Patreon lays off off 20% of its workforce

Station F, a Paris-based startup hub founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, is gearing up for a new edition of its F/ai accelerator program in a bid to strengthen its positioning as a stepping stone for promising AI startups. Launched in January of this year, F/ai’s planning to kick-start its second batch this September, aiming to help a handful of AI-focused startups move from early product to real revenue in a matter of weeks. Spanning 538,000 square feet, Station F is often described as a co-working space, but its footprint extends beyond the physical space, its director Roxanne Varza told TechCrunch. One example is Station F’s Future 40 annual selection, in which the team names the most promising teams among some 1,000 companies it welcomes each year. In 2024, TechCrunch observed that nearly all of that annual cohort incorporated AI into its core business. Station F today has a front row seat to the rise of AI startups, leveraging its position as a cornerstone of “la French Tech.” The startup hub has also successfully leveraged its position to capture equity stakes in its Future 40 companies. “We have been investing [in these companies] since 2022,” Varza said. Helped both by its size and Niel’s connections, Station F has become a frequent stop for officials seeking to connect with Europe’s tech scene, with no less than 11 presidential visits since President Macron’s inaugural tour in 2017. It has also welcomed AI big names like Sam Altman, and is now leveraging these ties for F/ai. The first cohort of F/ai’s program was backed by a long list of significant tech companies — AMD, Anthropic, AWS, Clay, Google, G42, Hugging Face, Lovable, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, OVHcloud, Snowflake, and Qualcomm — not to mention several VC funds. The second cohort will add a few more big names, TechCrunch has learned: Eleven Labs, Nebius, Rippling, OpenRouter, Hubspot, and Github. “The goal was to bring together all the major players and make it much easier for [AI] startups looking to launch in Europe to connect with them,” Varza said. Two teams from the accelerator’s first batch have already gained international recognition: Alpic, which won the global grand finale of The Pitch, a competition organized by Deel; and Rippletide, which won the OpenAI Codex Hackathon. While awards rarely hurt, especially when they bring funding, F/ai is focused on helping its cohort generate revenue, targeting €1 million (about $1.14 million) within six months. “We’d heard quite a bit of criticism about the slow pace of commercialization of European startups,” Varza said. “This brings them on par with what investors are seeing in the U.S.” Investors seem to like what they’ve seen so far. The first cohort collectively raised $34 million in pre-seed funding, according to Station F. The teams’ track record may have also helped: 80% of these 20 AI startups were founded by repeat entrepreneurs, a third of whom hold PhDs. The founder profile skews that way mostly because F/ai selects its cohort exclusively via recommendations from founders, partners and investors — a process that could add to the cliquishness and elitism France’s tech scene is at times accused of. But while teams can’t apply directly, they can get in touch with one of F/ai’s many partners, and perhaps soon with alumni, Varza said. She added that Station F has some 30 other programs startups can apply to. Access appears to be a key focus for F/ai, which has in the past hosted the likes of Turing Award winner Yann LeCun for private chats. “Today, if the founders here want to speak to people at this level, they all seem to think they need to go to the U.S. and join a program there. We actually want to show that you can stay here and do it from here,” Varza said. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant. You can contact or verify outreach

When AI agents begin working for people — and increasingly for one another — they will need a way to find jobs, pay for services, and build trust. Crypto exchange OKX is betting that future is closer than many expect, launching a marketplace where AI agents can hire one another, settle payments autonomously, and build portable on-chain reputations. Called OKX AI, the marketplace opens to developers on Tuesday following a closed beta involving 50 early AI service providers. The marketplace builds on technology OKX previously developed to let AI agents hold digital wallets, make payments using stablecoins, and establish persistent identities. The launch marks OKX’s latest push beyond crypto trading as it seeks to become a broader fintech company. With more than 150 million users globally, OKX is betting the next generation of customers will not just be people or institutions, but AI agents capable of transacting autonomously, giving rise to an emerging “agent economy.” “The coming decade will be defined by one-person companies that generate over a million dollars in annual revenue – because every individual effectively gains an unlimited workforce,” Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, told TechCrunch. “Traditional financial infrastructure was built for humans. The agentic economy needs infrastructure designed for autonomous software. That is why we built OKX.AI.” Haider Rafique, OKX’s chief marketing officer and global managing partner, said the company believes “agentic commerce” could become a trillion-dollar market over the next five years, driven by micropayments and autonomous software. The marketplace is aimed at crypto developers building AI applications and solo entrepreneurs looking to automate parts of their businesses with AI agents, Rafique told TechCrunch. The company expects those developers to build applications for the marketplace, allowing other users to access AI-powered tools without having to build them from scratch. OKX AI marketplaceImage Credits:OKX Among the early builders are CertiK, whose service lets AI agents assess the security of a crypto wallet or token before executing a transaction, and CoinAnk, which provides live market data on a pay-per-query basis. GenLayer, another launch partner, is bringing dispute-resolution infrastructure to the marketplace to help AI agents resolve contractual disagreements. By using blockchain-based payments and stablecoins, the company says AI agents can settle transactions around the clock, including low-value micropayments that would be impractical using conventional payment rails. Rafique said OKX is applying the same fraud detection, compliance systems, and internally developed infrastructure that underpin its cryptocurrency exchange to the marketplace, which will be rolled out in phases before becoming more widely available. OKX’s launch comes as technology companies and startups race to build the infrastructure that will underpin AI agents, from developer platforms and marketplaces to payment and identity systems. Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, said the biggest challenge is not simply enabling AI agents to transact, but helping them discover one another and resolve disputes when things go wrong. “What we’re building is essentially a digital court system,” Castellana told TechCrunch. “The challenge for us is distribution. OKX already has that.” Rafique argues that OKX’s biggest advantage is not simply its technology but its reach. The company believes its existing network of crypto developers and users will help seed the marketplace, while its broader strategy extends well beyond digital assets. In March, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested about $200 million in OKX at a $25 billion valuation. Rafique said the partnership is part of the company’s ambition to “modernize markets” through tokenization, while OKX AI represents its parallel effort to “modernize money” for an er

Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding on Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face as they deploy AI agents: how to authenticate, govern, and control them at scale. The seed round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million after investment. Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs last year tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 employees. NewCore is betting companies will eventually need to manage those digital workers much like human employees. For co-founder and chief executive Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), the opportunity stems from a belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded cloud-security startup Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point, said the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms were ill-suited for a future in which software workers operate alongside human employees. “We know for sure that the scale and the complexity that those things [AI agents] are going to add to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms are going to break them,” he told TechCrunch. Alon co-founded NewCore with chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman (pictured above, right), a former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and chief revenue officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra. NewCore’s platform is designed to manage both human and AI-agent identities in a single system. The startup says AI agents should be treated as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than as traditional service accounts or machine credentials. The idea for NewCore, Alon said, began taking shape in 2023 while helping review the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the bill, he assumed the customer must be satisfied with the product. “I said, ‘You must be extremely happy with them,’” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’” The exchange reinforced Alon’s belief that identity had become a large but stagnant market dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressure. Established identity providers including Okta and Microsoft’s Entra have begun adding capabilities for AI agents. However, Alon argues those efforts extend platforms originally designed for human employees, whereas NewCore was built from the ground up for a workforce made up of humans, machines, and AI agents. “The traditional vendors give you an agentic way to deal with identity, but it’s on the side — it’s not integrated,” Alon said. As one example, NewCore uses what it calls a “split-key” architecture that divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate a single point of compromise. NewCore also offers an “Agentic Skill” integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex and Cursor that allows those AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed credentials. Employees can also use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, review and revoke access for AI agents, providing what Alon described as a human oversight layer as companies deploy more autonomous systems. The startup has grown to more than 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel. Alon said the platform is being used by fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. The startup expects to begin charging customers this summer, he added. Alon predicts AI agents c

Something strange is happening in tech right now. Companies are posting record profits and revenue while laying off tens of thousands of people, citing AI as the official explanation. So far this year, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech companies this year, affecting nearly 150,000 people — a pace of about 974 people per day, 44% faster than last year — according to TrueUp, a tech job board and recruiting platform that also runs one of the most widely cited tech layoff trackers. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years last month, with nearly 40,000 cuts, and AI was the most-cited reason for layoffs across every industry for the third month running, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas. There’s growing skepticism that AI is really the culprit, though — that it’s more of a convenient cover story than the actual cause. Few examples illustrate the pushback better than what happened at Block earlier this year. After getting hammered over laying off nearly half of Block earlier this year, citing AI as the reason, Jack Dorsey denied the cuts were a sign of trouble at the payments company, insisting AI tools “are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He also acknowledged, when pressed by commenters on X about the bloat he’d created during the pandemic, that Block had, in fact, over-hired. Other voices have also begun to weigh in, including famed VC Marc Andreessen, who recently called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are really about pandemic-era overhiring. In conversation with podcaster-investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen said, “Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It’s at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%. Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.” What happened earlier this month at Uber captures the ambiguity well. The company cut about 23% of its people division — the unit HR and recruiting — affecting less than 1% of its 34,000 employees, it said. A company spokesperson specified that the cuts had nothing to do with AI. But the announcement came roughly one month after Uber’s CTO offered that the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months and had to cap individual engineers’ spending on tools like Cursor and Claude Code; whatever Uber said publicly, it’s hard not to connect those dots.What makes this combustible: at the very moment that tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming wealthy on a scale that’s hard to comprehend. Early last month, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems closed its first day on the Nasdaq up 68% from its $185 IPO price, giving the chipmaker a market cap of roughly $67 billion — the largest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s 2020 debut. By the close, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie were billionaires. (The company’s shares have since fallen 30%.) SpaceX meanwhile went public on Friday and enjoys, as of this writing, a $2.1 trillion market cap, turning Musk into a paper trillionaire and potentially minting an estimated 4,400 millionaires, and around 400 centimillionaires in the process, assuming the shares hold up. Anthropic and OpenAI are quickly inching toward the public market, too, both at valuations of roughly $1 trillion or more. Set against that backdrop, Mark Zuckerberg’s latest purchase takes on new meaning. In early March, he purchased a $170 million mansion on Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker” — setting the all-time record for the most expensive home sale in Miami-Dade County history. Two months later, Meta announced it would lay off 8,000 people, or roughly 10% of its workforce. It isn’t just Zuckerberg or the other tech titans who routinely shell out jaw-dropping sums on their real estate portfolios. But these extremes come at a moment when many Americans are getting

Loading the player… The people deciding that AI can replace your job are also the ones least likely to understand what your job truly involves, according to Box founder Aaron Levie, who pointed to this as an example of “AI psychosis.” Indeed, ClickUp recently cut 22% of its workforce for AI agents, tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching all of 2025, and DuckDuckGo installs are climbing from users who want Google to stop forcing AI into search and just give them links. Watch as TechCrunch’s Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what happens when the AI-pilled and the AI-skeptical are both right at the same time, plus three deals worth knowing about and Waymo’s new robotaxi hitting the road. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Topics Aaron Levie, AI, AI agents, AI layoffs, ai psychosis, Amazon competition, AWS, Equity, openrouter, Snowflake, Stord, Waymo robotaxi Theresa Loconsolo is an audio producer at TechCrunch focusing on Equity, the network’s flagship podcast. Before joining TechCrunch in 2022, she was one of 2 producers at a four-station conglomerate where she wrote, recorded, voiced and edited content, and engineered live performances and interviews from guests like lovelytheband. Theresa is based in New Jersey and holds a bachelors degree in Communication from Monmouth University. You can contact or verify outreach from Theresa by emailing theresa.loconsolo@techcrunch.com. View Bio Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news