Oceans — to state the obvious — are big.
Building a company is hard. But building one that also designs, manufactures, and delivers hardware at scale, from a factory floor, with supply chain concerns galore is another order of difficulty. And Rivian’s CEO RJ Scaringe is speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to detail that journey and the lessons it’s bestowed.
Rivian sits at the intersection of AI, software, robotics, manufacturing, and transportation. And Scaringe has spent the better part of two decades proving that intersection isn’t just survivable. He also thinks it’s about to become much more crowded.
Scaringe’s Disrupt Stage session is just one of many big conversations happening at Disrupt this year, running October 13-15 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Check out the programming that’s been announced so far here, and if you don’t already have a ticket, lock in yours before our next price increase on August 22.
What Scaringe brings to the Disrupt Stage
Rivian has begun rolling out the R2, the roughly $58,000 SUV that Scaringe is counting on to do what the pricier R1T and R1S didn’t: expand Rivian beyond the niche market. He’s called it “maybe the most important thing we’ve launched to date” amid slowing demand for costlier EVs and mounting competitive pressure, especially from lower-cost Chinese EV manufacturers.
At the same time, Scaringe has been expanding beyond vehicles. He’s laid out a roadmap to full Level 4 autonomy by 2028, and he’s building out Rivian’s own charging network with ambitions to become one of the largest in the U.S.
Scaringe also founded Mind Robotics, a humanoid robotics company that’s raised $900 million this year alone, which he runs as executive chair and acting CEO, with Rivian as a large shareholder and launch customer. With the goal of turning Rivian’s factory floor in Normal, Illinois, into a proving ground for more ingrained human and robotic coexistence on the assembly line, Scaringe sees an opportunity to directly address an anticipated shortage in human labor.
And exclusively at Disrupt 2026, you’ll get to watch Scaringe detail how all of these investments fit together, and what he’s learned about building in the physical world and then bringing AI into the fold, while many AI companies try to accomplish the inverse.
To hear it in person and join the 10,000+ founders, investors, and technologists heading to San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on October 13-15, grab your ticket today to make sure you get the best available price.
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Every year I read through thousands of Startup Battlefield applications. And every year, I see the same pattern: The founders who belong on this stage are often the ones who almost didn’t apply.
They think they’re too early. They think they need more traction. They think the program is for companies further along than they are.
So here’s what we’re actually looking for and how to make sure your application reflects it. The deadline to be considered was May 27, but with the competition heating up and the applications continuing to come in, we’ve extended it to June 8. You still can apply here, but time is still running out!
And if you’re not up to speed on this year’s Startup Battlefield details, it’s once again a premiere part of TechCrunch Disrupt, which will be in San Francisco from October 13-15 and concludes with the crowning of this year’s future champion. And that list of champions includes some incredible companies, from giants like Cloudflare and Discord, to the most recent crop of winners, who you can learn about in detail right here.
What gets a company selected for Startup Battlefield
Startup Battlefield is not a competition for the most polished companies. It never has been. It’s a competition for the most promising ones.
We’re looking for companies with ideas that feel meaningfully different and category-defining, with the potential to make a major impact in their industry or geography. For every application, the question we ask is simple: Does this change something? Not incrementally. Genuinely.
Product and disruption. What are you building, and does it represent a real shift in how something works? We’re not looking for a better version of what already exists. We’re looking for the thing that makes the existing version feel obsolete.
The founding team. Why you, why now, why this problem? Your origin story is part of the application. The founders who can articulate their conviction clearly, not just their market size, are the ones who stand out.
Industry and geographic diversity. The Startup Battlefield 200 is a global cohort. We actively look for companies from every corner of the world and every vertical in tech. If you’re building something important in a geography or sector that doesn’t often get a spotlight, that matters to us.
What doesn’t disqualify you from Startup Battlefield
Having press coverage. Local coverage is fine. Industry coverage is fine. A few founder profiles are fine. We’re looking for companies whose core technology hasn’t had its moment yet. If you’ve had some coverage but the product hasn’t been showcased, that’s exactly what Disrupt is for. Apply and show us what you have.
Being pre-launch. You need a working MVP, but you don’t need customers. You don’t need revenue. Pre-launch companies are genuinely welcome.
Having applied before. Many Startup Battlefield 200 companies applied more than once before being selected. A previous rejection says nothing about your company’s future or your chances this time.
Raising money. Bootstrapped, pre-seed, and seed companies are all welcome. Series A companies are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, particularly founders building in capital-intensive industries or raising in markets where funding dynamics differ from Silicon Valley norms.
Tips for a strong Startup Battlefield application
Show your product working. This is the single most important thing. Not a mockup. Not a simulation. Not an animated explainer video with upbeat background music. Your MVP in action, in real time. Even if it’s rough, even if it’s a screen recording from your phone. We want to see it work.
Know your competitive landscape. “We have no competitors” is not a credible answer, and it raises questions about how well you understand your market. Name your competitors, acknowledge them honestly, and then explain clearly and specifically why you win. This is one of the most important parts of the application and one of the most commonly underdeveloped.
Tell your st
As the tech industry rallies around AI agents, some companies are building capabilities to enable AI agents to make payments and trade stocks on users’ behalf.
Stock trading app Robinhood is also moving in that direction: The company on Wednesday said it is launching support for AI agentic trading, as well as a new agentic credit card.
Robinhood said users on its platform can now create a separate account for their AI agents and connect them to a dedicated wallet. While these agents would be able to read and analyze users’ portfolios to come up with trading strategies and suggest investments, they’ll only be able to access the pre-loaded balance in the dedicated wallet to place orders.
Image Credits: RobinhoodImage Credits:Robinhood
Users will get notifications of all trades their AI agent makes, and will be able to monitor their activities within the Robinhood app itself. For some trades, agents will show a preview that users may have to approve before the order is executed. The company said it has also built in fraud detection protection, in which a team from Robinhood would review suspicious trades and help users resolve disputes.
Robinhood says users can connect their AI agents to its Model Context Protocol (MCP) service to do things like analyze concentration risk and sector exposure, execute trades, or look through analyst notes to identify new investment opportunities across various sectors.
The agentic trading feature is launching in beta and only allows stock trading right now. The company says it plans to add support for options, crypto, event contracts, futures, and prediction markets soon.
Robinhood is also debuting a new virtual credit card meant to be used by AI agents. With this card, users can connect their AI agents to the company’s banking MCP server to enable them to make payments.
The virtual card is currently only available to Robinhood Gold Card holders, who can link their account to this new card.
Users can set monthly limits on this virtual card, and can choose if their AI agent should seek approval every time it makes a payment. The company said its Robinhood Platinum Card will also get support for a similar virtual an agentic card feature when it launches later this year.
Robinhood has been ramping up its AI efforts for the past few years. The company acquired AI-powered research platform Pluto in 2024, and last year added an AI assistant that offers investment advice.
“We’ve heard a lot of demand from our customers to bring their own tools, LLMs, and agents, and connect them to Robinhood. That is why we are launching our new products,” Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of product at Robinhood, told TechCrunch over a call.
Robinhood is not alone in enabling AI agents to make payments, with major players like Stripe, Amazon, Google, and newer startups like Prava Pay building products that give AI agents the ability to buy stuff on users’ behalf. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
You can contact or verify outreach from Ivan by emailing im@ivanmehta.com or via encrypted message at ivan.42 on Signal.
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What will it take to launch the first must-have AI consumer product? Maybe $700 million.
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 post-money.
The mega round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, and included Align Ventures, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Prime Movers Lab, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and TamarackGlobal. (Phew!)
Perhaps what’s most notable about the fundraise is how little Hark has revealed about what it is building. Founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, also the entrepreneur behind robotics company Figure.AI and electric aircraft builder Archer, launched Hark in late 2025 with $100 million of his own money to develop an agentic AI system that serves as a universal interface with the digital world.
Hark expects to release its first multi-modal models this summer, which it says will power a personal AI platform that works with existing products and services. The company expects to follow that with hardware devices built specifically for those systems.
The fresh cash will be spent on recruiting top talent for hardware, product design and AI research, and on securing compute and components. The company currently has 70 employees, and runs a data center with Nvidia B200 GPUs.
Abidur Chowdhury (pictured above in a promo video), a former Apple product executive, is Hark’s director of design. He declined to reveal new details of what he’s working on when TechCrunch peppered him with questions this week, but said investors were impressed by a series of demos from his team.
“I haven’t seen anything that feels like something that will really help like the normal person,” Chowdhury said, speaking of the AI products on the market. “People are really building things to help people make software, and it’s working, and it’s really impactful, but we haven’t really seen that for the normal person yet.”
He noted that while Anthropic is prioritizing coding tools and OpenAI is moving in the same direction ahead of its IPO, few companies are focused solely on building interfaces and native hardware the way Hark is. “With this focus, with this great team that we have, and this round that we’ve raised, I think we can make something really special in this space,” Chowdhury said.
Still, there are more questions than answers. One challenge will be providing the context of a customer’s life to an AI assistant without making the people around the user uncomfortable or violating their privacy. Wearables like Meta’s existing glasses or the forthcoming Android spectacles don’t seem to have solved this problem. When asked how he might square this particular circle, Chowdhury only smiled.
“Sounds like that would make a great product.” When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of
Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.
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Oceans — to state the obvious — are big. That makes it hard for governments, shipping companies, and insurance providers to know exactly what’s happening on them at any particular moment. It doesn’t help that these modern-day ships often aren’t equipped with modern technology or the right software behind those sensors to properly analyze what they see.
Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia-based startup, is building a solution to this problem that it calls “SmartMast.” It’s quite literally a package of weather-hardened sensors like cameras and radios that go on a ship’s mast and can relay real-time maritime data. Combined with an analytics platform that can interpret all that information, Quartermaster refers to it as a “continuous, distributed sensing network” — a hive mind for millions of ships.
SmartMast is far more advanced than the current standard known as AIS, or the “automatic identification system,” according to Quartermaster CEO and founder Neil Sobin. AIS is very basic and more or less consists of relayed location pings. It’s also vulnerable. Sobin says Quartermaster’s tech will be less susceptible to fraud, which can be a big problem on the high seas.
“In maritime, AIS is a completely broken system. It’s opt-in, [you] enter your own data, and if you want to do anything nefarious on the ocean, from petty smuggling all the way up to sanctions evasion, you can simply opt out of the system, or spoof it,” he said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “You can take advantage of just how fragile it is.”
Sobin has spent recent weeks repeating this pitch to investors, and they rewarded him with a $43 million Series A funding round. The investment, which Quartermaster announced Wednesday, was co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, a VC firm that backs “remarkable founders from day zero.”
First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led Uber’s seed round in 2010 and is an investor in Flexport, said in a statement that Quartermaster is “reshaping how maritime operators understand and act on the world’s oceans.”
“Most attempts to bring intelligence to the ocean have run into the same wall: the cost of bespoke hardware does not scale to a planet that is mostly water. Neil and his team have solved that,” he said.
Quartermaster says more than 600 ships using SmartMast have covered 10 million square miles of ocean to date. The primary goal is to create an infrastructure layer for intelligence applications — identifying other ships, collecting training data for companies working on marine autonomy, aiding scientists and robotics experts, and providing data and insights to governments.
In Sobin’s eyes, there’s almost no limit to how Quartermaster’s system can be used, and the company’s already turning up new applications of the tech. For instance, the company said SmartMast-equipped ships have already assisted in “over 20 rescues of mariners at sea.” That’s not a revenue-driving opportunity, but Sobin said Quartermaster is constantly thinking about ways to make life better for mariners, especially because it may win more customers.
“That is work we’re really proud of, but also [those are] the dynamics that help us lock in our network, you know, and create that incentive for mariners to work with us in this way,” he said. “Our approach is to be pro-mariner and to create incentive for the mariner, and I think very few others will figure out how to operate that model as successfully as we have. I think there are a bunch of players in the market who try to sell a sensor to a boat, try to sell a sensor to a fleet operator, and I think those are really challenging pitches to make, because fleet operations are low-margin businesses.”
As for the funding, Sobin said he expects a large chunk of it will be put towards hiring engineers to keep pushing Quartermaster’s tech forward. While that money will help, Sobin also thinks the opportunity will just be too good for some engineers to pass up.
“The ocean has so much low-hang
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