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News about Android is being relegated to a side show at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, next month. On Monday, the company announced it would share information about the latest updates coming to the Android ecosystem at an upcoming virtual event called “The Android Show: I/O Edition,” airing on May 13. The decision to move the Android portion of Google I/O to its own separate event ahead of the start of I/O suggests this year’s developer conference could be even more AI heavy than usual. AI news and updates were already taking up an increasingly longer portion of the Google I/O consumer and developer keynote addresses. Google, however, is framing this shift differently. Instead, the company says there were “so many new things to share” about Android that it chose to create a special event — an I/O edition of its Android Show video podcast — as another way to share the latest news and changes. It also notes that Android will continue to have a presence at I/O in keynotes and technical sessions for developers. Still, moving a bulk of the Android news to a virtual show ahead of the main event is a notable programming change for the developer conference. Whether that’s because there’s “too much news” or because Google decided Android’s news didn’t require as high a billing as in previous years remains to be seen.

Temu is adding “import charges” of around 145% in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods shipped from China, CNBC reports. The fees cost more than the products that U.S. consumers are buying, and in some cases are more than doubling the price of a standard order. For example, CNBC found that a summer dress sold on Temu for $18.47 will cost $44.68 after $26.21 in import charges. Shein has also hiked prices but isn’t implementing an import charge, it appears. The moves come a few weeks after Temu and Shein warned that they were going to raise prices for U.S. customers starting April 25 in response to the tariffs. The 145% tariff on products made in China, along with Trump’s decision to end a customs exemption that had allowed goods under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free, has disrupted the business models of both platforms.

Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play. Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, one of the most experienced and seasoned B2C founders in Europe, who built the Amen and Plazes apps. Right now, all users can do on Grouphug is export the text from a group WhatsApp chat and generate funny images from the content. However, this is just a taster of things to come. Underlying this simple exercise to acquire beta users is an app still in stealth mode. But Petersen hinted to TechCrunch that the company plans to launch a platform to generate more value out of WhatsApp groups using generative AI. “We think we’ve cracked AI humor. For now, Grouphug will create jokes based on what happened in the group. We turn your WhatsApp chats into memes. But then we have other plans for it,” he told TechCrunch. “There is this world of group chats where most of the things happening, like on Reddit or X, are conducted in public. But everything that’s in WhatsApp groups is not part of the public internet. That’s an opportunity.” The startup has already raised a €1.5 million ($1.7 million) pre-seed round led by Berlin-based Blueyard VC, alongside Tiny VC, Charles Songhurst (a Meta board member), Atlantic Labs, and others. Petersen is joined by Joseph Djenandji, who recently exited his well-known multi-channel travel brand LostIn. The third founder is Matthew Balazsi, who has worked on AI and ML for the last 10 years. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020. Spotify also reported a record-high quarterly operating income of €509 million (around $528 million). However, this was below the company’s guidance of €548 million ($625 million). Total revenue jumped 15% year-over-year to €4.2 billion ($4.8 billion). Additionally, the music-streaming giant now has a total of 678 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 423 million ad-supported MAUs. The numbers come on the heels of the company’s profitability milestone last quarter, when it reported operating income of €477 million ($509.48 million). Spotify remains a top player in the music-streaming industry, successfully beating competitors like Apple Music and Amazon Music. Plus, the company has been chasing YouTube with its push into video podcasts, with 330,000 shows now on the platform. Notably, its recently launched Spotify Partner Program has paid out more than $100 million to podcast creators in the first quarter. Most recently, Spotify rolled out its AI Playlist offering to over 40 markets, including the Bahamas, Fiji, Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, Singapore, and more.

Google announced on Tuesday that digital IDs are coming to more states and services in Google Wallet. The company also shared that Wallet is getting a way to privately verify age and that the app is expanding to 50 more countries. Residents in Arkansas, Montana, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia will soon be able to save their U.S. government-issued digital IDs to Google Wallet. Plus, people in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, and New Mexico will be able to use their mobile IDs at the DMV. As the REAL ID deadline of May 7, 2025, approaches, Google notes that you can use an ID Pass created from your U.S. passport to pass through TSA security for domestic travel at supported airports, even if you don’t have a REAL ID driver’s license or state-issued ID. However, your ID pass isn’t a replacement for your physical ID, so you should still keep that with you. Users will also soon be able to use their digital ID to recover Amazon accounts, access online health services with CVS and MyChart by Epic, verify profiles on platforms like Uber, and more. In addition, Google is rolling out the ability for residents in the U.K. to create digital ID passes with their U.K. passports and securely store them in Google Wallet. As verification is required across many websites and services, Google says it wanted to create a verification system that not only verifies users’ ages but also protects their privacy throughout the process. To achieve this, Google is integrating zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology into Google Wallet. This integration will allow Google to provide fast age verification across mobile devices, apps, and websites that use its digital credential API. The company will use ZKP in other Google products and partner with apps like Bumble, which will use digital IDs from Google Wallet to verify user identity and ZKP to verify age. Google will also open source its ZKP technology to other wallets and online services. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW As for Wallet’s expansion to 50 more countries, Google didn’t provide a list of the specific countries. TechCrunch reached out to learn more.

Google’s AI-based note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM is making its Audio Overviews feature available in 76 new languages, the company announced on Tuesday. Audio Overviews launched last year to give users the ability to generate a podcast with AI virtual hosts based on documents they have shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs. The idea behind the feature is to give users another way to digest and comprehend the information in the documents they have uploaded to the app. With this expansion, more people can use Audio Overviews in their preferred language. Google notes that up until now, Audio Overviews have been generated in your account’s preferred language. Now the company is introducing a new “Output Language” option that will allow users to choose which language their Audio Overviews are generated in. You can change the language at any time, making it easy to create multilingual content or study materials as needed, Google says. “For example, a teacher preparing a lesson on the Amazon rainforest can share resources in various languages — like a Portuguese documentary, a Spanish research paper, and English study reports — with their students,” Google wrote in a blog post. “The students can upload these and can generate an Audio Overview of key insights in their preferred language.” Google told TechCrunch in an email that the new supported languages include Afrikaans, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Bengali, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish (European, Latin American, Mexico), Estonian, Basque, Persian, Finnish, Filipino, French (European), French (Canada), Galician, Gujarati, Hindi, Croatian, Haitian Creole, Hungarian, Armenian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, and Japanese. They also include Javanese, Georgian, Kannada, Korean, Konkani, Latin, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maithili, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Malay, Burmese (Myanmar), Nepali, Dutch, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norwegian (Bokmål), Oriya, Punjabi, Polish, Pashto, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Swedish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional). Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

Google Play’s app marketplace is losing apps. From the start of 2024 to the present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That’s a decline of about 47%, representing a significant purge of the apps that have been available to Android users globally. The decline is not part of some larger global trend, the firm also notes. During the same period, Apple’s iOS App Store went from hosting 1.6 million apps to now just around 1.64 million apps, for instance — a slight increase. In Google’s case, the decline in apps could be a relief for Android device owners who have had to sort through scammy, spammy, and otherwise poor-quality apps to find the best ones to install. The reduction could also help developers who have had to fight for visibility. Over the years, Google Play’s less stringent requirements for app review have led to the marketplace being overrun with lower-quality apps. While Apple continues to enforce strict app review measures before publication, Google often relies on automated checks combined with malware scans to speed up the app-review process. It tends to have a shorter app-review period as a result of its lighter touch in terms of human review. In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings. Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn’t install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated “limited functionality and content.” That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF-file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Reached for comment, Google confirmed that its new policies were factors here, which also included an expanded set of verification requirements, required app testing for new personal developer accounts, and expanded human reviews to check for apps that try to deceive or defraud users. In addition, the company pointed to other 2024 investments in AI for threat detection, stronger privacy policies, improved developer tools, and more. As a result, Google prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on its Play Store and banned more than 158,000 developer accounts that had attempted to publish harmful apps, it said. One factor Google didn’t cite was the new trader status rule enforced by the EU as of this February, which began requiring developers to share their names and addresses in the app’s listing. Those who failed to do so would see their apps removed from EU app stores. (It’s worth pointing out that Apple also began requiring trader status information in February and did not see a decline in available apps as a result.) Appfigures additionally notes it began seeing a decline in the number of apps on the Google Play Store even before the official start of the purge last summer; it doesn’t yet have an explanation for this change. However, the firm says there have been 10,400 releases on Google Play so far this year, up 7.1% year-over-year as of April.

As part of its Q1 2025 earnings release, Snap said it’s scrapping plans for a simplified version of its app. The news comes seven months after Snapchat began testing a redesigned version of the app without the Snap Map or Stories tabs. The new version consolidated the app’s navigation bar around three icons: chat, camera, and Snapchat’s TikTok competitor, Spotlight. Instead of continuing to test the simplified version, the social network is now going to begin experimenting with a “refined five-tab interface” that keeps all of the app’s existing tabs and makes it easier to access Spotlight. “In terms of the simple Snapchat design, we learned a lot from the redesign, but ultimately found that it was difficult, especially for power users, folks who really love Snapchat the way that it is who use the map and stories all the time, to really adopt the three-tab design, which made it harder to find stories and subscriptions and harder to find the map,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said on a call with investors. “So ultimately, we’re taking a bunch of learnings from the three tab simple Snapchat design and evolving the five-tab design with those learnings.” The company says it found that a more prominent Spotlight experience and the integration of Friend Stories within chats significantly boosted daily content viewership and total content views, especially among more casual users. “Our most engaged Snapchatters consistently demonstrated a preference for a five-tab layout, favoring the familiarity of tile-based content discovery and a dedicated Map tab,” Snap said in its letter to investors. “Informed by these insights, we have begun testing a refined five-tab interface that combines the best of both approaches: bringing more Stories to the messaging experience and adding easier access to Spotlight, now placed directly to the right of the Camera.” The reversal comes as Snap shares that it lost 1 million users in North America in Q1 quarter-over-quarter. Snapchat DAUs (daily active users) in North America stood at 99 million, compared to 100 million in the past quarter and 100 million in the prior year, according to Snap’s shareholder letter. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW The company also saw an increase of more than 55% year-over-year in the number of My AI daily active users in the U.S., as Spiegel teased some AI-related announcements to come later this year. “As we look at the areas where we really want to differentiate, it’s really around that visual communication,” he said. “And so as we look at the way that people are interacting with My AI, by sending snaps and either receiving snaps or a chat response in return. I think that starts to show the way that these multimodal models are going to play a powerful role in people’s lives. I think looking even longer term beyond that, the way that people are going to integrate AI into augmented reality, and I think provide a totally new user interface powered by AI is something that we’re investing a lot in. We’ll have more announcements around that later this year.” Snap reported first-quarter revenue of $1.36 billion, a 14% year-over-year increase. The company says the uptick was driven by growth of its Snapchat+ subscription service and progress that it has made with its advertising solutions. Snap also reached a new milestone: more than 900 MAUs (monthly active users) worldwide. In addition, the social network’s DAUs grew to 460 million globally, an increase of 38 million year-over-year.

Since it launched nearly 20 years ago, Speedtest.net has been one of the most popular tools used to measure internet speeds. However, Doug Suttles, the founder and former CEO of Ookla, the network testing company behind Speedtest, felt that just measuring speed was not enough to tell people all they wanted to know about their internet connections. That’s why Suttles is now launching a new tool called Orb that measures latency, packet loss, jitter, and speed to give you a measure of how stable your internet connection is. Suttles, who started Orb with Ookla exec Jamie Steven in 2023, said Speedtest.net was the right tool for its time, but as internet speeds became less of an issue around the world, he felt people needed new, more holistic ways to assess their internet connections. “Speed tests are like the dipstick in your car, which will tell you that you ran out of oil once your car breaks down. We wanted to build a dashboard to tell you that you are low on oil, so you can fix that problem,” Suttles told TechCrunch over a call. Image Credits:Orb.netOrb checks network connections for three key variables: responsiveness, which is measured by a combination of lag, jitter, latency, and packet loss; reliability, which measures responsiveness over time and packet loss over time; and speed, which is your usual download and upload speeds. All these variables can be measured over different time intervals — one minute, five minutes, one hour, and 24 hours. Combining all three variables, the tool gives you a score to indicate how stable your network connection is. An Orb score above 80 indicates a good connection; 70-80 means you have an okay connection; and if you get anything below that, you may have noticeable problems. If your score is under 80, the app suggests steps you can take to improve the performance of the network. The startup says it uses LLMs to show descriptions of key issues and the suggestions related to solving those. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Image Credits:Orb.netOrb has apps for various platforms, including iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. The company also provides a guide for installing the tool on Raspberry Pi, Onewrt, Docker, Steam Deck, Prox Max, WLAN Pi, older smartphones, and other platforms for those who would want to monitor their connections more frequently. The startup is also working on a feature that would let users set up an Orb and share it with someone else to have them monitor your connection. Both users will receive notifications if the connection quality wavers. Image Credits:Orb.netOrb is currently free to use, and the company wants to keep it that way. Suttles said he’d like to license the technology to enterprises and ISPs so they can monitor and identify network issues with advanced alerts and analytics. The startup has so far raised $3.8 million in funding from Sidekick Ventures, as well as individual investors, including Fastly senior director Edward Bender; Netflix engineer Jana Iyengar; Big Network CEO Tom Daly; Fastly’s former head of streaming, Lee Chen; the head of strategy and operations of Oculus Studios, Jason Kay; former president of THQ and founder of Naughty Dog, Jason Rubin; and Vetro’s head of strategic initiatives, Will Cooper. Steven, who also worked on creating Down Detector, said Orb also aims to create recipes for different services that help you detect if you can access a particular site, like Zoom, Netflix, X, or Google Drive, to check if the services are working.

Instagram Threads, Meta’s X competitor, has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday. That’s an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024. It’s also worth noting that in a single quarter, Threads added nearly the same number of users to its network as one of its newer competitors, Bluesky. The latter, a decentralized social app, today has roughly 35 million users. X, meanwhile, now has north of 600 million monthly active users, according to statements made by its CEO, Linda Yaccarino, on Wednesday. While Threads is still small in comparison to Meta’s other social apps — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp — its growth is helping to cement its place in the microblogging app ecosystem. In total, Meta says that more than 3.4 billion people now use at least one of Meta’s apps daily. On Wednesday’s call, Zuckerberg told investors that the growth indicates that Threads “continues to be on track to become our next major social app.” He additionally noted that there’s been a 35% increase in time spent on Threads as a result of improvements to the app’s recommendations systems.

Epic Games has notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple, as a result of which Fortnite could return to the U.S. iOS App Store as early as next week. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling on Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the company from imposing anticompetitive pricing. Apple won many of the arguments in the trial with Epic Games. One notable exception was a ruling prohibiting the iPhone maker from collecting fees on purchases made outside of apps. At the time, Apple was told to change its app store to allow developers to direct customers to their websites, where users could then make purchases. Per the ruling, Apple not only failed to comply, it did so “willfully” and with the intent of creating new anticompetitive barriers. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple,” Rogers said in the ruling. She went a step further and referred the case to the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California to review it for possible criminal contempt proceedings. An Apple spokesperson said the company would fight the court’s decision, saying “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took to X to announce his company would bring Fortnite back to the U.S. App Store as soon as next week. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW As The Verge reported, Sweeney also extended a proposal to Apple: “If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic,” he wrote. The ruling was celebrated by other tech companies affected by Apple’s policy. “This landmark court ruling is a victory for developers everywhere,” Spotify spokesperson Jeanne Moran said in an emailed statement. “Spotify will move quickly to submit an app update to Apple, enhancing the experience for our consumers across the United States.”

WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion people using it every month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted during the company’s Q1 results conference call on Wednesday. Founded in 2009 and acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, WhatsApp remains free to use and doesn’t serve any ads. The app reached the 2 billion monthly active user mark back in 2020, but with the latest milestone, it’s now one of the few apps to cross the 3 billion user mark, besides Facebook. That humongous user base makes WhatsApp a key business for Meta, especially now as the company has bet the farm on its AI strategy. The company has previously said that the app is one of its biggest distribution platforms for AI services. “We see people engage with Meta AI from several different entry points. WhatsApp continues to see the strongest Meta AI usage across our family of apps,” Meta’s CFO, Susan Li, said during the conference call. She also noted that most WhatsApp users engage with Meta AI in one-on-one chats. Zuckerberg said that while WhatsApp provides easy access to AI features, Meta has had to take a different approach to spur adoption of its AI products in markets like the U.S., where the majority of people still prefer to use their phones’ stock messaging apps to text each other. That’s where the company’s newly released Meta AI app comes in. “We hope to become the leader over time [in the U.S. messaging market], but we’re in a different position there than we are in most of the rest of the world on WhatsApp. So I think that the Meta AI app as a stand-alone is going to be particularly important in the United States to establish leadership in — as the main personal AI that people use. But we’re going to keep on advancing the experiences across the board in all of these different areas,” he said. The company said the chat app’s business platform, WhatsApp Business, is growing, and accounted for a large portion of the $510 million in revenue brought in by its family of apps. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Meta has been testing AI tools for WhatsApp Business, and Li said on Wednesday that the company is building a new AI agent management interface and dashboard that would let businesses train Meta’s AI on their information. That information could include a business’ website, WhatsApp profile, or their Instagram and Facebook page. It’s also testing letting businesses activate Meta’s AI chatbot in chats with customers.

MoviePass, the startup that made its mark with its movie theater subscription service, has always been known for shaking things up, and its latest venture is no exception. The company announced on Thursday the beta launch of Mogul, a new daily fantasy entertainment platform designed specifically for the Hollywood industry. To understand what Mogul is, it’s important to first grasp the concept of daily fantasy sports. This subcategory of fantasy sports allows players to compete over short-term periods, rather than an entire season. Players assume the role of team managers, creating their own dream teams made up of real-world athletes and earning points based on how those athletes perform in actual games. Mogul takes this idea by allowing users, who are likely passionate movie enthusiasts interested in this sort of thing, to act as studio heads in the film industry. Players are provided with a budget and “studio credits” (in-game currency) to spend on selecting actors for their leagues. Users can update their lineup of movie actors each day. They then participate in fantasy-style tournaments that last about a week, plus one-on-one competitions and solo challenges. Participants make calls on the results of various things, such as box office results, audience turnout, critic ratings, and potential award winners. As users level up, they earn digital collectibles — think signed posters and memorabilia — that help them climb the leaderboard. Mogul is built on Sui, a layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform developed by Mysten Labs. Beta testers will receive a digital wallet to securely store their in-game virtual currency, rewards, and collectibles. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Image Credits:MoviePass/MogulMoviePass is taking a bold leap with the introduction of Mogul, as it has never really been done before. But CEO Stacy Spikes believes it’s a huge market waiting to be tapped. He said, “People can name more actors than they can probably name sports athletes. So I think there’s a really big market opportunity there.” Initially, when we first learned about Mogul, we didn’t anticipate that it would take off, at least not in the early stages. We wondered if there are many movie fans willing to compete with others about box office revenue or ratings. However, we may have underestimated its appeal. The company claims that more than 400,000 people have already signed up for the early-access waitlist. It remains to be seen whether it can maintain this level of interest leading up to the official launch, but it could become popular among niche film industry followers. Image Credits:MoviePass/MogulDuring our initial conversation with Spikes, he positioned Mogul as a predictive market platform. Later on, we were told that a more fitting description would be to classify Mogul as a daily fantasy sports platform, but it may evolve to include this functionality in the future. For now, though, Mogul operates exclusively with virtual currency. This distinction is important, especially considering the regulated nature of daily fantasy sports, as opposed to prediction market platforms, which currently exist in a legal gray area. Kalshi, for instance, has been in ongoing legal battles with state gambling regulators. “It’s murky what needs to be approved. There are different types of clearances, depending on the markets you want in the U.S. You have to go state by state. It literally is like a Chinese puzzle with stuff all over the place,” Spikes said. Mogul represents the initial phase of MoviePass’s long-term web3 strategy. The company has previously revealed its intention to provide on-chain rewards for attending movies. It’s also backed by Animoca Brands, a venture capital firm specializing in blockchain technology. Last year, MoviePass partnered with Sui to allow subscribers to make payments using USD coin.

Epic Games’ mega-popular Fortnite is promising a return to the U.S. iOS App Store next week after a surprising ruling in a years-long legal battle with Apple. The dispute between Epic and Apple began in 2020, when Apple removed Epic Games from the iOS App Store. Because Apple takes 30% of all in-app purchases, Epic had introduced support for direct payments in Fortnite to bypass Apple’s fee. The following year, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple could not prevent developers like Epic from adding links for customers to buy digital goods outside of the iOS ecosystem to avoid forking over the 30% fee. But nearly four years later, on Wednesday evening, the same judge said in a ruling that Apple was in “willful violation” of the injunction that allowed developers to refer customers to payment methods that aren’t subject to Apple’s fees. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple,” Rogers said. NO FEES on web transactions. Game over for the Apple Tax. Apple’s 15-30% junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the Digital Markets Act. Unlawful here, unlawful there. 4 years 4 months 17 days. https://t.co/RucrsX7Z4A pic.twitter.com/3kSYnt5pcI — Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 30, 2025 Even at the time of the 2021 ruling, Fortnite did not return to the iOS App Store. At the time, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the app would return when it could offer “in-app payment in fair competition with Apple in-app payment, passing along the savings to consumers.” But after Rogers’ unexpected ruling this week, Sweeney said that Fortnite will finally be available again for iOS users in the US. “Apple’s 15-30% junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the Digital Markets Act. Unlawful here, unlawful there,” Sweeney wrote, noting that it had taken four years, four months, and seventeen days to get to this point. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW However, Sweeney is pushing Apple to extend the U.S. ruling worldwide before bringing Fortnite back to the App Store globally. That’s something that Apple seems unlikely to do, given it’s planning to appeal this ruling.

Google’s Gemini chatbot app now lets you modify both AI-generated images and images uploaded from your phone or computer, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. Native image editing in Gemini will start rolling out gradually today. The service will be expanded to people in most countries and get support for more than 45 languages in the coming weeks. The launch follows an AI image-editing model Google piloted in its AI Studio platform in March, which went viral for its controversial ability to remove watermarks from any image. Similar to ChatGPT’s recently upgraded image-editing tool, Gemini’s newfangled native image editor can, in theory, achieve better results than stand-alone AI image generators. Gemini now offers a “multi-step” editing flow that delivers what the company describes as “richer, more contextual” responses to each prompt with text and images integrated. You can change the background in images, replace objects, add elements, and more within Gemini. Editing an image using Gemini.Image Credits:Google“For example, you can upload a personal photo and prompt Gemini to generate an image of what you’d look like with different hair colors,” explains Google in a blog post. “[Or] you could ask Gemini to create a first draft of a bedtime story about dragons and provide images to go along with the story.” If this sounds like a deepfake risk, well, that’s reasonable. To allay fears, images created or edited with Gemini’s native image generation will include an invisible watermark, according to Google. The company is also “experimenting” with visible watermarks on all Gemini-generated images.

An executive cautioned during Microsoft’s earnings call on Wednesday that customers might face AI service disruptions as demand outstrips the company’s ability to bring data centers online. Microsoft’s EVP and CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings call that the company may face AI capacity constraints as early as June. “We had hoped to be in balance by the end of Q4 but we did see some increased demand, as you saw through the quarter,” Hood said. “So we are going to be a little short, a little tight as we exit the year.” The timing of Hood’s statement is interesting because Microsoft has reportedly canceled multiple data center leases this year. In February, investment bank TD Cowen published a memo that Microsoft canceled multiple data center leases that equated to a “couple hundred megawatts” or the equivalent of two data centers. In the two months since, there have been multiple reports of additional data center lease cancellations. Microsoft says these two instances are not necessarily related. The company reiterated today that it is still committed to investing $80 billion into data centers this year — as it originally earmarked at the beginning of this year. Half of that figure is for U.S.-based data centers. Hood also added that demand today and demand tomorrow are not the same thing. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “Just a reminder, these are very long lead time decisions; from land to build out, it can be, you know, lead times of five to seven years, two to three years,” Hood said. “So we’re constantly in a balancing position as we watch demand curves.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the top of the earnings call that the company opened data centers across 10 new countries and four new continents during this past quarter.

A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena, of helping a select group of AI companies achieve better leaderboard scores at the expense of rivals. According to the authors, LM Arena allowed some industry-leading AI companies like Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon to privately test several variants of AI models, then not publish the scores of the lowest performers. This made it easier for these companies to achieve a top spot on the platform’s leaderboard, though the opportunity was not afforded to every firm, the authors say. “Only a handful of [companies] were told that this private testing was available, and the amount of private testing that some [companies] received is just so much more than others,” said Cohere’s VP of AI research and co-author of the study, Sara Hooker, in an interview with TechCrunch. “This is gamification.” Created in 2023 as an academic research project out of UC Berkeley, Chatbot Arena has become a go-to benchmark for AI companies. It works by putting answers from two different AI models side-by-side in a “battle,” and asking users to choose the best one. It’s not uncommon to see unreleased models competing in the arena under a pseudonym. Votes over time contribute to a model’s score — and, consequently, its placement on the Chatbot Arena leaderboard. While many commercial actors participate in Chatbot Arena, LM Arena has long maintained that its benchmark is an impartial and fair one. However, that’s not what the paper’s authors say they uncovered. One AI company, Meta, was able to privately test 27 model variants on Chatbot Arena between January and March leading up to the tech giant’s Llama 4 release, the authors allege. At launch, Meta only publicly revealed the score of a single model — a model that happened to rank near the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW A chart pulled from the study. (Credit: Singh et al.)In an email to TechCrunch, LM Arena Co-Founder and UC Berkeley Professor Ion Stoica said that the study was full of “inaccuracies” and “questionable analysis.” “We are committed to fair, community-driven evaluations, and invite all model providers to submit more models for testing and to improve their performance on human preference,” said LM Arena in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “If a model provider chooses to submit more tests than another model provider, this does not mean the second model provider is treated unfairly.” Supposedly favored labs The paper’s authors started conducting their research in November 2024 after learning that some AI companies were possibly being given preferential access to Chatbot Arena. In total, they measured more than 2.8 million Chatbot Arena battles over a five-month stretch. The authors say they found evidence that LM Arena allowed certain AI companies, including Meta, OpenAI, and Google, to collect more data from Chatbot Arena by having their models appear in a higher number of model “battles.” This increased sampling rate gave these companies an unfair advantage, the authors allege. Using additional data from LM Arena could improve a model’s performance on Arena Hard, another benchmark LM Arena maintains, by 112%. However, LM Arena said in a post on X that Arena Hard performance does not directly correlate to Chatbot Arena performance. Hooker said it’s unclear how certain AI companies might’ve received priority access, but that it’s incumbent on LM Arena to increase its transparency regardless. In a post on X, LM Arena said that several of the claims in the paper don’t reflect reality. The organization pointed to a blog post it published earlier this week indicating that models from non-major labs appear in more Chatbot Arena battles than the study suggests. One important limitation of the study is that it relied on “self-identification” to determine which AI models were in private testing on Chatbot Arena. The authors prompted AI models several times about their company of origin, and relied on the models’ answers to classify them — a method that isn’t foolproof. However, Hooker said that when the authors reached out to LM Arena to share their preliminary findings, the organization didn’t dispute them. TechCrunch reached out to Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Amazon — all of which were mentioned in the study — for comment. None immediately responded. LM Arena in hot water In the paper, the authors call on LM Arena to implement a number of changes aimed at making Chatbot Arena more “fair.” For example, the authors say, LM Arena could set a clear and transparent limit on the number of private tests AI labs can conduct, and publicly disclose scores from these tests. In a post on X, LM Arena rejected these suggestions, claiming it has published information on pre-release testing since March 2024. The benchmarking organization also said it “makes no sense to show scores for pre-release models which are not publicly available,” because the AI community cannot test the models for themselves. The researchers also say LM Arena could adjust Chatbot Arena’s sampling rate to ensure that all models in the arena appear in the same number of battles. LM Arena has been receptive to this recommendation publicly, and indicated that it’ll create a new sampling algorithm. The paper comes weeks after Meta was caught gaming benchmarks in Chatbot Arena around the launch of its above-mentioned Llama 4 models. Meta optimized one of the Llama 4 models for “conversationality,” which helped it achieve an impressive score on Chatbot Arena’s leaderboard. But the company never released the optimized model — and the vanilla version ended up performing much worse on Chatbot Arena. At the time, LM Arena said Meta should have been more transparent in its approach to benchmarking. Earlier this month, LM Arena announced it was launching a company, with plans to raise capital from investors. The study increases scrutiny on private benchmark organization’s — and whether they can be trusted to assess AI models without corporate influence clouding the process. Update on 4/30/25 at 9:35pm PT: A previous version of this story included comment from a Google DeepMind engineer who said part of Cohere’s study was inaccurate. The researcher did not dispute that Google sent 10 models to LM Arena for pre-release testing from January to March, as Cohere alleges, but simply noted the company’s open source team, which works on Gemma, only sent one.

Amazon on Wednesday released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding of context, multi-step planning, and precise execution across multiple tools and data sources.” Amazon announced its Nova lineup of models in December at its annual AWS re:Invent conference. Over the last few months, the company has expanded the collection with image- and video-generating models as well as with audio understanding and agentic, task-performing releases. Nova Premier, which has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go, is weaker on certain benchmarks than flagship models from rival AI companies such as Google. On SWE-Bench Verified, a coding test, Premier is behind Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and it also performs poorly on benchmarks measuring math and science knowledge, GPQA Diamond and AIME 2025. However, in bright spots for Premier, the model does well on tests for knowledge retrieval and visual understanding, SimpleQA and MMMU, according to Amazon’s internal benchmarking. In Bedrock, Premier is priced at $2.50 per 1 million tokens fed into the model and $12.50 per 1 million tokens generated by the model. That’s around the same price as Gemini 2.5 Pro, which costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Importantly, Premier isn’t a “reasoning” model. As opposed to models like OpenAI’s o4-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, it can’t take additional time and computing to carefully consider and fact-check its answers to questions. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Amazon is pitching Premier as best for “teaching” smaller models via distillation — in other words, transferring its capabilities for a specific use case into a faster, more efficient package. Amazon sees AI as increasingly core to its overall growth strategy. CEO Andy Jassy recently said the company is building more than 1,000 generative AI applications and that Amazon’s AI revenue is growing at “triple-digit” year-over-year percentages and represents a “multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate.”

Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. The documents, submitted by attorneys for book authors suing Meta for what they claim is unauthorized training of the company’s AI on their works, don’t indicate what exactly Meta considers to be a “generative AI product.” But it’s public knowledge that the tech giant makes money — and stands to make more money — from generative AI in a number of flavors. Meta has revenue-sharing agreements with certain companies that host its open Llama collection of models. The company recently launched an API for customizing and evaluating Llama models. And Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant, may eventually show ads and offer a subscription option with additional features, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s Q1 earnings call Wednesday. The court documents also reveal Meta is spending an enormous amount on its AI product groups. In 2024, the company’s “GenAI” budget was over $900 million, and this year, it could exceed $1 billion, according to the documents. That’s not including the infrastructure needed to run and train AI models. Meta previously said it plans to spend $60 billion to $80 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, primarily on expansive new data centers. Those budgets might have been higher had they included deals to license books from the authors suing Meta. For instance, Meta discussed in 2023 spending upwards of $200 million to acquire training data for Llama, around $100 million of which would have gone toward books alone, per the documents. But the company allegedly decided to pursue other options: pirating ebooks on a massive scale. A Meta spokesperson sent TechCrunch the following statement: Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “Meta has developed transformational [open] AI models that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies. Fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this. We disagree with [the authors’] assertions, and the full record tells a different story. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of generative AI for the benefit of all.”

World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the identities of Tinder users in Japan using World’s identity verification system. Additionally, World has established separate collaborations with both the prediction market startup Kalshi and the decentralized lending platform Morpho; these partnerships enable customers to sign in to these services using their IDs already registered with World. And World plans to team up with Visa to launch The World Card, a card that lets users spend digital assets anywhere Visa is accepted. Image Credits:WorldSince its founding in 2019, World, developed by San Francisco- and Berlin-based Tools for Humanity, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and created digital IDs for millions of users. But it has yet to breach the mainstream, in part because of its cumbersome approach to verifying IDs. With these new partnerships, World is going after a broader audience — one that previously might not have considered having their eyeballs scanned to verify their “humanness.” The World Card is perhaps the most interesting of the new projects. Expected to become available in the U.S. later this year, it’ll connect to World’s World App and allow users to transact with cryptocurrencies. The card will automatically exchange crypto to fiat when needed, and potentially offer certain rewards for specific “AI subscriptions and services.” World had one surprise in store at its Wednesday event: a collaboration with Stripe to allow users to pay with World on Stripe-enabled websites and apps. The company didn’t say when this might go live. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

Microsoft on Wednesday launched several new “open” AI models, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. As it says on the tin, all of the new permissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they can spend more time fact-checking solutions to complex problems. They expand Microsoft’s Phi “small model” family, which the company launched a year ago to offer a foundation for AI developers building apps at the edge. Phi 4 mini reasoning was trained on roughly 1 million synthetic math problems generated by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model. Around 3.8 billion parameters in size, Phi 4 mini reasoning is designed for educational applications, Microsoft says, like “embedded tutoring” on lightweight devices. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. Phi 4 reasoning, a 14-billion-parameter model, was trained using “high-quality” web data as well as “curated demonstrations” from OpenAI’s aforementioned o3-mini. It’s best for math, science and coding applications, according to Microsoft. As for Phi 4 reasoning plus, it’s Microsoft’s previously-released Phi 4 model adapted into a reasoning model to achieve better accuracy for particular tasks. Microsoft claims Phi 4 reasoning plus approaches the performance levels of DeepSeek R1, which has significantly more parameters (671 billion). The company’s internal benchmarking also has Phi 4 reasoning plus matching o3-mini on OmniMath, a math skills test. Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning plus, and their detailed technical reports, are available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “Using distillation, reinforcement learning, and high-quality data, these [new] models balance size and performance,” wrote Microsoft in a blog post. “They are small enough for low-latency environments yet maintain strong reasoning capabilities that rival much bigger models. This blend allows even resource-limited devices to perform complex reasoning tasks efficiently.”

Google’s AdSense advertising network started supporting ads inside users’ chats with some third-party AI chatbots earlier this year, Bloomberg reported. The company is rolling out the feature following tests with AI search startups iAsk and Liner, the report said, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. “AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences,” Bloomberg cited a Google spokesperson as saying. The search and advertising giant is ostensibly seeking to capitalize on — and offset the potential threat of — the burgeoning trend of users increasingly using AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity to search the web and answer common queries. Google has invested heavily in AI tools and products, with a slate of large language models and frequent updates to its Gemini AI apps and models. The company late last year started showing ads in AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries it supplies for certain Search queries. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden has put a hold on the Trump administration’s nomination of Sean Plankey to head the federal government’s top cybersecurity agency, citing a “multi-year cover up” of security flaws at U.S. telecommunication companies. Wyden said in remarks, seen by TechCrunch and confirmed by the senator’s spokesperson, that he will block the nomination of Plankey to serve as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) until the agency agrees to release a 2022-dated unclassified report it commissioned detailing security weaknesses across the U.S. telecom network. Senate rules allow for any serving senator to unilaterally and indefinitely hold up a federal nomination. As noted by Reuters, which was first to report Wyden’s hold on Plankey’s nomination, lawmakers often use nomination holds — or the threat of a hold — to demand concessions from the executive branch. Scott McConnell, a spokesperson for CISA, referred comment to the White House, which did not return TechCrunch’s request for comment. In remarks slated for Wednesday, Wyden — who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee — said his staff members were previously permitted to read the unclassified report but that efforts to publicly release its findings were refused. Wyden said he appealed to then-CISA Director Jen Easterly as well as then-President Joe Biden to release the report prior to the change in government. Wyden said the report is a “technical document containing factual information about U.S. telecom security … as such, this report contains important factual information that the public has a right to see,” he added. “CISA’s multi-year cover up of the phone companies’ negligent cybersecurity has real consequences,” said Wyden, referring to the widespread hacking of U.S. phone companies by Chinese spies known as Salt Typhoon, revealed last year. Wyden said the hacks, which allowed the hackers to snoop on calls and text messages of senior American officials, were “the direct result of U.S. phone carriers’ failure to follow cybersecurity best practices … and federal agencies failing to hold these companies accountable.” Soon after the Salt Typhoon hacks, Wyden introduced legislation aimed at requiring phone companies to implement specific cybersecurity requirements, perform annual testing, and more. “The federal government still does not require U.S. phone companies to meet minimum cybersecurity standards,” Wyden said in his remarks Wednesday.

NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document. The document was published on Friday as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a vulnerability in the chat app to target hundreds of users, including more than 100 human rights activists, journalists, and “other members of civil society.” At the time, WhatsApp said around 1,400 users had been targeted. Now, an exhibit published in the court document shows exactly in what countries 1,223 specific victims were located when they were targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. The country breakdown is a rare insight into which NSO Group customers may be more active, and where their victims and targets are located. The countries with the most victims of this campaign are Mexico, with 456 individuals; India, with 100; Bahrain with 82; Morocco, with 69; Pakistan, with 58; Indonesia, with 54; and Israel, with 51, according to a chart titled “Victim Country Count,” that WhatsApp submitted as part of the case. There are also victims in Western countries like Spain (21 victims), the Netherlands (11), Hungary (8), France (7), United Kingdom (2), and one victim in the United States. The court document with the list of victims by country was first reported by Israeli news site CTech. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW “Numerous news articles have been written over the years documenting use of Pegasus to target victims around the world,” said Runa Sandvik, a cybersecurity expert who’s been tracking victims of government spyware for years. “What’s often missing from these articles is the true scale of the targeting — the number of victims who were not notified; who did not get their devices checked; who opted not to share their story publicly. The list we see here — with 456 cases in Mexico alone, a country with documented, well-known civil society victims — speaks volumes about the true scale of the spyware problem,” Sandvik told TechCrunch. Contact Us Do you have more information about NSO Group, or other spyware companies? From a non-work device and network, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop. Another piece of data that shows the scale of the government spyware problem is that the hacking campaign targeting WhatsApp users occurred over a period of only two months, “between in and around April 2019 and May 2019,” as WhatsApp wrote in its original complaint. In other words, in just two months, NSO Group’s government customers targeted more than a thousand WhatsApp users. It’s important to note that it is not clear if the fact that there is a victim located in a certain country means that specific country’s government was the customer using NSO Group’s spyware against those victims. It’s possible that a government customer could be using Pegasus to target someone outside of the country. As CTech noted, Syria appears on the victim list, but NSO Group cannot export its technology to Syria, a country that’s sanctioned by countries all over the world. The number of victims also gives an insight into who may be NSO Group’s highest-paying customers. Companies like NSO Group, and other predecessors like Hacking Team and FinFisher, determine what price to offer their surveillance products to their customers in part by the number of targets that can be concurrently infected with the spyware. Mexico, for example, was reported to have spent more than $60 million on NSO Group’s spyware, according to a 2023 New York Times article that cited Mexican officials, which could explain why there are so many Mexican targets in this list. Last year, WhatsApp scored an historic victory when the judge presiding over the lawsuit ruled that NSO Group had breached U.S. hacking laws by targeting WhatsApp users. The next step in the lawsuit is an upcoming hearing that will determine the damages that the spyware maker will have to pay to WhatsApp. Apart from this list of victims, the court case brought by WhatsApp has led to other revelations, including the fact that NSO Group disconnected 10 government customers after reports that they abused the spyware, and that the WhatsApp hacking tool produced by NSO Group cost up to $6.8 million for a one-year license, which in total netted the company “at least $31 million in revenue in 2019.” WhatsApp spokesperson Zade Alsawah declined to comment. NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Small and medium businesses are the latest targets for cybersecurity attacks, with one in three small businesses experiencing a data breach last year. SMBs are becoming more proactive in detecting and stopping these threats, and today a startup called Cynomi is announcing $37 million in funding to meet that demand. Insight Partners and Entrée Capital are co-leading this Series B, with previous backers Canaan, Flint Capital, and S16VC also participating. Sources close to the deal told TechCrunch that the company was valued at more than $140 million post-money. Cynomi previously raised around $23 million (including this seed round we covered in 2022). London and Tel Aviv-based Cynomi was founded by CEO David Primor, a PhD who previously was the CTO and head of R&D of the Israel Defense Forces; and COO Roy Azoulay, who was a founder and started and led the first startup incubator at Oxford University. Cynomi leans, at a basic level, into the trend of using AI-based agents to do complicated and high-volume work, but it’s also pushing the boundaries of what we might expect those AIs to do. CEO Primor describes his product not as an AI agent but as a “virtual CISO” — an automated, AI-based decision-maker that can help smaller organizations understand how to run their security operations. It’s also building a number of actions this “virtual CISO” is capable of carrying out. It can assess a network, plan a set of security policies, make remediation plans, track progress, run analytics to find vulnerabilities in a network, recommend optimizations for systems, and produce reports on the network status and health. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW All of this is not sold directly by Cynomi to SMBs, but via third parties that SMBs typically use for network connectivity and other managed services. The gap in the market that Cynomi is trying to exploit is a very large one. Malicious hackers used to focus exclusively on more valuable, larger businesses, but these days, they have started to focus on the long tail in the market. SMBs are numerous, accounting for some 90% of all businesses globally, so tapping into them can make for lucrative pickings. SMBs face some particular challenges, however, when it comes to budget and manpower, which is where a product like Cynomi’s comes in. “A virtual CISO service can start at $10,000 to $12,000 a year,” notes Azoulay. “A human CISO would be about at least 10 to 15 times that. It’s about having the knowledge and to be a sophisticated buyer in the sense of finding that CISO. It’s also about having a CISO [be online] the full week, 52 weeks a year.” That formula, so far, has worked for the startup. Cynomi has seen its annual recurring revenue triple in the last year, Primor said, with more than 100 service providers and consultancies — including big telcos like Deutsche Telekom — reselling Cynomi’s services to thousands of SMBs. Some 80% of its customers are in the U.S., and the company will now be widening its focus to Europe and other markets. The funding will be used for R&D and business development because the startup believes there is an even bigger opportunity ahead than just virtual CISOs. “The cybersecurity consulting space is a $163 billion business, but we believe it doesn’t really have an operating system,” said Azoulay. “We believe Cynomi can be that operating system.” There are dozens of cybersecurity companies out there targeting SMBs, and a sizeable group has identified service providers as their primary sales channel. These include the likes of Vanta, Cohere, Qualys, Coro, Bastion, Guardz. CyberSmart, Cowbell, and DataGuard. Philine Huizing, managing director at Insight Partners, said that it’s the “vCISO” hook that reeled Insight in as an investor. “We believe Cynomi is defining a new category with its vCISO platform,” she said. Meanwhile, the startup’s focus on working with managed service providers to deliver the product means it can be tailored or augmented with whatever the service providers are building or selling. That could help differentiate the service and keep it from becoming another commoditized offering. “MSPs can assess each client’s unique risks, customize strategies by industry, and efficiently manage day-to-day interactions, making them more impactful,” Huizing added.