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AI NewsAs OpenAI files for IPO, Sam Altman’s eye-scanning company is doing layoffs, report says

As OpenAI files for IPO, Sam Altman’s eye-scanning company is doing layoffs, report says

7:30 AM IST · June 9, 2026

As OpenAI files for IPO, Sam Altman’s eye-scanning company is doing layoffs, report says

OpenAI announced on Monday that it confidentiallyfiled for an IPO, marking what could become one of the defining public offerings of the decade. And then there’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s other company,Tools for Humanity, which is reportedly conducting layoffs, according toBusiness Insider. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for confirmation. You might know Tools for Humanity better through its verification project known as World — and its related device, a creepy silver orb that wants to scan your eyeballs. The idea is that the company will be able to verify people’s identities using unique iris scans, helping to distinguish human activity from bot activity in the increasingly automated world that Tools for Humanity co-founder and chairman Altman is constructing. The company would also use these scans to validate people’s identities to support the trade of its own cryptocurrency, Worldcoin. These vague, suspicious ambitions were enough toraise moneyat a$2.5 billion valuationfrom investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and other funds backing blockchain companies. But now the company is reportedlydownsizingas it struggles to create revenue. In the U.S., companies likeTinder, Zoom, and Docusign have partnered on Altman’s side project. Internationally, Tools for Humanity has facedregulatory and ethical concerns. In Kenya, India, and Hong Kong, for example, people were offered the equivalent of$50 in Worldcoinin exchange for their biometric data. Kenya later banned World from operating in the country, citing privacy and financial concerns; meanwhile, South Korea fined the company $830,000 forallegedly violatinglocal privacy law. Who would’ve thought? People don’t feel great about giving their biometric data to a startup in exchange for $50 worth of crypto.

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Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed DeductiveAI for up to $85M

Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed DeductiveAI for up to $85M

DeductiveAI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, has agreed to be sold to enterprise software company Elastic for up to $85 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Deductive, which was founded in 2023, came out stealth last November when it announced a$7.5 million seedround led by CRV with participation from Databricks Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, and PrimeSet.  The investment valued the startup at $33 million, according to PitchBook. Elastic and Deductive did not respond to multiple requests for comment. TechCrunch will update this article if either company responds. The sale marks a speedy exit for Deductive, which is operating in a fast-growing sector known as AI site reliability engineering (AI SRE). Building AI-powered SRE tools has become an important area, driven by the massive influx of AI-written code. Replacing manual debugging with AI enables human SREs to shift focus from constantly fixing outages and other problems, to spending more time on helping with product development. The acquisition reflects a broader trend in which established tech incumbents are looking to buy AI-native startups to integrate agentic technologies into their existing product suites, the source told TechCrunch. Elastic, which went public in 2018, is best known for Elasticsearch, the search and analytics engine that helps organizations store, search, analyze, and monitor large amounts of data in near real time. The company’s observability software — essentially tools that let engineers monitor software systems and detect security threats — could benefit from Deductive’s tech. According to the source, integrating Deductive’s AI technology into Elastic will enhance its observability platform by giving customers tools to automatically monitor performance and resolve system failures in real-time. Deductive was co-founded by Rakesh Kothari, who was previously VP of engineering at Lightspeed-backed business analytics startup ThoughtSpot, and Sameer Agarwal, who formerly worked at Apache Software Foundation and Meta. Agrawal was one of the founding engineers at Databricks. While Deductive reached roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR,) according to the source, the startup’s growth lagged behind Resolve AI, one of the sectors’ perceived early winners. The two-year-old Resolve was co-founded by former Splunk executive Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal. Greylock and Lightspeed-backed startup was last valued at$1.5 billionwhen it raised a $40 million Series A extension in April.

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Almost half of U.S. singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says

Almost half of U.S. singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says

Dating app giant Match Group — which owns apps like Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid — conducted astudyto determine how U.S. singles really feel about the relationship between AI and dating. Turns out, people don’t want AI messing with every aspect of human life. Across the industry, dating apps are experimenting with AI. Bumble introduced adating assistant named Bee, and Tinder isspendingso much on AI tools that it’s slowed its hiring process. Meanwhile, Hinge’s CEOstepped downlast year to launch a more AI-focused dating app altogether. But according to Match’s survey of 1,000 people aged 18 to 39, 47% of singles have a negative view of AI’s use in romantic contexts. This perspective varies depending on what the AI is being used for. About 40% of singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app, and that figure rises to 51% among women ages 18 to 24. However, only 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds said that they had used a companion app over the last three months, and only about a third of those users said they were seeking genuine connections with those chatbots. While Match says that people harbor a “near-universal” disapproval of actually dating an AI, like in the movie “Her,” that doesn’t mean that respondents are wholly opposed to AI features within apps. Some 64% of respondents said they could see how AI might help them in their dating journey. If we’re being pedantic,technically, every major dating app has already used some form of matching algorithm since before we knew what a GPT was. This survey refers to the new crop of AI features that basically every app is introducing, which help users punch up their profiles, choose photos, and keep conversations flowing. What dating app developers should take away from this survey is that people are not entirely closed off to AI; they just don’t want to be in a relationship with a robot, nor do they want to feel as though their dating experiences are overly inundated with technology that feels inauthentic. “Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but hands off for the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they’ll use it to help them punch up a profile or for help figuring out what to say when a conversation goes quiet, but the actual connection is still theirs to create.” Hopefully, this message reaches dating entrepreneurs like Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who suggested that dating app users could havepersonal bots that date other users’ bots. It’s pretty normal nowadays to say you met your partner online, but “his bot asked my bot out, and our bots hit it off” will never be a socially acceptable meet-cute.

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OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO

OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO

OpenAI is bringing on some big names to the team in the lead-up to its public debut: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball. Shazeer, a co-lead at Gemini and the founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI,announced his departure on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, leaving only for a three-year period when he left to co-found Character AI. Two years ago,Google re-hired Shazeerin a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to the startup’s technology. The move is the latest in a series of shufflings between the top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is credited for being one of the foundational minds behind modern generative AI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture. Before leaving Google, Shazeer had also reportedly been stirring the pot when it came to political issues. According toThe Information,Shazeer voiced opinions on internal messaging boards on transgender identity and Israel’s war in Gaza that resulted in management deleting his posts. Whether those controversies will follow him to his new employer remains to be seen. In the meantime, OpenAI is also shoring up its policy credentials by bringing Ball to the team. Ball had a brief stint last year in the White House, where he helped publish America’s AI Action Plan before stepping down to rejoin the techno-libertarian think tank the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow. “I am pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I’ll be joining OpenAI as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures,”Ball wrote on X on Thursday. “Our mandate will be to help the company’s leadership shape frontier AI policy.” Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, high-agency team” will focus on “matters pertaining to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the U.S. Federal Government), and society,” Ball wrote in ablog post. The Strategic Futures team will cover both public-facing policy and internal governance, he added. That last is important — Ball noted that “almost by necessity,” AI labs will have to lead on AI governance decisions. “In other words,internal governancewill be more central to the future of AI than most people realize,” Ball wrote. Ball’s decision to join OpenAI — arguably an AI favorite in the administration — comes as Anthropic battles once again with the U.S. government. Late last week, President Donald Trump ordered anexport control ban on Anthropic’s latest models,Fable 5 and Mythos 5, leading to the AI firm being forced to take the models down entirely to avoid noncompliance. For anyone who had “government interference” on their S-1 risk factor bingo card, Ball is what it looks like when a company locks in its insider status while a rival is squeezed. TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.

4 hours ago

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Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs

Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs

Snap will be spinning off an internal generative AI video team into a separate company. The new company — dubbed Dotmo — will focus on developing AI models that can create interactive gaming experiences, Snap told TechCrunch. Snap cited the high costs of conducting such work internally as one of the reasons for the spinoff. While technically a separate company, Dotmo will retain its close ties to the Snapchat creator. For one thing, Snap will provide Dotmo with a license to adapt its technology for gaming and interactive entertainment platforms. At the same time, the initial Dotmo team will consist of a group of current Snap staff who are leaving Snap to launch the new venture. Additionally, while Dotmo won’t be funded by Snap directly, the company says that Bobby Murphy, its chief technology officer, will act as lead investor and will have a significant personal stake in the new firm. Though a financial backer, Murphy will continue to work for Snap full-time as its CTO and continue to lead its GenAI research and development initiatives. In exchange for the talent and the technology license, Snap will get a large equity stake in Dotmo, the company said — a position that could prove rewarding if the company prospers in the future. Dotmo may also eventually seek outside funding, Snap said. The move marks Snap’s second major spinoff effort this year. Earlier in 2026, Snapspun off Specs into a new companyto focus exclusively on the development of its smart glasses line. (Snap’s recent unveiling of Specswasn’t exactly a home runfor the company. Snap’s stock tanked afterconcerns were raisedabout the hefty price tag attached to the new smart glasses, which is around $2,200.) Snap also underwent a round of layoffs earlier this year, during whichsome 1,000 jobs were cut. Dotmo represents a different kind of spinoff than the Specs operation, in that its team will be focused on developing digital experiences that aren’t currently a part of Snap’s core business priorities, a Snap representative said. However, it could still be considered a partner in the future if the fit seems right, they added. Spin-offs can be a cost savings strategy for companies, although they can serve a variety of other purposes — like showing off a particular asset, generating investor attention, or providing operational flexibility to the team involved. In spinning out Dotmo, Snap may be reducing the financial burden associated with its AI efforts, while still maintaining exposure to any potential upside through its equity stake.

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