant Meta to pay one of the largest data privacy case penalties in American history. The $25 billion fine came in a case about how Trump…

Fast Company Tech 10:00 UTC

Data centers were on the ballot this election, and they lost. While results from the midterm elections are still coming in, as of November 4, 38 out of 39 restrictions on data centers had passed—from temporary moratoriums on new…

YourStory (India) 09:33 UTC

Blinkit Ambulance, the free service from the quick commerce company, will now start charging Rs 2,500 for non-emergency transfers. “Emergency transfers–free, as always. Non-emergency transfers–₹2,500, charged after the trip. Broadly in…

YourStory (India) 09:20 UTC

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) on Wednesday flagged multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in specific versions of Tata Motors' iRA 2.0 and iRA.ev connected vehicle applications, warning that they could expose…

EU-Startups 09:19 UTC

Kabilio , a Barcelona-based startup building an AI platform for accounting firms and the small businesses they serve, has closed a €10 million funding round. The round was led by Picus Capital and Visionaries; they also led Kabilio’s…

YourStory (India) 09:05 UTC

From how KumaonKhand, a social enterprise building a hemp-based ecosystem in Uttarakhand, began as a college project and became a full-time venture in 202, to how PhysicsWallah and Lenskart's doubled their profit in the second quarter of…

Fast Company Tech 09:00 UTC

“Did you see the job application from the clanker?????” was the Slack message from my editor in September, after an AI agent applied for a freelance-writer job we had advertised. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. It took me a second…

TechCabal (Africa) 08:55 UTC

Speaking on the sidelines of AFIS 2026 in Luanda, Angola, Uzoma Dozie, the former Diamond Bank chief and Sparkle MFB CEO , argues that African banking is stuck in a collateral trap, explains why digital banks must move beyond one-to-one…

TechCabal (Africa) 08:45 UTC

Safaricom , Kenya’s largest telecommunications operator, generated KES 4.9 billion ($38 million) from Fuliza, its M-PESA overdraft service that lets customers complete transactions when they lack enough money in their wallets. On Thursday…

TechCabal (Africa) 08:15 UTC

Paga, one of Africa’s oldest fintechs, is expanding its Direct Debit access to let businesses using Paga Engine, its payments infrastructure business, collect recurring payments from accounts outside its network. The move is part of Paga’s…

YourStory (India) 08:12 UTC

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory warning that hackers are attacking non-banking financial corporations with the help of artificial intelligence. Terming the threat campaign "CRAFTY FALCON", the…

TechCabal (Africa) 08:09 UTC

In 2017, Flutterwave was a company of about 50 people that had convinced Uber, the world’s largest ride-hailing company, to trust its payments infrastructure to process transactions across African markets. The company was small enough for…

EU-Startups 07:59 UTC

Sequoia Capital , one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most prominent venture capital firms, has closed its London office as part of a broader restructuring. In an announcement titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow”, the firm outlined several…

StartupDaily (AU) 06:25 UTC

Indrus grabs $750k to expose yard chaos with AI camera tracking for trucks and trailers.

YourStory (India) 06:23 UTC

Zoho has launched a point-of-sale (POS) platform for restaurants in India, with Kolkata-based sweet shop Asha Sweets becoming its first customer. The product is being offered free of charge to restaurants with annual billing of up to Rs 12…

EU-Startups 06:21 UTC

FluoRok , an Oxford-based chemical manufacturing startup that has developed a patented process to produce fluorochemicals without using highly hazardous hydrogen fluoride (HF), has secured a €26.64 million ($30 million) Series A financing…

TechCabal (Africa) 06:14 UTC

In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Wazzup. Yellow Card, the stablecoin infrastructure company and one of the sector’s most-funded startups, launched in Africa in 2019, before expanding into other emerging markets…

StartupDaily (AU) 05:10 UTC

EDGE gives people leadership drills and skills used by high performers in business, the military and sport.

StartupDaily (AU) 04:47 UTC

AI-native hiring punishes résumé spam. Treat yourself like a product, target the 5% who matter, and start planting career seeds now.

YourStory (India) 02:03 UTC

Bariflo Cybernetics wants factories to get more use out of their wastewater treatment plants. The Odisha-based startup combines sensors, AI software and automation to adjust treatment processes, aiming to reduce the energy and chemicals…

YourStory (India) 02:00 UTC

Dear Reader, The earnings season is in full swing. PhysicsWallah, Lenskart and Nykaa were among the major Indian companies that reported their Q2FY27 results yesterday. Expanding scale and cost efficiencies helped PhysicsWallah post a…

TechCrunch 01:26 UTC

The tokenmaxxing frenzy has been short-lived as bills for said tokens came due, and companies decided that token rationing might be a more fiscally sensible approach.

TechCrunch 01:02 UTC

Data center opposition crossed party lines in Tuesday’s midterms.

YourStory (India) 00:30 UTC

Specialty chemicals startup altM has raised $10.3 million in a Series A funding round, with Rainmatter by Zerodha and Mela Ventures joining as new investors. Existing backers Omnivore, Theia Ventures, Aureolis Ventures and Spectrum Impact…

StartupDaily (AU) 00:22 UTC

AI health unicorn Heidi slashes 18% of staff and loses two cofounders weeks after a $475m boost.