January 27, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni's Phia raises $35M to 'make shopping fun again': "We're on the cusp of a completely new way of shopping," Gates told TechCrunch. Read More

China's Moonshot releases a new open-source model Kimi K2.5 and a coding agent: The company said that the model was trained on 15 trillion mixed visual and text tokens. Read More

'Among the worst we've seen': report slams xAI's Grok over child safety failures: "We assess a lot of AI chatbots at Common Sense Media, and they all have risks, but Grok is among the worst we've seen," Robbie Torney of Common Sense Media said. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Pinterest to lay off 15% of staff to redirect resources to AI: Pinterest says it's "reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution" and "prioritizing AI‑powered products and capabilities." Read More

Node-based design tool Flora raises $42M from Redpoint Ventures: Flora's node-based design tool is being used by companies like Pentagram and Lionsgate. Read More

Airtable gets into the AI agent game with Superagent: SuperAgent is Airtable's first standalone product in its 13-year history, and signals both the company's ambitions and the reality of the current AI moment: every serious software player is racing to prove they can deliver on agents. Read More

Google pays $68M to settle claims its voice assistant spied on users: Google did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement of the class-action case, which accused the firm of "unlawful and intentional interception and recording of individuals' confidential communications without their consent and subsequent unauthorized disclosure of those communications to third parties." Read More

Uber launches an 'AV Labs' division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners: Uber is not developing its own robotaxis again; instead it plans to collect and offer data. It's a bet that more volume will help autonomous vehicle partners solve the weirdest edge cases. Read More

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Disrupt 2026: +1 pass 50% off ends this Friday

Save 50% on a +1 ticket — offer ends this Friday or when the first 500 passes are gone! Lock in Disrupt tickets at Super Early Bird pricing now and join 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators Oct 13–15 in San Francisco for curated networking, 250+ speakers, 200+ sessions, and 300+ startup demos.

You missed these chats from Disrupt:

Kindred talks home-swapping platform for travelers, Chef Robotics introduces AI into commercial kitchens, and Character.AI addresses chatbot safety with teens.

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Last but Not Least

Samsung's TriFold phone will cost $2,899 in the US : The phone's display unfolds twice to reveal a 10-inch display, which is the largest screen ever on a Galaxy phone. Read More