TeeJay Tech Bro

  If there is one thing robotics founders and investors agree on, it’s that the “ChatGPT moment” where a general-purpose robot can seamlessly adapt to any environment has not arrived. Opinions vary on whether the breakthrough is just around the corner or a decade away. Feather Robotics , a humanoid startup founded last year, is developing a robot for either timeline. Unlike Tesla or Figure, which are tackling the lofty mission of building both the body and a foundational “brain” that isn’t yet widely deployed, Feather provides the hardware and software toolkit for developers to tackle real-world tasks now. “You can’t buy a Tesla robot today and develop on top of it,” Feather co-founder Hoa Mai told TechCrunch. “We realized that this is not how most companies became successful. Hardware players like Nvidia or Apple started with a product that worked and was deployable, and then they added complexity over time.” In 2025, after his previous humanoid startup was sold to 1X, Mai (pictur...

  For founders, Startup Battlefield 200 is one of the biggest moments of their careers. For everyone else in the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 audience, it’s one of the best ways to learn how great companies are actually evaluated by VCs. This startup pitch competition is as intense as you’d expect. From October 13–15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, every hand-picked founder has six minutes to make their case, but the most revealing moments often come after the presentation ends. That’s when the judges start asking the questions every investor, customer, and future employee will eventually want answered. Can this team execute? Is the market big enough? Why now? What’s defensible? Those conversations are as valuable for the thousands of founders watching from the audience as they are for the companies onstage. Vaibhav ‘Dr.V’ Agrawal, Co-Founder and General Partner, ODDBIRD VC Dr.V is the co-founder and general partner of ODDBIRD VC , a pre-seed fund he founded in 2024 to back AI compan...

Farmers around the world face a pressing problem: The equipment they use to till, plant, and harvest their fields is killing their margins. Studies have estimated that soil compaction can reduce yields by 20% to 60% .  Plowing can help, but it’s a laborious and expensive task that harms soil health in different ways. Muju Earth has developed an alternative, the Aeropod, that automatically aerates the soil without machinery or robotics. The startup says it can promote better soil health while cutting farmers’ tilling costs by half or more. The device is “built like a seed, it sows like a seed, and it ships like a seed,” Ifeoluwa Afolayan, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. The device is about the size of a fingernail, and farmers drop it in the soil alongside their seeds using the same equipment. There’s no need to till the soil in advance. “It just really seems like a no-brainer,” Afolayan said. After the Aeropod is exposed to a combination of temperature, pressure...

  Nscale , a British neocloud, has secured $3.36 billion in financing ahead of its IPO later this year, the company announced on Friday. Structured as a convertible note, the massive funding round underscores the staggering capital required to build out AI data centers. Led by hedge fund Third Point, the new investment includes $2.36 billion available to the company immediately and an additional $1 billion coming from existing investor Nvidia, which Nscale will receive in mid-November. The notes will convert into equity shares once the IPO is completed. Nscale, which filed its IPO paperwork last week, is expected to be valued at $35 billion on the NYSE, Financial Times reported, and is seeking to raise $3 billion in the offering, according to Bloomberg . Since it was spun out of Australian cryptocurrency mining company Arkon Energy two years ago, Nscale has amassed over $103 billion worth of contracts, according to its IPO filing . The company is currently developing several larg...