Techin' Geek

Generalist, a robotics startup, is now valued at $3 billion after raising additional capital led by 8VC, according to two people with knowledge of the funding.

The fresh capital totals nearly $200 million according to a regulatory filing. That additional capital is an extension of a $400 million Series B led by Radical Ventures that the company announced in June at a $2 billion valuation, the people said. The new capital brings the round’s total funding to $600 million.

Generalist and 8VC didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Generalist was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng, along with former Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry. It received early backing from 8VC and Radical Ventures as well as Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.

Until recently, the startup operated quietly and with little publicity.

Generalist is developing an AI foundation model that can work with various robots. It claims its newly released Gen 1.5 model enables robots to master new tasks from video demonstrations as short as 3 to 12 seconds long.

The startup is working with a handful of customers, using their feedback to tailor the model for specific use cases, according to one source.

Generalist isn’t alone in its pursuit of building a brain for a broad range of robots. Other competitors include Physical Intelligence, which is reportedly valued at $11 billion, and SoftBank-backed Skild AI, valued at $14 billion, as well as Genesis AI, which was in talks as of last month to raise capital at a $3 billion valuation.

The funding surge reflects a bet from some investors that robotics may soon reach its own “ChatGPT moment,” meaning that robots will be able to perform general tasks without being explicitly trained for each one. However, because robots cannot be trained on the entirety of the internet’s data the way LLMs can, some VCs warn that a truly general robotics model may still be years away.

Nitter, an open source project that allowed people to read X posts without logging into or even opening the X app, has received cease-and-desist letters from X demanding that it shut down. The news was shared via a brief message posted to the project’s website, and follows X’s earlier attempts to knock Nitter offline by technical means.

The service also powers a number of other sites, including XCancel, that allow people to view X posts directly.

This isn’t X’s first attempt to shut down Nitter. In 2024, Nitter’s flagship instance, Nitter.net, went dark temporarily after X rolled out new API restrictions. Nitter worked by fetching public X posts and then stripping out the ads, tracking cookies, and JavaScript, giving people a clean, clutter-free way to read posts without an account or the app.

After that crackdown, those who wanted to host a Nitter instance had to connect it to a real X account, according to the project’s GitHub page. Despite the restrictions, development picked back up and Nitter instances came back online.

This time, X is working to shut down Nitter and its instances via legal means. Nitter’s website states that the Nitter.net project is offline while its creator seeks legal advice after receiving a cease-and-desist letter. That creator, a developer who goes by the handle Zedeus, told TechCrunch by email that other Nitter instances received similar letters.

On Nitter’s website, the message currently reads:

On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.

nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I’m seeking legal advice and won’t be commenting further on the specifics for now.

Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.

The letter from X, which TechCrunch has viewed, accuses Nitter of an “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data,” through its service, saying that X has evidence that Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules.

Lawyers for X said the actions are in violation of “various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).” The letter gave Nitter until 5 p.m. EST on August 25 to shut down.

X is hardly alone in policing alleged scrapers. Meta has taken numerous scrapers to court, and most larger social networks today restrict the use of third-party readers, forcing users to log in and access the site’s content through the official app, where they can be tracked and shown personalized ads.

It’s an unfortunate development for lurkers, given that Nitter and its instances offered a handy way to keep up with certain people’s posts on X without an account. Now those people will either need to give up that access or, as X likely hopes, create an account and log in.

Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, has raised $37 million in fresh capital as it pushes to make moving goods through the air as cheap as trucking them by road.

The Series A round, led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures, comes less than a year after Airbound raised an $8.65 million seed round. With this funding, the three-year-old startup has raised nearly $50 million.

Airbound, and other startups in this nascent sector, argue that drones can move certain goods faster and cheaper than vehicles on the road. And while there have been successful deployments, drone delivery is still far from matching the scale and versatility of trucking.

Airbound is trying to close that gap by redesigning the aircraft to make it more competitive with ground transportation.

Conventional aircraft spend a lot of energy carrying their own weight rather than the payload, making flight expensive, particularly for moving smaller loads. Airbound’s answer is to build vertical-flight drones designed to weigh less than the cargo they carry, founder and CEO Naman Pushp said in an interview.

Airbound’s current drone, called TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and can carry around 2.2 pounds of payload. Its next version, currently under development, is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and be able to carry up to 11 pounds, Pushp told TechCrunch.

The startup uses a rocket-like, tail-sitter design for its drones, which takes off and lands vertically in an upright position before transitioning to horizontal flight. Pushp said Airbound intends to retain vertical takeoff and landing even as it develops larger aircraft to avoid dependence on runways.

“We want to build towards a world where everything has cost parity with trucking,” he said.

Founded in 2023, Airbound has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across the southern Indian cities of Bengaluru and Guntur, Pushp said. That includes more than 1,000 flights with the Indian hospital network Narayana Health, where its drones transport diagnostic samples between healthcare facilities.

The startup uses a single active drone on the Narayana route, flying diagnostic samples about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes. The same samples can take three to five hours to be transported by two-wheelers when factoring in the time spent waiting for enough samples to be bundled for road transport, according to Pushp.

That partnership is expanding to include Narayana’s new Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru, which was designed without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank and will instead rely on Airbound’s drones to connect with centralized facilities.

Three-city drone network

Airbound has set its sights on a far larger ambition to create a drone delivery network that connects three cities in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The startup has sign an agreement with the state government with an eventual target of 10,000 flights a day for retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries. That daily flight target will require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft, depending on route lengths, though Pushp expects the number to be closer to 250.

The agreement does not involve a government contract or subsidy, Pushp said, adding that the Andhra Pradesh government is working with Airbound on the regulatory framework needed to enable the network. The startup expects to generate business from companies using it for deliveries.

Indian startups including Skye Air Mobility and TSAW Drones are already building aerial logistics businesses, while other Indian drone makers such as Garuda Aerospace have also explored delivery use cases. Nonetheless, Pushp argues that Airbound wants to build the aircraft that other logistics networks could eventually use rather than just trying to become the largest delivery operator.

“That’s the Boeing role — the aircraft airlines everywhere rely on, not the airline itself,” he said.

Airbound designs and manufactures its aircraft in a 43,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru, where it keeps work on the airframe and other core systems in-house. While Pushp declined to disclose its production capacity or how many aircraft the startup has built so far, he said manufacturing would not be the bottleneck as Airbound scales.

The bigger bottleneck, Pushp noted, is regulation, particularly securing approvals for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, a certification that allows drones to fly beyond the direct sight of an operator and is critical to operating delivery networks at scale.

Those regulatory constraints have also limited Airbound’s ability to turn its flights into meaningful commercial revenue. Moreover, the startup remains broadly pre-revenue despite having a team of more than 150 employees.

“The goal is to be a giant in a few decades, not to make revenue as soon as we can,” Pushp said.

The Dutch Data Protection Authority is fining Uber €825 million (around $966 million) — the second largest penalty issued so far under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, according to Reuters.

The Dutch regulator was investigating complaints that Uber had deactivated driver accounts through an automated process without sufficient warning or human oversight. In a statement, deputy chair Monique Verdier said that the company had “committed serious infringements.”

“A computer should not make decisions on its own that have [such] major consequences,” Verdier said.

Uber, however, argued that most driver suspensions are brief, that no permanent deactivations take place without human review, and that drivers have the ability to appeal. (Dutch regulators said some drivers were permanently deactivated without human review, which Uber disputes.) The company said it will appeal the decision.

“We strongly disagree with this decision ​and disproportionate fine,” an Uber spokesperson told Reuters. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for additional comment.

Brahim Ben Ali, a former Uber driver in France, told the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant that after his account was deactivated in 2019, he collected testimonies from 170 other Uber drivers and eventually brought his complaint to the Netherlands, where Uber’s European headquarters are located.

Ben Ali was assisted in this effort by a Swiss nonprofit focused on digital rights called PersonalData.io, which helped the drivers collect data about how the deactivation decisions were made. Founder Paul-Olivier Dehaye said a driver “can complete a thousand journeys with satisfied passengers, but if just one person reports a very serious problem, the consequences can be enormous.”

Dehaye told me that this is the third fine that the Dutch regulator has levied on Uber, following a €290 million fine over its handling of drivers’ personal data and a €10 million fine stemming from related issues. He also said he plans to start a class action suit through which drivers can seek compensation.

In fact, Dehaye said these fines all originate with complaints made by the same group of drivers. And he’s starting a new company called StartClaims to support the litigation and other regulatory action — first against Uber and then eventually expanding to other gig economy cases, as well as related areas like adtech.

While discussing the case with Dehaye (who I’ve known casually since college), I brought up a blog post by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, in which Gruber worried that this fine makes it “unlawful in the EU for Uber to monitor its drivers for pulling scams against customers, or just never picking riders up, leaving them stranded.”

Gruber also took issue with Verdier’s statement, arguing, “Saying that ‘a computer’ made these decisions is like saying that when a company suspends or fires a habitually late employee, that ‘the time clock’ made the decision. Managers at the company set the policies, and the devices measure employee compliance.”

Dehaye countered that Gruber “misses the point.”

“Uber is free to use humans to punish drivers who scam, but then [it] has to take responsibility for this decision making (like ‘being an employer’, not ‘being a marketplace’),” he said.

With back-to-school season approaching (or already here in some places), keeping track of everyone’s schedules can get pretty chaotic. Between work, school, appointments, sports, chores, and everything else going on, a regular paper calendar just doesn’t cut it. That’s where Linkdaze’s smart digital calendar comes in — a touchscreen tablet built specifically to organize a household rather than a single person. 

One of Linkdaze’s biggest strengths is its calendar compatibility. The system can synchronize calendars from popular services, including Google, iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, and Cozi, which is a dedicated family-organizing app. This is particularly useful for families where different members use different platforms. Instead of asking everyone to switch to a single calendar app, Linkdaze brings multiple schedules together and uses color coding to make individual family members easy to identify.

Launched last December, Linkdaze is available in 15.6-inch and 10.1-inch models, giving you some flexibility depending on how much wall space you have. Beyond calendars and appointments, you can use it for chores and rewards, meal planning, shopping lists, and other family organization. It can even double as a digital photo frame for displaying family photos.

The most interesting feature, however, is Linkdaze’s AI meal planner with “Snap-to-Sync.” Instead of manually entering everything into a meal-planning app, you can take a photo of a paper recipe or your kid’s school lunch menu. Linkdaze will turn that information into a digital meal plan and generate a shopping list from it. While not an entirely new idea, it’s a useful feature that helps Linkdaze stand out from a basic digital calendar.

Another big plus is that Linkdaze doesn’t require a monthly subscription for its main features. It’s an interesting choice in a category where recurring revenue has become the default. Skylight, a competing smart-calendar brand, offers additional features through its $79 per year subscription. For a hardware company entering a crowded smart-display market, that decision is either going to differentiate its product or look like a lost revenue stream.

Linkdaze is also less expensive up front, with the 10.1-inch model priced at $119.99 (currently discounted to $66 on Amazon) compared with Skylight’s 10-inch model starting at $149.99 (if you pay for the subscription.)

Overall, this device could make a practical gift for busy parents who are trying to keep everyone’s schedules in one place. It could also be a great fit for college apartments, where roommates can use it to coordinate chores, study schedules, shared meals, and other household responsibilities. It’s also very helpful for those of us juggling interviews, deadlines, meetings, and story assignments.

This post was first published on August 20, 2026.

Indian startups spent years getting consumers accustomed to having groceries and everyday goods delivered within minutes. Now Walmart-owned Flipkart is rapidly closing the gap with those quick-commerce pioneers, as global rival Amazon mounts its own push into instant delivery.

Flipkart Minutes, which debuted in August 2024 as the e-commerce giant’s foray into quick commerce, is now delivering 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, up from about 390,000 to 400,000 in November, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. That puts the two-year-old service close to Swiggy’s Instamart, which is delivering about 1.4 million orders a day, according to a person familiar with its operations.

The gap is notable as Flipkart is a relative latecomer to a market whose top ranks have been dominated by Instamart, Blinkit, and Zepto. Food-delivery giant Swiggy launched Instamart in 2020 and Zepto arrived the following year, both during the pandemic, while Blinkit traces its roots to online grocery platform Grofers, founded in 2013. The three have since established themselves as India’s top quick-commerce players.

Blinkit continues to dominate the market with around 3.4 million to 3.6 million daily orders, followed by Zepto at about 2.4 million to 2.6 million, per recent estimates from market research firm Datum Intelligence. Flipkart is now rapidly narrowing the gap with Instamart, the smallest of the three established leaders by order volume.

Instamart still has substantial scale. Earlier this month, Swiggy said the quick commerce service has more than 14 million monthly transacting users and operates over 1,200 dark stores across over 130 cities. The company has also been narrowing Instamart’s contribution-margin losses, with more than 45% of its dark-store network now contribution-margin positive.

Nonetheless, Flipkart has fueled that growth with an aggressive expansion of its delivery infrastructure. Minutes now operates about 1,020 to 1,050 micro-fulfillment centers — essentially small warehouses located close to customers specially to handle quick deliveries — up from 600 in January and about 340 a year ago, one of the sources told TechCrunch. The company is adding around 100 such facilities a month, the source said, aiming to have 1,500 by the end of 2026.

Flipkart’s advantage goes beyond adding dark stores. The company can tap an enormous pool of existing e-commerce customers it has already spent years and billions of dollars acquiring, giving Minutes a ready audience for faster deliveries, Satish Meena, an adviser at Datum Intelligence, told TechCrunch.

“Flipkart is already a serious player,” Meena said. “Once you open 1,000 dark stores and [are] doing a million orders per day, it’s serious enough.”

Minutes is also seeing customers return and shop more frequently. About 65% to 70% of customers making purchases on the service each month are repeat buyers, while transactions per customer have increased 50% to 60% from a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said.

Those customers are spending an average of about ₹400 to ₹500 (about $4.20–$5.20) per order, with fruits and vegetables, staples, dairy, and meat among the fast-growing categories, the sources said. Flipkart is also expanding its selection of higher-end gourmet products, including organic and artisanal items, as it looks to capture more of customers’ spending on Minutes.

Even as Minutes has expanded, its average delivery time has fallen to about 11 minutes, from 13 minutes a year ago, one of the sources told TechCrunch.

A battle for India’s shoppers

Flipkart’s growth comes as quick commerce takes a bigger role in how Indians shop online, even as broader consumer demand has shown signs of weakness. In a recent report, Bernstein analysts said while the country’s consumption growth softened in July, a shift toward quick commerce and e-commerce continued, with quick-commerce platforms recording healthy growth in monthly active users.

Similar to Flipkart, Amazon is striving to gain its share in the Indian quick-commerce market. The Seattle-based company has been expanding Amazon Now, its quick-commerce service, as it seeks to bring the instant-delivery model to its existing e-commerce customer base.

During CEO Andy Jassy’s visit to India in June, Amazon stated that Now became its fastest-growing business in India, with orders doubling every quarter since launch. The company also laid out plans to take the service to more than 300 cities and set up a network of more than 1,000 micro-fulfilment centers, alongside larger facilities aimed at expanding the range of products it can deliver within minutes.

Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, Zepto, and Blinkit parent Eternal did not respond to requests for comment.

The quick commerce expansion is increasingly defensive as well as offensive for both Flipkart and Amazon, Meena told TechCrunch. As consumers grow accustomed to receiving certain purchases almost immediately, the e-commerce giants risk losing those transactions to specialist quick-commerce platforms if they cannot offer comparable speed.

“Can you go back to scheduled delivery now in grocery? No,” Meena said. “You will not go back.”