Latest AI News
Musk’s xAI is being sued over its data center generators — now it’s buying $2.8B more
Elon Musk’s xAI has gotten itself inhot waterover its use of polluting generators at its data center near Memphis, Tennessee. Now it wants to buy even more of them. InSpaceX’s IPO filing, released Wednesday, the company said its xAI division will buy another $2.8 billion worth of turbines for its AI infrastructure over the next three years. One deal, worth $2 billion, is specifically for “mobile gas turbines,” the kind that it’s currently being sued over. The NAACP filed alawsuitagainst xAI last month for operatingdozens of unregulated gas turbinesthat worsen the air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country. The organization has sought an injunction against xAI’s use of the turbines. So far, xAI has beengranted permitsfor 15 turbines. As of a few weeks ago, it was using 46. Each of the types of turbines xAI is operating have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of NOxpollution annually, a group of chemicals that contributes to asthma-inducing smog. The company claims that it can operate the turbines for up to a year without permits because they are “mobile” — that is, they’re still on the trailer they were shipped on. The company appears to be exploiting a discrepancy between state and federal interpretations. Mississippi claims it doesn’t need to permit mobile generators. But federal regulations say that turbines of that size, even if they’re on a trailer, are still subject to air-pollution regulations. The EPA ruled earlier this year that xAI was operating the turbines in violation of federal law. SpaceX acknowledges the risks in its IPO filing. “We currently rely significantly on natural gas and gas turbine technology to power our data center operations,” it wrote. Injunctions or rescinded permits “would adversely affect our AI business.”
View
Nvidia posts another record quarter, reveals $43B of holdings in startups
Nvidia announced another record revenue figure after market close on Wednesday, reporting financial results for the quarter ending April 26. Over those three months, the company brought in $81.6 billion in revenue (up 20% from the previous quarter) and a record $75.2 billion in data center revenue. On the strength of that revenue, the company is authorizing $80 billion in share repurchases. “Our Blackwell architecture is everywhere, adopted and deployed by every major hyperscaler, every cloud provider, and every major model maker,” said Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Notably, Nvidia did project a slowdown in revenue growth, forecasting $91 billion in revenue for the next quarter, which will be 12% growth. Chinese exports did not make any significant impact on the company’s earnings. While H200s have been approved for U.S. export, “we have yet to generate any revenue, and we are uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into [China],” Kress said. One surprise was the sheer volume of Nvidia’s stakes in privately held companies (listed in the filing as “non-marketable equity securities”), which nearly doubled between January and April. The company began the quarter with $22 billion in privately held stakes, but ended with $43 billion, driven primarily by $18.5 billion in purchases over the course of the quarter. The previous quarter had seen only $649 million of equivalent purchases. Notably, that figure does not include Nvidia’s recent investment in publicly traded companies like Corning and IREN, nor does it reflect future commitments that have not yet closed. Nvidia committed to investing $30 billion in OpenAI in February, although the precise structure of the deal was not disclosed. On a call discussing the results, Jensen Huang emphasized the broad scope of Nvidia’s impact, including a pending buildout with Anthropic. “The amount of capacity we’re going to bring online for Anthropic this year and next year is going to be quite significant,” Huang told investors on a call. “Our coverage for Anthropic had been largely zero until this.”
View
xAI burned $6.4B last year — SpaceX’s IPO filing shows why the spending is far from over
Elon Musk’s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on just $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according toSpaceX’s IPO filings. And the losses are poised to grow. SpaceX’s filing reveals plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters,” a dramatic boost that will likely require significant additional compute spend. Elon Musk merged his AI company xAI — which had previously acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) — with his rocket and satellite companySpaceX in Februarybefore announcing that he’d take the combined company public this year. While AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also eyeing public debuts in 2026, SpaceX’s is expected to be one of the largest in history with a potential $1.75 trillion valuation. Thefilingmarks the first public glimpses into xAI, and therefore X’s, financials. In 2024, xAI recorded a loss of $1.56 billion on $2.62 billion in revenue. By 2025, losses had ballooned to $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion, meaning the gap between what xAI earns and spends is widening. Meanwhile, competitor (and customer) Anthropicreportedlyexpects a 130% revenue jump to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, leading to its first operating profit. The jump in revenue from 2024 to 2025 came in large part from “AI solutions and infrastructure revenue” totaling $465 million, which includes $365 million in X and Grok subscription revenue and $88 million in data licensing. An additional $116 million came from advertising. AI segment capital expenditures climbed from $12.7 billion in 2025 to $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That’s an annualized capex run rate of about $30.8 billion, more than doubling year-over-year. So far, that investment has resulted in growing, but still limited, user numbers. Per the filing, SpaceX recorded 117 million monthly active users (MAUs) for Grok AI features as of March 2026, out of 550 million total MAUs across Grok and X combined. That implies only one-fifth of the combined ecosystem is actively using Grok AI features. Still, SpaceX intends to soldier on with Grok; its next-generation AI is expected to scale to “multiple trillions of parameters,” which the filing describes as a “step change in reasoning in depth and overall intelligence.” It’s an ambitious target, and one that’s now recorded in the audited annals of SEC history. It’s also a target that will undoubtedly require more investment. The SpaceX filing’s “use of proceeds” section mentions an “expansion of ourAI compute infrastructure.” Per the filing, xAI’s Colossus and Colossus II data centers — both of which came online in 122 days and 91 days, respectively — collectively provide about 1 gigawatt of compute power. These are both used for Grok’s training and inference. SpaceX claims that owning the compute infrastructure and vertically integrating across the AI stack lets them “train and iterate frontier models at lower cost and higher velocity.” Another way that SpaceX might assuage investor fears about spending is by performing training and inference on orbital data centers, which Musk has promised to be a much cheaper alternative to terrestrial data centers. That sci-fi vision isn’t likely to happen for several years, though. The filing says SpaceX intends to begin deploying its orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028 — the first concrete timeline set for such a launch. “The future of AI will be determined by control of the physical stack,” the filing reads.
View
Clouted wants to take the guesswork out of making short videos go viral
It feels like short video clips from podcasts, songs, and movies are suddenly everywhere on social media right now, and that’s not an accident. Brands have realized that the format offers a highly cost-effective way to market products. Brands and marketing agencies often outsource the process of finding the most compelling 30 to 90 seconds of a video, known as “clipping,” to independent creators. But managing these gig workers and determining exactly where to distribute those videos presents a massive operational challenge. Clouted, a startup that went through a16z’s Speedrun accelerator in 2024, is building the infrastructure to automatically handle both the distribution strategy and the logistics of the clipping process. The platform taps into a network of over 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, then uses AI to determine the best social media platform and target audience for promoting them. Clouted co-founder and CEO Justin Banusing first applied the company’s technology to his personal passion: electronic music and festival production. As a longtime DJ, he used Clouted to promote and grow &Friends, a Manila-based electronic dance music and pop-culture festival that now draws over 20,000 people. Clouted’s approach has caught investor interest. The startup just announced a $7 million seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, Peak XV’s Surge, and others. Unlike purely volume-driven marketing tools, Clouted doesn’t just chase high clip counts. Instead, its AI operates a continuous testing loop, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to figure out what actually performs best. The practical effect is that each campaign makes the next one more targeted and efficient, as the system accumulates data on what works. Clouted functions somewhat like penetration testing for social media algorithms — a concept borrowed from cybersecurity, where researchers probe a system’s defenses by attempting to break them. Rather than looking for security flaws, Clouted’s AI and its network of creators test thousands of different clipping and distribution approaches to identify what triggers a piece of content to go viral. “The result is that every campaign Clouted runs makes the next one faster, smarter, and more effective,” Banusing told TechCrunch. “The platform learns which formats win, which audiences convert, and which distribution channels compound over time.” While Clouted competes directly with similar startups like Overlap AI in the automated clipping space, Banusing said he looks to larger marketing infrastructure players, specifically CreatorIQ and Hightouch, as the ultimate competition. Hightouch recently crossed$100 million in ARR, suggesting that the enterprise marketing infrastructure space is large and still expanding. That’s the market Clouted is ultimately building toward.
View
Anthropic says it’s about to have its first profitable quarter
Anthropic has told its investors that it will more than double revenue to around $10.9 billion in its second quarter, and deliver an operating profit for the first time, the Wall Street Journalreports. That’s a big milestone and fast quarter-over-quarter growth that would put it in an advantageous position relative to its chief competitor, OpenAI. However, the WSJ reports, it may not remain profitable throughout the year due to the large compute costs it’s scheduled to incur. These financials were recently shared with the company’s investors as part of a funding round. The startup has gained in popularity over the past year, as more and more professionals haveexpressed a preference for its chatbot, Claude. The company has also made recent efforts to diversify its customer base — including announcing a new service for small business owners and new tools for law firms. Interestingly, this info about Anthropic’s alleged profitability dropped the same day as news broke aboutOpenAI likely filing for its IPO soon. Anthropic declined to provide further comment.
View
Jensen Huang says he’s found a ‘brand new’ $200B market for Nvidia
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang is, perhaps, one of the greatest corporate hype men of all time when it comes to his company. He may even surpass Salesforce’s Marc Benioff when it comes to relentless optimism in his company’s future and revenues. Even so, he delivers on the hype, quarter after quarter. Instead of cautioning you to view the proclamation that he’s found a “brand new $200 billion TAM for Nvidia” with skepticism, I’d argue he’s earned a bit of trust. Huang positioned this massive new market at the feet of Nvidia’s new CPU product, Vera, which was introducedin March. Speaking on Wednesday’s earnings call — after Nvidia posted another record-breaking quarter with $81.6 billion in revenue and forecast $91 billion for the next — Huang pitched Vera as a potentially transformative product. And one that already has promising sales figures. But no matter how well Nvidia delivers, Wall Street harbors anxiety over what will knock Nvidia from its perch. Lately, such fears have centered on the CPU. Nvidia is the king of the GPU, whereas historically the CPU markets were owned by companies like Intel and AMD. (Nvidia has made CPUs previously, of course, but that’s not its core business.) For example, last month Amazon Web Services crowed about a giant contract it signed with Meta for millions ofAmazon’s homegrown AI CPUs. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been clear that he thinks AWS can do AI chips, both GPUs and CPUs, at least as well, andpossibly better than Nvidia. But now, with the Vera CPU, which is sold alone and bundled with its Rubin GPU, Huang believes he’s unlocked “a major new growth driver” for his company because Vera is, he believes, “the world’s first CPU, purpose-built for agentic AI,” Huang said on the call. “Vera opens a brand new $200 billion TAM for Nvidia, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler and system maker is partnering with us to deploy it. The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and robotic physical AI. Nvidia sits at the center of these transitions,” hype man Huang said. He explained that while the “thinking” part of an AI model uses GPUs, agents mostly run on CPUs. They use CPUs to do their assigned tasks and will, he predicts, run their own form of CPU-driven PCs. Vera is for agents because it’s specifically designed to process tokens as fast as possible. This is opposed to classic cloud architecture CPUs designed with “cores,” or the ability to run multiple instances of apps as fast as possible. That sounds logical, but with the major cloud providers as well as startups pursuing AI chip development, what makes him think that Nvidia will be the go-to source for agentic CPUs? Because, Huang says, Nvidia has already sold $20 billion worth of standalone Vera CPUs this year and we’re only at the beginning. “The world has a billion users, human users. My sense is that the world is going to have billions of agents, not today. I mean, we’re going to grow into it, but we’ll have billions of agents, and those billions of agents will all use tools. And those tools are going to be like PCs, just like us humans using using PCs today,” he said. “We’re going to need a lot more CPUs,” he explained.
View
Startup Battlefield 200 applications close in 1 week: Window to nominate and apply for the most promising startups closes May 27
Your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding is gone in a week. Startup Battlefield 200 applicationsclose May 27. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — this is the moment to act. Apply todayfor the opportunity to take the stage atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, taking place October 13-15, alongside 200 of the world’s most promising early-stage startups. Pre-Series A founders, consider this your final countdown reminder: The strongest startups are already entering the arena, and theapplication window is closing fast. If your startup has already been nominated,don’t wait to complete your application. This final week moves quickly, and last-minute submissions risk getting buried as applications surge ahead of the deadline. Know a startup that deserves the spotlight?Nominate them nowso they still have time to apply before May 27. Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with splashy fundraising announcements. They started with a pitch. Dropbox demoed to a room full of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what edge networking meant. Discord was still a scrappy gaming startup called Hammer & Chisel. They all passed through the same crucible: Startup Battlefield 200. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a pattern. And it starts with an application. Startup Battlefield 200has never been a competition for the most polished companies. It’s a competition for the most promising ones. Pre-launch is fine. No revenue is fine. What matters is whether what you’re building genuinely changes something — not incrementally, but meaningfully. If you or a founder you know is building something impactful, then the application itself becomes the first pitch.Apply before May 27. Startup Battlefield 200is where breakout companies get discovered. Selected startups will showcase live on the Disrupt Stage in front of 10,000+ attendees, leading VCs, global media, and the broader TechCrunch audience. This is your opportunity to gain investor exposure, receive direct VC feedback, and prove your company belongs among the next generation of category-defining startups. Every one of the 200 selected companies receives: And every selected company pitches, whether on the Disrupt Stage or the Pitch Showcase Stage. Both put founders in front of the investors, media, and partners who attend Disrupt specifically to find what’s next. You don’t need to make the top 20 for this experience to change your trajectory.Get started by nominating and applying here. More than 1,700 companies have competed in Startup Battlefield 200. Together, they’ve raised over $32 billion and generated more than 250 exits, including acquisitions by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon. The network runs so deep that alumni have even acquired each other: Dropbox acquired fellow Battlefield 200 alum DocSend in 2021. This is also the same launchpad that helped accelerate companies like Fitbit, Trello, and Mint. Behind every one of those outcomes was a founder willing to make a bet on themselves publicly, in front of people who were paying attention.Apply and learn more here. We’re looking for ambitious early-stage startups building innovative, potentially category-defining products. Applications are open globally across all industries. Most selected companies are pre-Series A, though select Series A startups may qualify on a case-by-case basis. To apply, startups should have: Thousands apply every year. Only 200 are selected. Just 20 finalists pitch live on the Disrupt Stage. One startup takes the crown and wins $100,000 in equity-free funding. The founders who wait until they feel ready often wait too long. You do not need to be polished. You need to be promising. If you’ve been sitting on this, here’s the reality: The worst outcome is you don’t get selected this cycle — and you come back next year with a stronger application because you went through the process. The stage matters. The community lasts. The milestone is real. But the deadline is now one week away. If you’re building something category-defining — or know a startup that deserves the spotlight —submit your nomination and complete your application before May 27.
View
OpenAI barrels toward IPO that may happen in September
A day after Elon Musklost his lawsuitthat threatened OpenAI’s structure, leadership, and finances, the AI giant is ready to move forward with its initial public offering, sources toldthe Wall Street Journal. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman reportedly hopes that his company will be ready to go public by September. The ChatGPT maker has been working with tech IPO powerhouse bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and may file IPO paperwork confidentially with regulators within days or weeks, per the WSJ. The news of OpenAI’s potential IPO, which by all accounts should be a blockbuster, comes as the world awaits the public disclosure of SpaceX’s IPO filings, which are expected to appear as soon as Wednesday, according to reports. Rocket-maker SpaceX is, of course, now one of OpenAI’s major competitors, after itconsumed Elon Musk’s model maker, xAI. Now that Musk failed to skewer OpenAI, the competitor he co-founded, through the heart with a lawsuit, it looks like the next Musk vs. Altman battle will take place in the world of finance. Which one will be the bigger IPO? OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
View
IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed
Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is“proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are. One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closeda $2.8 million seed roundled by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user’s daily workflows and then automate them with limited to no human prompting. IrisGo was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company’s automated assistant. (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backward.) The core idea is simple: Show the program how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed. During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how his platform could learn to place a coffee order online. As I watched, IrisGo recorded the steps it took to select a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular Bay Area chain), fill out credit card information, and then hit purchase. Lai then asked IrisGo to repeat the order on its own; the agent dutifully complied. Buying coffee, of course, is not really the point. Instead, the hope is that the system will automate a whole host of business-related tasks. Iris comes with a built-in “skills” library — things like email drafting, invoice processing, report building, document summarization, and many other ready-to-use automated workflows. At the same time, Iris learns from the user’s desktop behavior and automatically adds those tasks to its potential list of action items. The application also includes a coding assistant — similar in concept to OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code — designed to assist developers as they go about their work. “Our target audience is knowledge workers — white-collar companies. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks that those workers do every day,” Lai said, noting that, despite the high-octane power of today’s frontier models, AI-assisted office work can still feel incredibly manual and repetitive. The goal, he said, is to move away from that and toward a more fully autonomous workflow, where the human works on high-level conceptual work while agentic systems take care of all the clerical work in the background. A particularly appealing feature of IrisGo is that it is designed to process a lot of data on-device, giving it strongerprivacy protectionsthan other applications that rely heavily on the cloud. Lai says that the system is still a hybrid architecture — meaning that larger, more complex tasks are ultimately processed through the cloud, although the companypromises thatcloud processing “only occurs when explicitly authorized by the user and uses end-to-end encryption.” Part of the strategy for scaling Iris has been to garner credibility through association with prominent figures and organizations. Support from Ng — notably a co-founder of the formativedeep learning research team Google Brain— has helped. Lai managed to set up a meeting with Ng through a shared connection: Both are alumni from Carnegie Mellon University. Lai and his co-founder demoed Iris during that meeting, and Ng’s AI Fund ultimately led the startup’s seed round. Nvidia and Google have also backed the company. IrisGo recently launched the beta versions of its macOS and Windows apps, and the company is also currently pursuing deals with laptop companies to preinstall the app on new devices. It recentlystruck such a dealwith Acer, and Lai said the hope is that the company can strike similar deals with other device makers soon.
View
OpenAI claims it solved an 80-year-old math problem — for real this time
OpenAIclaimsits new reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because this isn’t the first time OpenAI has made such a bold claim.Seven months ago, the AI giant’sformer VP Kevin Weilposted on X: “GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdős problems and made progress on 11 others.” It turns out, GPT-5 didn’t actually solve those problems; it just found solutions that already existed in the literature. Taunts from rivals like Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis followed, and Weil promptly took down his premature post. Today, at least, it seems OpenAI didn’t make the same mistake twice. Alongside the announcement, the company publishedcompanion remarksin support of the disproof from mathematicians like Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom, who maintainsthe Erdos Problems website, and previously called Weil’s post“a dramatic misrepresentation.” “For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids,”OpenAI posted on X. “An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.” The company said this marks “the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.” The proof, per OpenAI, came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, not a system specifically designed to solve math problems or even this problem in particular. OpenAI says this is significant because it means AI systems are now more capable of holding together long, difficult chains of reasoning and connecting ideas across fields in ways researchers may not have previously explored. That has implications for biology, physics, engineering, and medicine. “AI is helping us to more fully explore the cathedral of mathematics we have built over the centuries,” Bloom said in a statement. “What other unseen wonders are waiting in the wings?”
View
NanoClaw creator turns down $20M buyout offer, raises $12M seed instead
NanoCo, the company behind security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch, its founders tell TechCrunch. The funding was led by Valley Capital Partners, and saw participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures and angels like Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. In a matter of weeks, NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen (pictured above, left) said he went from coding the project on his couch to receiving viral endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, fielding inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even a roughly $20 million acquisition offer that he and his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen (pictured above, right), declined. “It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet,” Gavriel told TechCrunch. “There was a lot of inbound and interest,” he added. “People reaching out in DMs on X and sending emails.” He estimated that about 50 or more founders and tech executives sent DMs asking to invest. One of them was Delangue, who dropped a note: “I like what you’re doing with NanoClaw.” Gavriel then responded in kind, telling the Hugging Face CEO that he liked the company’stiny robot, Reachy Mini, and hoped to run NanoClaw on it one day. The two programmers then started talking shop, and Cohen eventually asked Delangue if he was interested in angel investing and secured a yes. As it turns out, an active member of NanoClaw’s open source community is already working on running it on Reachy Mini, Gavriel says. Aswe previously reported, interest in NanoClaw skyrocketed after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted his praise for it. But the project really began to snowball after the Foreign Minister of Singapore called NanoClaw his “second brain” in aFacebook postthat went viral. NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to assist the Cohen brothers with their previous startup, an AI marketing firm that used agents to do much of the work. But instead of running directly on a computer, with access to all services and credentials, NanoClaw runs sandboxed in a container — a practice that isbecoming a common solution to running more secure, OpenClaw-like setups. But a couple of months ago, the idea was novel and took on a life of its own. Seeing the interest, the Cohen brothers began talking to investors and other founders asking for advice. Should they turn this free project into a company? How? One VC offered to buy the project right then for one of his portfolio companies, offering a “six-digit” dollar amount, Cohen said. While contemplating that, they met a founder friend who gave them a key insight: Open-source projects grow exponentially more valuable as their community grows. Not only do these users help contribute code to mature the project quickly, but they discover and demonstrate various uses as well. He told the Cohen brothers that if they believed NanoClaw could be that kind of project, they would have to quit their other venture and commit to it. “He was right,” Gavriel said. Shortly after they shuttered the other business and focused, the viral posts came, and their new outfit secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel. About two weeks after that first offer, they got another, this one for around $20 million, including jobs to stay and run their company. The brothers declined that one, too. “Since then, it’s only escalated. We have many thousands of people using NanoClaw,” he said. NanoCo has now started booking enterprise customers, an idea that came from its community. The product’s early adopters have been people with technical skills, many of whom are executives at big tech companies. After these users set up their own NanoClaw instances, they kept getting hit up by coworkers asking for help to do the same. These folks don’t want to become NanoClaw IT people, Cohen explained, but NanoCo does. So it is offering implementation services, these days known as “forward-deployed engineers,” to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support. While NanoCo declined to specify who their early enterprise customers are, the brothers say that executives at companies like Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture are using NanoClaw itself.
View
Startup Battlefield 200 applications close in one week: Window to nominate and apply for the most promising startups ends May 27
Your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding is gone in a week. Startup Battlefield 200 applicationsclose May 27. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — this is the moment to act. Apply todayfor the opportunity to take the stage atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 13-15, alongside 200 of the world’s most promising early-stage startups. Pre-Series A founders, consider this your final countdown reminder: the strongest startups are already entering the arena, and theapplication window is closing fast. If your startup has already been nominated,don’t wait to complete your application. This final week moves quickly, and last-minute submissions risk getting buried as applications surge ahead of the deadline. Know a startup that deserves the spotlight?Nominate them nowso they still have time to apply before May 27. Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with splashy fundraising announcements. They started with a pitch. Dropbox demoed to a room full of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what edge networking meant. Discord was still a scrappy gaming startup called Hammer & Chisel. They all passed through the same crucible: Startup Battlefield 200. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a pattern. And it starts with an application. Startup Battlefield 200has never been a competition for the most polished companies. It’s a competition for the most promising ones. Pre-launch is fine. No revenue is fine. What matters is whether what you’re building genuinely changes something — not incrementally, but meaningfully. If you or a founder you know is building something impactful, then the application itself becomes the first pitch.Apply before May 27. Startup Battlefield 200is where breakout companies get discovered. Selected startups will showcase live on the Disrupt Stage in front of 10,000+ attendees, leading VCs, global media, and the broader TechCrunch audience. This is your opportunity to gain investor exposure, receive direct VC feedback, and prove your company belongs among the next generation of category-defining startups. Every one of the 200 selected companies receives: And every selected company pitches, whether on the Disrupt Stage or the Pitch Showcase Stage. Both put founders in front of the investors, media, and partners who attend Disrupt specifically to find what’s next. You don’t need to make the top 20 for this experience to change your trajectory.Get started by nominating and applying here. More than 1,700 companies have competed in Startup Battlefield 200. Together, they’ve raised over $32 billion and generated more than 250 exits, including acquisitions by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon. The network runs so deep that alumni have even acquired each other: Dropbox acquired fellow Battlefield 200 alum DocSend in 2021. This is also the same launchpad that helped accelerate companies like Fitbit, Trello, and Mint. Behind every one of those outcomes was a founder willing to make a bet on themselves publicly, in front of people who were paying attention.Apply and learn more here. We’re looking for ambitious early-stage startups building innovative, potentially category-defining products. Applications are open globally across all industries. Most selected companies are pre-Series A, though select Series A startups may qualify on a case-by-case basis. To apply, startups should have: Thousands apply every year. Only 200 are selected. Just 20 finalists pitch live on the Disrupt Stage. One startup takes the crown and wins $100,000 in equity-free funding. The founders who wait until they feel ready often wait too long. You do not need to be polished. You need to be promising. If you’ve been sitting on this, here’s the reality: the worst outcome is you don’t get selected this cycle — and you come back next year with a stronger application because you went through the process. The stage matters. The community lasts. The milestone is real. But the deadline is now one week away. If you’re building something category-defining — or know a startup that deserves the spotlight —submit your nomination and complete your application before May 27.
View