Tech

Forget the feed: Status AI raises $17M to turn social media into interactive entertainment

Published

8 hours ago

May 19, 2026

Like many young people of her generation, Fai Nur was what she called a “chronically online teenager.” She obsessed over music groups, TV shows, and movies, and never missed the chance to talk about her interests endlessly online. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, she saw potential immediately. “AI could finally let any user actually simulate any character, not just watch or talk about their favorite worlds, but live inside them,” she told TechCrunch.

“The role-play and immersion that fans had always wanted was suddenly possible at scale,” she said. She brought in her friend Amit Bhatnagar, who grew up building Minecraft games, and Pritesh Kadiwala, and the three of them began building Status AI: a gamified social media app where users can play any character in any universe. The app officially came out of stealth last year.

To use app, Nur said, users first craft a persona and are then transported into a social world built around them. “A user can become a celebrity with millions of followers, step inside their favorite show or book, run for president, or go viral on the internet,” Nur said.

The worlds on Status are user-generated, where settings, stories, and characters all come from player interaction. “You pick one character to be your first follower, then earn more as the story progresses.” There are both multiplayer and single-player modes for users looking to connect with friends in the app. “We’re fielding interest from studios and streamers,” she said. “They see Status as a way to develop audiences before bringing fans together in theaters or arenas.”

The company announced Tuesday $17 million in combined seed and Series A funding, with investors including General Catalyst, Y Combinator, LightShed Partners, and Abstract. The raise is a bet that consumer social’s next chapter isn’t another feed but instead interactive entertainment and the IP franchises that come with it.

The era of passive entertainment — users sitting back and watching other people’s lives scroll past — is coming to an end, Nur argues. And the first generation of AI social apps, built around the chatbot experience as seen with Character.AI and Chai, is already starting to feel dated.

“Status is built on the premise that the next generation doesn’t want to watch stories,” she said. “They want to engage with the stories and even live inside them.”

That shift has the attention of media companies. Status investor Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed, told TechCrunch that every media company these days is “desperately searching for ways to get consumers to live inside the worlds and characters they create.”

In some ways, Nur says the company is hoping to reimagine what a consumer app looks like in a post-AI world. “We’re using AI to create immersive, fun experiences that are brand-safe, interactive, and endlessly dynamic.” Status is also part of a trend on which TechCrunch reported late last year, suggesting the future of social media will be less generalized and more focused on fandom and niche communities.

Consumer investor Natalie Dillon of Maveron has argued the winners of the new era of social media will be “the platforms that combine intimacy, utility, and creativity in one ecosystem,” in that they won’t “look like traditional social networks; they’ll feel like multiplayer environments where people can build, buy, and belong all at once.”

Nur said the fresh capital will be used to help scale the platform. Already, she said, Status has seen more than 13 million worlds created, with more than 5 million character profiles — metrics that suggest strong early engagement in what Nur calls a new category: immersive social entertainment.

“Our early users were predominantly young women,” she said. “And this has consistently been the audience that decides which platforms become culture.”

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Tech

Mach Industries just spent $50M to solve a major defense tech problem

Published

11 minutes ago

May 19, 2026

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Three-year-old Mach Industries has acquired solid rocket motor startup Exquadrum in a $50 million cash-and-equity deal, the Huntington Beach-based defense startup tells TechCrunch. Exquadrum — now rebranded as Mach Energetics — has been fully folded into Mach’s operations, giving it direct control over one of the most important, and constrained, components in modern unmanned systems.

The deal itself started with a lucky break. The two companies first connected last September when an Exquadrum customer at an MIT recruiting event happened to overhear a Mach recruiter mention that the company was in the market for a solid rocket motor supplier. Introductions were made, Mach came in as a customer, and now, roughly five months later, it has acquired the company outright, beating out upwards of eight other potential buyers in the process, it says.

“The Exquadrum acquisition marks an important next stage in Mach’s growth,” said founder and CEO Ethan Thornton, who dropped out of MIT at 19 to start the company. “As we deliver vehicles to the warfighter, we’ll continue to vertically integrate our supply chain across solid rocket motors, engines, radar, and avionics to ensure we deliver the best possible product at the lowest cost. In many areas of the defense industrial base, these components are not only too expensive or lacking performance, they’re simply unavailable, with lead times stretching years. In short, vertical integration is non-optional.”

That supply problem is real and getting more acute. Decades of consolidation have left the domestic solid rocket motor market effectively controlled by two large primes — Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman — with little independent capacity to absorb the growing demand that modern drone warfare has created.

Indeed, in February, the Pentagon awarded the defense tech outfit Anduril $43.7 million specifically to expand domestic SRM production (its second such investment in the company in just over a year), explicitly calling SRMs a critical bottleneck in the munitions supply chain.

Mach is now explicitly positioning itself as part of the solution, and not just for its own programs but for the broader ecosystem. Mach Energetics plans to sell components, testing services, and subsystems to other defense firms, a maneuver that suggests Mach sees itself as potential infrastructure for the defense tech industry and not just a systems builder.

According to Mach, all 85 Exquadrum employees are coming over as part of the deal, along with the company’s IP, business lines, and its 70,000-square-foot facility in Victorville, California, which is anchored by a nearby energetics and rocket propulsion test site. The combined company now has roughly 350 employees. Exquadrum co-founders Kevin Mahaffy and Eric Schmidt (no relation to the former Google CEO) are both taking on leadership roles within Mach Energetics and the broader organization.

The acquisition also mirrors moves by other ambitious defense tech startups that are focused on owning the stack and using cost and speed as competitive weapons. Mach has five vehicle programs in various stages of development — Viper, a jet-powered VTOL; Glide, a high-altitude strike glider; Stratos, an airborne surveillance platform; Dart, its low-cost counter-drone interceptor; and Pike, a long-range strike munition built for large-scale deployment — with plans to enter production on at least three this year. The company says the acquisition meaningfully improves unit economics across all of them at exactly the moment it is starting to scale.

Mach has raised nearly $200 million in total — most recently a $100 million Series B last June led by Bedrock Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital — at a valuation of $470 million. It’s a multiple that right now looks modest for a company with this trajectory and will definitely be worth watching as the rubber starts to meet the road this year.

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Tech

Discord enables end-to-end encrypted voice and video calling for every user

Published

29 minutes ago

May 19, 2026

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Messaging platform giant Discord has switched on end-to-end encrypted voice and video messaging for every user. The end-to-end encryption feature means that Discord users can now communicate privately without anyone else being able to listen in to their calls, not even Discord.

This is a major privacy win for the community’s hundreds of millions of users, soon after social media giant Meta pulled the plug on Instagram’s end-to-end encrypted messaging feature earlier this year. TikTok said it would also not end-to-end encrypt user messages after it became a U.S. company.

Discord launched the end-to-end encrypted voice and video calling feature in 2024, and on Monday rolled out the feature to every user, no action needed.

“End-to-end Encryption is now standard for every voice and video call on Discord, outside of stage channels. No opt-in required,” said Mark Smith, Discord’s vice president of core technologies, in a blog post.

Tech

You can now talk to your Gmail inbox, as seen at Google IO 2026

Published

39 minutes ago

May 19, 2026

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Google isn’t finished infusing AI into your inbox. On Tuesday at their IO 2026 developer conference, the tech giant announced an expansion of its “AI Inbox” functionality for Gmail, which is adding conversational AI features. That means you can ask Gmail about things in your inbox instead of typing in search terms.

The company says the Gemini AI-powered feature, called Gmail Live, will help you quickly find information buried in your inbox.

Perhaps you need information about your upcoming flight, the time of your dentist appointment, the door code for your Airbnb rental, or some details about an event at your kid’s school, for instance.

Before, you’d have to type in keywords in the search box (or maybe type in someone’s email address or domain) to try to narrow down your search. That doesn’t always make emails easy to find, however, especially if the search term is something found across several messages.

“Gmail Live can answer naturally phrased questions, respond to follow-up questions, and pivot if you need to interrupt it,” Devanshi Bhandari, product lead for Gmail, explained in a briefing ahead of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, where the feature was first introduced to the public.

It’s another way that Google is trying to showcase how its AI technology can drive real-world improvements to products used by millions of consumers, at a time when many outside the tech industry are questioning the value of AI, as new data centers get built in their backyards, driving up their power bills.

Being able to point to something as simple as making it easier to find something that’s lost in your email inbox — an experience nearly everyone has suffered at some point — could be a practical and positive use case for AI … or at least, Google hopes.

Bhandari demonstrated Gmail Live to reporters, asking the tool a series of questions about things in the inbox, like a child’s show-and-tell project and their class trip, plus hotel and flight information for a trip to Detroit. Similar to using a stand-alone AI chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT, Gmail users can ask these questions aloud in natural language, and the chatbot responds.

In the demo, Gmail Live also understood nuances between things like “field trip” and “trip” and was able to jump from one topic to another, Bhandari pointed out. Plus, the AI can pull granular details from emails, like a hotel room number, or infer which people you’re asking about, even when they’re not explicitly named.

Similar voice technology is also coming to its to-do list, Google Keep, the company noted.

Notably, Gmail Live is not replacing traditional Gmail search — it’s just another option.

Google may have learned that not everyone is ready for an AI-only experience after it “upgraded” Google Photos with AI-powered search to much backlash. Google Photos later rolled back the feature, making the use of AI optional after numerous complaints.

Gmail is also gaining other new capabilities, including ready-to-send drafts, instant file access, and the ability to manage to-dos by marking individual tasks as done.

Plus, the AI Inbox experience, which launched earlier this year, will expand beyond Google AI Ultra subscribers to reach Google AI Pro and Plus subscribers as well. This allows you to see an overview of the tasks and items to catch up on that are buried in your inbox, all on one page.

The voice-powered Gmail Live feature, however, will roll out later this summer and will initially be limited to Google AI Ultra subscribers.