TechCrunch Top 3

Databricks CEO says fresh $1B will help him attack a new AI database market: The round, which pushes Databricks' valuation to $100B, was co-led by Insight Partners and Thrive. CEO Ali Ghodsi says he's found an enormous untapped AI agent market to spend the funds. Read More

Spotify's latest feature lets you add your own transitions to playlists: The new options are designed to appeal to playlist experts and other music fans, who have collectively created nearly 9 billion playlists on Spotify's platform to date. Read More

AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees: Firecrawl nabbed Shopify's CEO Tobias Lütke as an investor from a gutsy email after they discovered he was using the product. Read More

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Afternoon Must-Reads

Meta is shaking up its AI org, again: On Friday, The Information reported that Meta was preparing to tear down its existing AI org and reorganize it into four new groups. Four days later, the change has been made official with an internal memo. Read More

Aalo Atomics raises $100M to build a microreactor and data center together: Nuclear startup Aalo Atomics plans to turn on its first power plant, the 50-megawatt Aalo-X, in the summer of 2026. It's an aggressive timeline that bucks nuclear industry trends. Read More

Discover how developer tools are shifting fast with Lauri Moore and David Cramer at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: From no-code to AI-assisted dev environments, "vibe coding" is changing how early-stage startups build — and who they need to hire. The once-standard idea of landing a "10x engineer" as your first critical hire is getting a serious reality check with Lauri Moore (Bessemer) and David Cramer (Sentry) on the Builder Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in October at San Francisco's Moscone West. Read More

Allianz Life data breach affects 1.1 million customers: Data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned notified 1.1 million customers of a July data breach, a number not previously reported. Read More

US spy chief says UK has dropped its Apple backdoor demand: Tulsi Gabbard said that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance also participated in the negotiations with the U.K. government over its once-secret demand to Apple. Read More

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Last but Not Least

OpenAI launches a sub-$5 ChatGPT plan in India: This plan will offer 10x more messages and image generation than the free tier, among other benefits. Read More