Latest AI News
Cisco cuts nearly 4,000 jobs to spend more on AI, reports ‘record quarterly revenue’
Technology giant Cisco is cutting fewer than 4,000 jobs, or around 5% of its workforce, despite reportingbetter-than-expected profit and revenuein its fiscal third quarter. The networking equipment maker said it reducing its headcount in order to change its “cost structure” and invest in AI and cybersecurity. Cisco’s decision follows a recent trend of tech companies increasingly citing a priority on AI spending as a reason to let employees go.CloudflareandGeneral Motorshave both laid off staff in recent days, despite reporting strong financial results. Cisco said it plans to invest more in cybersecurity, as the company continues to contend witha slewofsecurity vulnerabilitiesin its routers and firewalls that have allowed hackers to break into the networks of its corporate customers,including the U.S. government. Cisco last year also experienceda data breachin which customers’ personal information was affected. Ina blog postpublished Wednesday, Cisco’s chief executive Chuck Robbins touted the company’s “record revenue” and “double-digit growth,” while acknowledging that the company was making strategic investments “in our employees’ use of AI across the company.” Accordingto public filings, Robbins was slated to earn more than $52 million in executive compensation during 2025. When reached by TechCrunch, a Cisco spokesperson did not comment beyond Robbins’ statement, or say, when asked, if Robbins plans to reduce his compensation. This is the latest round of job cuts at Cisco in recent years. The company laid off thousands of employeesduring two separate layoffs in 2024, andcut 150 jobsin 2025.
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Khosla Ventures is betting $10M on Ian Crosby, whose first startup, Bench, imploded
Ian Crosby, whose previous startup Bench Accounting famouslyshut down in 2024before beingbought for scraps, is taking another shot at building a business out of automating the arduous work of bookkeeping. His new startup,Synthetic, aims to build a fully autonomous AI bookkeeper that can generate accrual-based financials without direct human involvement. Although the product is still in the design phase — and Crosby admits his vision may not yet be technologically possible — the startup has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Basis Set Ventures and Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke. Most investors would run from a founder facing the kind of challenges Crosby is right now — the fallout of his previous business collapsing and a vision that may exceed the technical feasibility of current foundational models. But Khosla partner Jon Chu told TechCrunch he sometimes does just the opposite: “I tend to run towards controversy a little bit.” “In controversy, groupthink often shapes the narrative rather than the truth of the story itself,” he said, citing Parker Conrad’s 2016 ousting from Zenefits as an example. While the industry narrative was initially critical of Conrad, he subsequently founded Rippling, which is now valued at nearly $17 billion. “I believe people have room for growth,” Chu said about his bet on Crosby and Synthetic. Crosby maintains he wasn’t directly responsible for bringing Bench to the point of insolvency. According to him, he wasfired by Bench’s boardin 2021, three months after he turned down a $250 million acquisition offer from Brex. The board also disagreed with Crosby’s strategic direction, especially as the business was bleeding cash, and his executive team was reportedlyfrustrated with his direct leadership style. “He took a big swing, made a few mistakes. That didn’t go well,” Chu said. Bench ultimately imploded when its new management proved unable to restore the company to health on its own. After leaving Bench, Crosby joined Shopify and founded Teal, another accounting startup, which was bought by Mercury 18 months later. As part of his due diligence, Chu said he spoke with several executives who worked with Crosby after his departure from Bench, and they all “had fantastic things to say about Ian,” Chu told TechCrunch. Chu is convinced that the three roles Crosby held after leaving Bench provided the entrepreneur with ample opportunity to learn from his past mistakes. Crosby says he has his eyes firmly set on creating a fully AI-driven bookkeeping service, rather than relying on human accountants, as most accounting startups such as Xero do now. “We're not going to release anything that's not fully autonomous,” Crosby told TechCrunch. “It’s that or bust.” Synthetic plans to serve only AI and other software startups. But Crosby acknowledges that AI models still make significant bookkeeping mistakes. While Synthetic's prototype works for a narrow group of users, he remains uncertain how it will scale for a broader customer base. Crosby explained with an analogy: “It's like a self-driving car that can drive down one street versus the self-driving car that can drive down any street. We haven't driven down enough streets to know if it's going to crash.” Still, the founder says he can afford to be patient and wait for foundational models to become more reliable for bookkeeping calculations. “I've raised years of cash, so we can just wait it out,” Crosby said.
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Cerebras raises $5.5B, kicking off 2026’s IPO season with a bang
Cerebras raised $5.5 billion in its IPO on Thursday, pricing shares at $185 Wednesday evening, way higher than its range ($115 to $125, later raised to $150-$160), even as it increased the size of the offering to 30 million shares. And pre-market trading indicates that shares are going to open with a giant pop, as retail investors bid up the price to grab them. (We’ll update this story after trading begins.) Even at the IPO price, the company enters its first day of trading at a fully-diluted valuation of $56.4 billion (meaning, accounting for all shares). Co-founder CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake at $185/share is worth nearly $1.9 billion, while co-founder CTO Sean Lie’s stake weighs in at about $1 billion. A year ago, it looked like this day would never happen for Cerebras. The Nvidia competitor, which designed its giant chip from scratch, purpose-built for AI, had first filed to go public in 2024. But concerns about a large investment from Abu Dhabi-based Group 42 mired the IPO in an endless review from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Investors were also cool about its financials: Group 42 accounted for almost all of Cerebras’s revenues. So those IPO plans were shelved. IPO ambitions reappeared in earnest in April when the companywas able to report about double the revenues: $510 million in 2025 (up 76% year-over-year), and from a handful of customers. It also reported a massive swing to a profit — to $237.8 million in net income — compared to losing nearly half a billion the year before. Investors began salivating. Cerebras has now come out as a major contender for supplying chips for inference — the ongoing compute processing required for models to answer prompts — and now counts OpenAI (in acomplicated circular-deal relationship), G42, Saudi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Amazon Web Services as customers. Developing, will update this post with first-day of trading numbers.
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Amazon Kills Rufus AI, Replaces It With Alexa for Shopping AI Assistant
Amazon, on Wednesday, announced Alexa for Shopping, a new artificial intelligence (AI) shopping assistant. The new tool comes with agentic capabilities and replaces Rufus AI, a mainstay on the app and the website since February 2024. The Seattle-based tech giant revealed that the new AI experience combines Rufus AI and Alexa+ to bring an assistant that not only has deep knowledge of Amazon's shopping platform and catalogued products, but also brings the immersive conversational layer with agentic automation. The new tool is first rolling out in the US.
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AI-Native Startup Exaforce Secures $125 Mn to Scale Agentic Security Operations
Beyond geographic expansion, the company intends to bolster its presence in research and development by enhancing multi-model AI capabilities and aiding enterprises in operationalising agentic workflows.
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Cisco to Cut Nearly 4,000 Jobs in Q4 Amid AI Shift
The networking company plans workforce cuts while increasing investments in AI, silicon, optics, and security.
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Fuel Crisis Reopens India’s Most Uncomfortable Workplace Debate
Industry observers say many IT companies remain wary of returning to prolonged remote work, especially as they restructure teams and adapt to AI-led changes in business models.
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The Traditional E-Commerce Interface is Starting to Collapse
Generative AI is changing how consumers discover products online by turning static recommendations into real-time shopping experiences.
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Microsoft Edge Update Allows Copilot to Access Open Tabs; Journeys Mode Introduced in English
Microsoft has introduced the Copilot's agentic AI capabilities to the Edge mobile app. Now, users will be able to ask queries to Microsoft's AI agent, which will access information for them from active tabs to generate answers. The company is also rolling out the AI-backed Journeys tool for the Edge mobile app, which will organise the user's browsing history into different topics, allowing users to pick up browsing from where they left off. Microsoft recently redesigned the new tab page for the Edge desktop app. It is now bringing the same design to its mobile browser, where users will be able to directly ask questions to Copilot.
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Anthropic Introduces Claude for Small Business With Ready-to-Run AI Workflows, Connectors
Anthropic, on Wednesday, announced a new offering for smaller enterprises. Dubbed Claude for Small Business, the new solution brings a set of new connectors and ready-to-run workflows to power artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation within tools that small businesses use the most. With this release, the San Francisco-based AI startup is also diversifying its product and service offerings to serve different enterprise niches. The announcement comes just a week after the company launched a new business venture to provide AI services to enterprises.
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Clio’s $500M milestone arrives just as Anthropic ups the ante
While AI is now being applied to everything from healthcare to customer support, no single use case has yet been nearly as popular or lucrative as code writing. Jack Newton, co-founder and CEO of Clio, a Canadian law firm management software company, is convinced that legal tech is poised to be the next big winner of the LLMs era. That’s a self-interested claim — 18-year-old Clio is a legal tech company — but the numbers are hard to dismiss. Clio saw its revenue growth accelerate sharply after integrating AI into itsoffering in 2023. The company surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in mid-2024, doubled that figure by late last year, and just announced that its ARR reached $500 million. “LLMs are so excellent for coding because all the existing code in the world is a huge repository to train on,” Newton said. “The analogy to legal is really clear.” Law firms hold massive corpuses of contracts and agreements, providing a rich basis of text-based data for AI models to learn from. “Tech companies and lawyers alike are recognizing what a huge amount of upside there is for legal with LLMs,” Newton said. Clio isn’t the only legal tech company seeing a massive revenue surge driven by AI. Four-year-old Harvey, which offers LLM AI for law firms, hit ARR of $190 million by the end of 2025, co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg sharedon LinkedIn.Harvey’s main rival, Legora, announced last month that it reached$100 million in ARRa mere 18 months after launching its platform. Althoughthe legal tech community's definition of ARR has beenunder scrutiny recently, the opportunity to apply AI to law makes clear sense,given that LLMs can automate the field’s most time-consuming tasks, such as document review and drafting. Legal tech companies aren’t the only ones recognizing how valuable AI could be for lawyers. Earlier this week, Anthropic announced asuite of newlegal-specific features, expanding Claude for Legal -- the law-focused plug-in whosedebutearlier this year sent legal tech stockstumbling. Both Harvey and Legora rely on Claude as a core model among others, which makes the dynamic an uncomfortable one: a key supplier is now also a competitor. For Newton, these are all signs of the vast potential of the legal AI market. He has reason to be optimistic. The Canadian-based Clio was valued at$5 billionwhen it raised a $500 million Series G last November. The company provides law firms with time-tracking, invoicing, and payment tools. It$1 billionacquisition of data intelligence platform vLex last year now allows lawyers to use Clio’s AI for research, as well.
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Who decides what AI tells you? Campbell Brown, once Meta’s news chief, has thoughts
Campbell Brown has spent her career chasing accurate information, first as a renowned TV journalist, then as Facebook’s first, and only, dedicated news chief. Now, watching AI reshape how people consume information, she sees history threatening to repeat itself. This time, she’s not waiting for someone else to fix it. Her company,Forum AI— which she discussed recently with TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz at a StrictlyVC evening in San Francisco — evaluates how foundation models perform on what she calls “high-stakes topics” — geopolitics, mental health, finance, hiring — subjects where “there are no clear yes-or-no answers, where it’s murky and nuanced and complex.” The idea is to find the world’s foremost experts, have them architect benchmarks, then train AI judges to evaluate models at scale. For Forum AI’s geopolitics work, Brown has recruited Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Anne Neuberger, who led cybersecurity in the Obama administration. The goal is to get AI judges to roughly 90% consensus with those human experts, a threshold she says Forum AI has been able to reach. Brown traces the origin of Forum AI, founded 17 months ago in New York, to specific moment. “I was at Meta when ChatGPT was first released publicly,” she recalled, “and I remember really shortly after realizing this is going to be the funnel through which all information flows. And it’s not very good.” The implications for her own children made the moment feel almost existential. “My kids are going to be really dumb if we don’t figure out how to fix this,” she recalled thinking. What frustrated her most was that accuracy didn’t seem to be anyone’s priority. Foundation model companies, she said, are “extremely focused on coding and math,” whereas news and information are harder. But harder, she argued, doesn’t mean optional. Indeed, when Forum AI began evaluating the leading models, the findings weren’t exactly encouraging. She cited Gemini pulling from Chinese Communist Party websites “for stories that have nothing to do with China,” and noted a left-leaning political bias across nearly all models. Subtler failures abound too, she said, including missing context, missing perspectives, straw-manning arguments without acknowledgment. “There’s a long way to go,” she said. “But I also think that there are some very easy fixes that would vastly improve the outcomes.” Brown spent years at Facebook watching what happens when a platform optimizes for the wrong thing. “We failed at a lot of the things we tried,” she told Fernholz. The fact-checking program she built no longer exists. The lesson, even if social media has turned a blind eye to it, is that optimizing for engagement has been lousy for society and left many less informed. Her hope is that AI can break that cycle. "Right now it could go either way," she said; companies could give users what they want, or they could "give people what's real and what's honest and what's truthful." She acknowledged the idealistic version of that — AI optimizing for truth — might sound naive. But she thinks enterprise may be the unlikely ally here. Businesses using AI for credit decisions, lending, insurance, and hiring care about liability, and "they're going to want you to optimize for getting it right." That enterprise demand is also what Forum AI is betting its business on, though turning compliance interest into consistent revenue remains a challenge, particularly given that much of the current market is still satisfied with checkbox audits and standardized benchmarks that Brown considers inadequate. The compliance landscape, she said, is "a joke." When New York City passed the first hiring bias law requiring AI audits, the state comptroller found more than half had violations that went undetected. Real evaluation, she said, requires domain expertise to work through not just known scenarios but edge cases that "can get you into trouble that people don't think about." And that work takes time. "Smart generalists aren't going to cut it." Brown — whose company last fall raised$3 millionled by Lerer Hippeau — is uniquely positioned to describe the disconnect between the AI industry's self-image and the reality for most users. "You hear from the leaders of the big tech companies, 'This technology is going to change the world,' 'it's going to put you out of work,' 'it's going to cure cancer,'" she said. "But then to a normal person who's just using a chatbot to ask basic questions, they're still getting a lot of slop and wrong answers." Trust in AI sits at extraordinarily low levels, and she thinks that skepticism is, in many cases, justified. "The conversation is sort of happening in Silicon Valley around one thing, and a totally different conversation is happening among consumers."
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