October 21, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Heat pump tech is 170 years old. Pascal thinks it’s time for an update.: Refrigerants startup Pascal has a new take on heat pump and cooling tech using a sponge-like material that promises to be 20% more efficient. Read More

AI promises productivity, but for managers, it's mostly a headache for now: More than 50% of managers say they're finding it harder to evaluate employees' work after adopting AI, according to a new survey. Read More

Foursquare co-founder says equity holders saw no returns from the company's acquisition: Foursquare raised $411 million in funding according to PitchBook data, but its equity holders saw no returns from its final acquisition. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

SpaceX's AI business is beating expectations: SpaceX hit profitability in the third quarter, with net income of $4.4 billion. AI was the engine. Read More

Eric Schmidt reportedly owns about half as much of Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei: Eric Schmidt’s fortune is about to get even bigger. Read More

Google has joined Amazon in attacking Nvidia's stronghold with AI app developers: Google has joined Amazon in releasing a developer tool that makes it easy for PyTorch users to move their apps off Nvidia GPUs. Read More

Anthropic’s cloud partnerships are getting messy: Anthropic is reportedly struggling to secure enough compute from cloud providers that increasingly view it as a competitor, even as its infrastructure spending balloons ahead of a planned November IPO. Read More

SpaceX and Tesla boards form special committees to review merger: Elon Musk likes the idea but says he is not on either committee, which is made up of independent directors. Read More

Last but Not Least

Mach9 raises $34M after pivoting to AI CAD software: The startup initially set out to build better, faster, and cheaper surveying hardware in 2021. Read More