Monday, June 9, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we are diving into everything you need to know from Apple's WWDC event; we're meeting a company selling pizza-making robots; and it's the last day to apply for TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield. Go apply now!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Apple

Fresh new look: Not every product update has to involve AI — yes, even in 2025. At its WWDC event, Apple announced that it's refreshing its user interface and calling the upgrade Liquid Glass because its software will feature a "glassy" look and feel.

🔓 A hack! United Natural Foods, a major food distributor, disclosed that it was hit by a cyberattack. The company caught wind of the hack on Thursday and subsequently started shutting down portions of its network. Natural Foods said this is causing ongoing disruptions to its business.

🥲 We hardly knew ye: Anthropic's brief experiment with having its Claude AI model write a blog called Claude Explains is already over. Anthropic shut the blog down and removed its few initial posts, and it now redirects users back to Anthropic's homepage. RIP.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Apple

📲 A little of everything: Apple didn't hold back on the first day of its WWDC event. The company announced a major rebrand to its operating systems, a dedicated mobile gaming app, and more. Here's everything that was announced at WWDC 2025.

🍕 Pizza party time: Entrepreneurs seem determined to find a way to roll robotics into the pizza-making process. XRobotics' countertop pizza-making robot is one that's seeing some traction: The company just raised $2.5 million, and its robots are cranking out 25,000 pizzas a month.

⏱️ Slight delay: Blue Origin delayed the launch of the second flight of its New Glenn rocket until at least mid-August, after having originally targeted late spring. Its first flight in January saw the rocket's upper stage reach orbit on first attempt, but its booster stage exploded while trying to land.

📊 Over AI? New data from Ramp implies that AI adoption by corporations may already be slowing. Ramp's AI Index found that the adoption of AI products was leveling off after 10 straight months of growth. Ramp's data comes from 30,000 corporations.

🔋 Bucks for batteries: Mitra Chem, a company that's developing materials to make lithium-iron-phosphate store more energy, has raised $15.6 million. This total is part of a larger $50 million round the company is looking to raise.

Around the web

💰 Billionaire time: Theresia Gouw, the founding partner at Acrew Capital, has become the first female VC billionaire, per Forbes estimates. They've got a look at how the former figure skater, and early Facebook investor, has reached the milestone.

👂 They are finally (maybe?) doing something: A month ago, 404 Media had a horrifying report that Instagram's chatbots were claiming to be licensed therapists. Now Congress is urging Meta to look into it, which I'm sure will accomplish a lot.

Before you go

Image Credits: Kimberly White for TechCrunch / Getty Images

✨ Bears, beets, Startup Battlefield: TechCrunch Disrupt is only a few months away, and today marks the last day for companies to apply to be in TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield program. This isn't just another pitch competition, but rather is something much bigger.