Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse

Plus more of TechCrunch's top stories to start your morning

View this email online in your browser  July 15, 2026 TechCrunch Top 3 Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse: Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, Israeli identity management startup Oak is emerging out of stealth with $60 million in seed funding.  Read More Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models: Anthropic-backed Ode launches as AI labs bet that embedding forward-deployed engineers inside enterprises is the key to accelerating enterprise AI adoption. Read More A SpaceX vet raised $65M to pull wire harnesses out of the Cold War era: Someone has to bundle all the wires that go into rockets, missiles, and satellites. Read More A message from General Compute General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier. Learn more here Morning Must-Reads OpenAI's first hardware device is reportedly a screenless speaker that can move: The device is weirdly described as involving "mechanical elements that can move on their own" and the Bloomberg report includes the detail that the device is designed to "feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT." Read More India bets billions on breaking China's grip on smartphone manufacturing: New Delhi announced a $6.5 billion smartphone manufacturing program and a $13.3 billion semiconductor push to deepen India's electronics supply chain. Read More US charges Russian 'bulletproof' web hosts over cyberattacks that netted $62M from cybercrime victims: The 2024 indictment, now unsealed, accuses three Russians and two web hosts of aiding hackers and profiting from cybercrime. Read More Indian AI coding startup Emergent becomes a unicorn with $130M Series C: The startup has reached a $120 million annualized revenue run rate and more than 200,000 paying customers. Read More Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet: The guy behind TCP/IP is working on a standard for identifying AI agents in the wild. Read More Last but Not Least OpenAI researcher Miles Wang in talks to launch AI drug discovery startup valued at $2B: The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences. Read More Check out some of our other newsletters: StrictlyVC TechCrunch Events TechCrunch Mobility Want to adjust your daily newsletter schedule? You can do it right here Got a tip? Get in touch securely. Want to advertise on TechCrunch? advertise@techcrunch.com Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. Unsubscribe Member Center Privacy Policy Copyright © 2026 TechCrunch Media LLC 501 2nd Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94107

Lucid Motors denies report it's considering bankruptcy

Plus more of TechCrunch's top stories this afternoon

View this email online in your browser  July 14, 2026 TechCrunch Top 3 Lucid Motors denies report it's considering bankruptcy: The company said the "rumors are completely false" after its stock sank more than 50% on a report that it was weighing the option. Read More DeepMind CEO calls for an independent standards body to regulate frontier AI: DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is proposing an AI "standards body" modeled after FINRA, to test frontier models and develop best practices for their release. Read More Anthropic's newest ad is creeping people out: Anthropic has consistently attempted to depict itself as the ethical foil to other AI companies. This latest marketing stunt — which leans into criticism of AI as a way to make Anthropic seem aware of the responsibility it carries — would appear to be more of the same. Read More A message from CAST New: Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for tech debt AI agents are not only accelerating software delivery, but the creation of architectural technical debt. Learn how leading organizations are tackling it. Download your full complimentary copy.  Download here Afternoon Must-Reads Iran abused mobile networks' vulnerabilities to locate US military in the Middle East, report says: The Iranian government exploited well-known flaws in cellphone networks to locate and then strike U.S. military personnel in the build-up and beginning of the war. Read More Apple opens its new Siri AI to everyone with the iOS 27 public beta: If you’ve been waiting to try Apple’s revamped Siri without installing a developer beta, you now can. The company on Tuesday released the iOS 27 public beta, giving iPhone owners early access to its AI-powered assistant and other new features before the software’s official launch this fall. Read More OpenAI's new flagship model deletes files on its own, people keep warning: A number of social media posts claim that GPT-5.6 Sol deleted files and data without warning. OpenAI had basically disclosed the problem in June. Read More Meta’s Adam Mosseri says AI token budgets could soon be capped per engineer: Instagram head Adam Mosseri believes companies will eventually need to manage AI token spending the same way they manage payroll or other operating expenses, predicting that engineers could soon face limits on how much they spend using AI tools. Read More The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier: Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says enterprises increasingly want open models, due to cost, accessibility, and ownership. Do frontier models still matter if most production AI ends up running on open models? Read More Last but Not Least The founder of Hinge raised $18M to build a new AI dating service, Overtone: Overtone describes itself as "a voice- and audio-forward service, enabled by AI, that provides highly curated introductions." Read More Check out some of our other newsletters: StrictlyVC TechCrunch Events TechCrunch Mobility Want to adjust your daily newsletter schedule? You can do it right here Got a tip? Get in touch securely. Want to advertise on TechCrunch? advertise@techcrunch.com Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. Unsubscribe Member Center Privacy Policy Copyright © 2026 TechCrunch Media LLC 501 2nd Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94107