Nicolas Sauvage is betting on the boring parts of AI

The portfolio he has assembled since 2019 is dotted with technologies that have become more widely interesting to VCs over the last year:

Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell

At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to …

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Meta buys robotics startup to bolster its humanoid AI ambitions

Meta bought humanoid startup Assured Robot Intelligence to beef up its AI models for robots, the company said.

Y Combinator alum Skio sells for $105M cash, only raised $8M, founder says

Subscription billing fintech Skio sold to its competitor Recharge in what was a healthy exit, according to its founder and former CEO.

After dissing Anthropic for limiting Mythos, OpenAI restricts access to Cyber, too

OpenAI will begin rolling out it cybersecurity testing tool, GPT-5.5 Cyber only “to critical cyber defenders” at first.

Salesforce is crowdsourcing its AI roadmap — with customers 

Salesforce lets its customers lead its product roadmap with the thinking that if one enterprise customer has a problem, the others likely do too.

Satya Nadella says he’s ready to ‘exploit’ the new OpenAI deal

Microsoft gets to offer OpenAI’s tech to its cloud customers and doesn’t have to pay for it. “We fully plan to exploit it,” Nadella said.

Google gains 25M subscriptions in Q1, driven by YouTube and Google One

Google added 25M paid subscriptions in Q1, reaching 350M total, as YouTube and Google One grow.

Parallel Web Systems hits $2B valuation five months after its last big raise

The AI agent-tool startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has raised $100 million, led by Sequoia, months after raising a previous $100 million.

Google Photos uses AI to make the iconic closet from ‘Clueless’ a reality

Google recreates Cher’s closet from “Clueless” with AI.