Daily AI Grants Roundup – May 21, 2026

Hark has raised $700M in a Series A round at a $6B valuation to build personalized AI models and native hardware devices led by Parkway Venture Capital.

Your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding is gone in a week.. Startup Battlefield 200 applications close May 27.. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — this is the moment to act.. Apply…

Rising gas prices have been a recurring headline since the Trump administration started its war against Iran in late February, but it’s not the only commodity affected by the conflict.. Around 10% of the world’s aluminum is made in the Gulf region, so prices of the metal have…

Nvidia announced another record revenue figure after market close on Wednesday, reporting financial results for the quarter ending April 26.. Over those three months, the company brought in $81.6 billion in revenue (up 20% from the previous quarter) and a record $75.2 billion…

Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems : agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are.. One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo.. The company, which…

Alongside tools for AI-generated podcasts, Spotify on Thursday introduced a new, ElevenLabs-powered AI tool for self-publishing audiobooks within the Spotify for Authors platform.. The company said at its Investor Day event that the feature will launch in beta this June on an…

One of the common features for companies to build in the age of AI is to connect services like email, calendar, documents, and notes to create a daily brief in text or audio format.. Spotify is also giving in to this temptation and releasing a new standalone desktop app…

For users, Spotify has been a place to consume podcasts made by other creators.. The company wants to change that by introducing a personal podcast feature, which uses AI to generate podcasts for users based on an idea or a custom prompt.. Earlier this month, the company…

What will it take to launch the first must-have AI consumer product?. At least according to Hark, an AI lab building models and hardware for an AI personal assistant, which said on Thursday that it had raised that much in a Series A round that values it at $6 billion…

When the founders of a mental health app for men called Mental saw that one feature — AI interactive audio — was resonating wildly with their users, they knew they were onto something.. And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which…

One of the most promising introductions at Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday was a new way for consumers to use the web: AI agents.. Unfortunately, it was also the most confusing.. Google took the wraps off information agents , a reinvention of the aging Google…

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang is, perhaps, one of the greatest corporate hype men of all time when it comes to his company.. He may even surpass Salesforce’s Marc Benioff when it comes to relentless optimism in his company’s future and revenues.. Even so, he delivers on…