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After two decades going to Starbucks every day at 4:30 a.m., longtime customer Tony Dennis abandoned the company last year.”I was frustrated,” he told CNBC.The customer experience he used to love had disappeared. Baristas didn’t engage with him, despite his daily visits. At the same time, the cost of his double-shot tall nonfat lattes and double-shot tall nonfat cappuccinos kept climbing.The 65-year-old Las Vegas real estate developer wasn’t the only Starbucks customer who no longer felt the same loyalty. Following a drift of customers away from the chain and two disastrous earnings reports, Starbucks’ board ousted then-CEO Laxman Narasimhan and…

Google is expanding AI Mode — its AI-powered Search experience — to five new languages, opening access to additional users around the world, after being limited to English for over six months. On Monday, Google announced that AI Mode will now support Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. The update follows last month’s rollout of the AI-powered experience to 180 new markets in English, after initially launching in the U.S. and later expanding to the U.K. and India. “With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the…

Cognition AI, the startup behind AI coding agent Devin, has hit a $10.2 billion valuation after raising $400 million, marking a jump from the company’s $4 billion valuation earlier this year, reports Bloomberg.  Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel-backed VC, led Cognition’s latest round, with participation from existing investors like Lux Capital, Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Elad Gil, Definition Capital and Swish Ventures. In July, Cognition acquired AI coding startup Windsurf, just days after Google poached the startup’s CEO, co-founder, and research leads. The raise comes after serious growth for Cognition’s core product. The startup’s annual recurring revenue from Devin has climbed…

LONDON (AP) — A Palestinian beer managed to find its way to British store shelves this week from the Israeli-occupied West Bank despite onerous border checks, a distance of some 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) and a raging war in the region.How it got here is a story of an unlikely bond between brewers in arms.“My grandfather used to say, if you can make it succeed and happen in Palestine, you can succeed anywhere else in the world,” said Madees Khoury, brewmaster at Taybeh Brewing Co. and daughter and niece of the founders. “Because of these challenges and obstacles that we…

Venture capital firm Insight Partners says it has completed notifying a number of individuals, including the firm’s limited partners, whose personal information was stolen by hackers in a January data breach.  In a statement late last week, the company said it completed its review in August following the data breach, which it described as a “social engineering attack” without further explanation. According to its earlier notice, the stolen data included information about certain Insight Partners’ funds, management companies, and portfolio companies. The hackers also took banking and tax information, the company said, as well as personal information about its current…

The corporate space world tired Bianca Cefalo to the point that she found it easier to literally start her own space company and launch objects into orbit.  Cefalo is the founder of Space DOTs, which launched in 2022 to detect space threats. She and her team have created a software platform called SKY-I for space tech manufacturers and operators to help them detect, interpret, and attribute natural and human-originated threats in orbit. She’s spent decades in the industry, working on projects that have put objects on the moon and launched satellites into orbit. She worked as a thermofluid dynamic analyst…

One of the biggest questions facing founders today: How do you keep building when the rules won’t stop shifting? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, where we celebrate TechCrunch’s 20th anniversary from October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, we’ll hear firsthand from Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, on the Builders Stage. Why Ryan’s story matters Since launching Flexport in 2013, Ryan Petersen has helped more than 10,000 companies move over $175 billion worth of goods worldwide, raising $2.3 billion and redefining how supply chains are managed in a volatile, tech-driven era. But Petersen’s lessons go far beyond logistics.…

Charlie Sheen said fatherhood quickly occupied his life when he got sober eight years ago.“It turned into just an interesting daily grind of just sudden responsibility and, you know, having to answer the call and it was amazing,” Sheen said Monday, telling an audience that once he “finally put down the bottle,” his children started coming to his home.Sheen sat down with actor and writer David Duchovny during an event at 92nd Street Y, New York on Monday to discuss the writing process behind his memoir, “The Book of Sheen,” his journey through sobriety and his passion for acting.The actor…

AI needs a better brain — and Edo Liberty is building it. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Pinecone founder and CEO Edo Liberty will explain why the next wave of AI-native apps won’t be driven by bigger models, but by smarter search. With 10,000+ startup and VC leaders expected to be at Disrupt, this AI Stage fireside chat and presentation is a must-attend session. The future of AI isn’t more data — it’s better retrieval As AI becomes more embedded in every workflow, the real differentiator isn’t just the algorithm — it’s…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A decade-long slide in high schoolers’ reading and math performance persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years, according to results released Tuesday from an exam known as the nation’s report card. Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress.The assessments were the first since the pandemic for eighth graders in science and 12th graders in reading and math. They reflect a downward drift across grade levels and subject areas in previous releases from…