Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we're looking at Cloudflare's latest gambit; the U.S.' fight against North Korean hackers; and a $1B acquisition motivated by data. We've also got notes on a startup capitalizing on devotion; Tesla's marketing stunts; Bolt's comeback; Meta's new Superintelligent Labs, and more. Let's go!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: TechCrunch

1. Pay to scrape: Cloudflare has come up with a new type of marketplace that could give publishers more control over their content and compensation for all that insatiable AI scraping. "Pay per Crawl" lets publishers experiment with letting AI crawlers scrape their sites for a set rate. Read More

2. Remote gigs to pay for nukes: The U.S. has taken down a major North Korean money laundering operation that relied on undercover remote IT workers getting employed by American tech companies to raise funds for the regime's nuclear weapons program. Oh, and they stole commercial IP and data, too. Read More

3. The data moat: Legal tech firm Clio has agreed to drop $1 billion in cash and stock on xLex, a legal data intelligence platform. That database will no doubt be put to good use to improve AI models for lawyers. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Image Credits: Sri Mandir

🛕 Digital devotion: Religion is huge in India, with 53 temples for every 100,000 people. AppsForBharat, an Indian startup behind devotional app Sri Mandir, is capitalizing on that religious fervor, and it just raised a fresh $20 million only nine months after raising $18 million. Read More

🚘 Delivery in 30 min or less: Tesla is all about pulling marketing stunts, often right before releasing delivery figures or earnings. A few days after launching its limited Austin robotaxi service, Tesla has now delivered a Model Y SUV to a customer autonomously, letting the vehicle drive itself about 15 miles from Tesla's factory. Read More

🤝 Quite the turnaround: Bolt is working on its comeback. The fintech has partnered with Klarna to integrate the latter's payment into its checkout operating system. In other words, Bolt devices will now show Klarna's BNPL offering. Read More

💰 From Workday to Series B: The founders of Levelpath found their own path while working at Workday, where they spotted the challenges that pushed them to build mobile-first, user-friendly procurement software platforms. The startup just closed a $55 million Series B led by Battery Ventures. Read More

🤓 Superintelligent: Meta has poached a number of engineers from top AI firms like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. All of them – plus Meta's entire existing AI team – will be working in its new Superintelligence Labs, co-led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Read More

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Around the Web

🧐 Quality prompts: As AI agents start being integrated into workflows, Google DeepMind's Philipp Schmid writes that "context engineering" — providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by an LLM — is going to replace prompt engineering. Read More

🤖 Robots don't unionize: Amazon might soon employ as many robots in its facilities as it does humans, reports The Wall Street Journal. With more than a million robots in workplaces assisting with 75% of deliveries, Amazon is getting close to a full workforce of robots. Read More

🔐 The DOGE effect: Bloomberg has a deep dive into a pattern that has emerged from three U.S. Treasury hacks, in which the department didn't deploy cybersecurity measures that could have prevented the attacks or flagged the intruders sooner. Some worry the impact of DOGE and its continued layoffs will make cyber defense matters worse. Read More

Before You Go

🚀 Full circle: Netflix has been offering more livestream offerings as it increasingly changes to resemble cable TV. Subscribers will now be able to watch livestreams of NASA rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks, and views of Earth from space. Read More