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Y Combinator-alum Rulebase is betting that the next wave of automation in financial services won’t be about flashy AI interfaces but rather the unglamorous back-office tasks like compliance. The startup, founded in 2024 by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, two Nigerian engineers who met in London, just raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round led by Bowery Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and several angels. Financial services firms spend enormous amounts of effort on support tickets, resolving disputes, ensuring quality assurance, and regulatory compliance. Rulebase’s software, which it calls an agent co-worker, replaces much of…

In brief Google launched an open-source protocol to let AI agents handle financial transactions, backed by Coinbase, PayPal, American Express, and the Ethereum Foundation. The protocol expands Google’s Agent2Agent framework with payment support for cards, stablecoins, and real-time bank transfers, plus a crypto-specific x402 extension. The Ethereum Foundation says the effort aligns with its ERC-8004...

Salesforce is increasing its focus on national security. The customer relationship management giant announced the creation of a new business unit called Missionforce on Tuesday. It will be focused on incorporating AI into defense workflows in three main areas: personnel, logistics, and decision-making, according to a company press release.  Missionforce will be helmed by Kendall Collins, the CEO of Government Cloud. Collins joined Salesforce in 2023 and was previously the chief business officer and chief of staff to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.   “With Missionforce, we’ll now bring the best of AI, cloud, and platform technology from the private sector…

Peter Schiff, the outspoken gold advocate, warned that Bitcoin may be “topping out” as traders await a Federal Reserve decision this week. Related Reading According to a post on his X account, Schiff said gold and silver have broken out while Bitcoin is showing signs of losing momentum. The comment has drawn attention because it comes just before a key Federal Reserve meeting that many expect to affect risk assets. Market Resistance At $116,000 Bitcoin has been stuck near the $116,000 level and has not been able to push well past that mark, even after recent gains. Based on market…

Hawaii health officials are affirming their support for federal marijuana rescheduling—a policy change that the Trump administration is actively considering. At the same time, a state lawmaker who sponsored a cannabis legalization bill in the most recent session says he’s actively gathering input on how to revise the legislation in the hopes it can pass...

Autonomous vehicles have long been touted as “just around the corner,” but the reality of bringing self-driving cars to the streets is far from simple. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 — October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco — Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana joins the Disrupt Stage for a wide-ranging conversation on the true state of AVs and where the industry goes from here. Inside the self-driving reality check While headlines often highlight crashes, controversies, or overblown promises, Mawakana has spent years navigating the real-world path to autonomous mobility. At Disrupt, she’ll dig into what it actually takes to scale…

In brief Bitwise has filed to debut an ETF giving investors exposure to AVAX, the 19th-biggest digital coin by market cap. The S-1 filing comes as Dogecoin and XRP ETFs are expected to hit the market this week. Asset managers are hoping to get the green light for a number of altcoin ETFs. Crypto asset...

Gemini’s mobile adoption has been soaring since the August launch of its Nano Banana image editor model, which has received positive reviews, particularly from users who say they can now more easily perform complex edits and create realistic images. The app has climbed to the top of global app stores’ charts and has seen a 45% month-over-month increase in downloads in the month of September so far, according to new data provided by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Though the month is only half over, Gemini’s app has already gained 12.6 million downloads in September, up from 8.7 million in August.…

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading in a sideways consolidation phase after hitting its all-time high near $124,000, with volatility keeping investors cautious. The price has been fluctuating in a relatively tight range, showing resilience but also failing to establish a clear directional trend. For many traders, this period feels like the calm before a potential breakout, as the market sits at what analysts describe as a pivotal setting. Related Reading While short-term traders navigate intraday moves, long-term investors are focusing on structural signals that could define Bitcoin’s next phase. Top analyst Maartunn recently highlighted a significant on-chain dynamic: dormant whale coins…

Harjot Gill was running FlexNinja, an observability startup he co-founded several years after selling his first startup Netsil to Nutanix in 2018, when he noticed a curious trend.   “We had a team of remote engineers who were starting to adopt AI code generation on GitHub Copilot,” Gill told TechCrunch. “We saw that adoption happen, and it was very clear to me that as a second-order effect, it’s going to cause bottlenecks in the code review.”  In early 2023, Gill started CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review platform, and it acquired FlexNinja.  Gill’s prediction has come true: developers are now regularly…