Latest AI News
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch signals IPO readiness as AI agents fuel revenue surge
While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel, a 10-year-old dev tool and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents. “When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at theHumanXconference in San Francisco last week. “Now we’re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.” The explosion inapp creationby non-developers has been a significant boon to Vercel’s business. The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from$100 millionat the beginning of 2024, as reported by The Information, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according toForbes. Given that growth, Rauch was asked onstage about his IPO plans. He suggested the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity. “Vercel is very much a working public company,” Rauch said. As for when the debut will happen, he replied: “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company’s ready and getting more ready for it every day.” 2026 was expected to be a strong year for new listings, but a sharp sell-off in software, fueled by the fear of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, most talk of public debuts has largely ceased. Once any of those company’s go public, all expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again. Meanwhile most tech CEOs have gone quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch is telegraphing the company’s public market readiness, suggesting that Vercel is eyeing a listing in the not-too-distant future. When pressed about what Wall Street should know about Vercel, Rauch responded: “The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling.” Vercel is betting that as more apps are created by AI agents instead of humans, the company will become the primary platform for hosting everything agents develop. “Agents are very prolific at deploying,” Rauch said, adding that 30% of the apps running on the company’s platform already came from agents. According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to purchase existing software. “All of that software… it needs to go somewhere, and we think it’s going to be Vercel,” he said. Vercel was last valued at $9.3 billion when it raised a $300 million Series F led by Accel in September. The company competes with Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services for hosting services, and it also offers v0, a vibe coding tool for creating websites and apps.
View
This Startup Wants to Fix India’s GPU Shortage by Turning Chips into Real Estate
Compute Labs is building a model in which investors own GPUs and earn from their use across AI workloads.
View
Europeans Do Not Trust China, US Tech Companies With Their Data: Survey
A new survey has found that Europeans do not trust Chinese and US-based tech companies when it comes to handling their data. The findings are important at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) companies based out of these two countries have started gaining a user base from across the globe. With individuals in major European countries taking a generally negative outlook towards foreign technology and products, this also becomes an important moment for the EU to bolster homegrown AI technology and push native tools as an alternative.
View
PhysicsWallah, Microsoft to Offer AI Courses Across Tier-2, 3 Cities
The programmes will be delivered through PW Skills and will integrate tools such as Microsoft Copilot, GitHub, and Microsoft Office 365.
View
How AI is Forcing Data Centers to Trade Uptime for Raw Power
As AI diversifies into training, inference, and hybrid workloads, operators are abandoning the one-size-fits-all approach for data centre infrastructure.
View
The Tech Players Powering India’s Predictive Police Push
Hyderabad Police’s AI deployment comes as city law enforcement agencies increasingly integrate digital intelligence into policing.
View
Indian IT Cannot Escape AI Cannibalisation
From TCS to Infosys and HCLTech, firms admit AI is eroding legacy revenues even as new growth builds.
View
The largest orbital compute cluster is open for business
For all the hype about data centers in space, there just aren’t very many GPUs up there. As that starts to change, the near-term business of orbital compute is starting to take shape. The largest compute cluster currently in orbit was launched by Canada’s Kepler Communications in January, and boasts about 40 Nvidia Orin edge processors onboard 10 operational satellites, all linked together by laser communications links. The company now has 18 customers, and announced its newest on Monday — Sophia Space, a startup that will test the software for itsunique orbital computeronboard Kepler’s constellation. Experts expect that we won’t see large-scale data centers like those envisioned by SpaceX or Blue Origin until the 2030s. The first step will be processing data that is collected in orbit to improve the capabilities of space-based sensors used by private companies and government agencies. Kepler doesn’t see itself as a data center company, but as infrastructure for applications in space, CEO Mina Mitry tells TechCrunch. It wants to be a layer that provides network services for other satellites in space, or drones and aircraft in the sky below. Sophia, on the other hand, is developing passively-cooled space computers that could solve one of thekey challengesfor large-scale data centers in orbit: keeping powerful processors from overheating without having to build and launch heavy, expensive active-cooling systems. In the new partnership, Sophia will upload its proprietary operating system to one of Kepler’s satellites and attempt to launch and configure it across six GPUs on two spacecraft. That sort of activity is table stakes in a terrestrial data center, and this is the first time it will be attempted in orbit. Making sure the software works in orbit will be a key de-risking exercise for Sophia ahead of its first planned satellite launch in late 2027. For Kepler, the partnership helps prove the utility of its network. Right now, it is carrying and processing data uploaded from the ground, or collected by hosted payloads on its own spacecraft. But as the sector matures, the company expects to start linking up with third-party satellites to provide networking and processing services. Mitry says satellite companies are now planning future assets around this model, pointing to the benefits of offloading processing for more power-hungry sensors, like synthetic aperture radar. The U.S. military is a key customer for that kind of work as it develops a new missile defense system predicated on satellites detecting and tracking threats. Kepler has already demonstrated a space-to-air laser link in a demo for the U.S. government. That kind of edge processing — dealing with data where it is collected for faster responsiveness — is where orbital data centers will initially prove their value. That vision sets Sophia and Kepler apart from established space companies like SpaceX andBlue Origin, or startups likeStarcloudandAetherfluxthat are raising significant capital to focus on large-scale data centers with data center-style processors. “Because we have the belief it’s more inference than training, we want more distributed GPUs that do inference, rather than one superpower GPU that has the training workload capacity,” Mitry told TechCrunch. “If this thing consumes kilowatts of power and you’re only running at 10% of the time, then that’s not super helpful. In our case, our GPUs are running 100% of the time.” And once these technologies are proven in orbit, well, anything can happen. Sophia CEO Rob DeMillo points out that Wisconsin adopted a ban on data center construction last week, something some lawmakers in Congress are also pushing. Anything that limits data centers on Earth is, in their eyes, making the space-based alternative more attractive. “There’s no more data centers in this country,” Demillo mused. “It’s gonna get weird from here.”
View
Accenture Invests in Replit, Partners to Scale Vibe-Coded Software
Replit offers a cloud-based platform that integrates coding environments, AI-assisted development, collaboration tools, and hosting.
View
Is India Ready for Drone Warfare? The Weakest Link is the Obvious
With the use of drones in the conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia, India is now stepping up its defence adoption.
View
Ramp’s AI Coworker Turns Employee Workflows Into Reusable Skills
“When one person on a team figures out a better workflow, everyone on that team gets it and gets more productive.”
View
New Research Finds Seven ‘Deadly’ Vulnerabilities in AI Benchmarks
A study from UC Berkeley showed how easy it is to game popular AI model evaluation tests.
View