October 19, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Rivian's CEO says autonomy will enable 'dramatically different' vehicle designs: Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said he thinks autonomy will allow his company to build radically different kinds of vehicles than the outdoorsy SUVs and trucks it currently makes. Read More

AI assistant startup Town nabs unicorn valuation 4 months after launch: AI assistant startup Town nabbed a unicorn valuation on Monday, announcing a $108 million Series B round co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Read More

Tolan snags $30M for its AI companion that helps users navigate life: AI companion app Tolan has raised another $30 million after attracting more than 250,000 active users. Read More

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Afternoon Must-Reads

People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again: Fed up with ads, tracking, and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs. Read More

Amazon to fund 12 small nuclear reactors at former Indiana coal plant: Amazon and X-energy have inked another deal to deploy nuclear power to the grid. This one will generate nearly 1 gigawatt of electricity. Read More

Amazon is taking its biggest shot at Nvidia yet with new TorchNeuron dev tool: Amazon wants to break Nvidia’s hold on PyTorch, the free toolkit used to build most AI apps, so that more developers run their apps on alternative chips like its own. Read More

Musk pledges to give 'every kid in America' one of his SpaceX shares: Musk's post came just a few hours after Anthropic promised to put 5% of its shares into a new "public benefit fund," which it intends to use to make "large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations" after its upcoming IPO. Read More

Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago: Eugenia Kuyda's newest startup Wabi is positioned to take advantage of an idea she had more than a decade ago. Wabi offers a personal AI assistant with a twist, free and downloadable to anyone today. Read More

Last but Not Least

Nvidia launches new open models to run agents in the enterprise and on PCs : Nvidia is leaning hard into the trend of enterprise companies wanting to run their own open models in their own data centers and also trying to make on-device, private AI agents a thing. Read More