This digest compiles the latest from Tech Crunch.
Today’s Tech Crunch Roundup
OpenAI pushes into higher education as India seeks to scale AI skills
18 Feb 2026, 2:32 pm by Jagmeet Singh
OpenAI says its India education partnerships aim to reach more than 100,000 students, faculty and staff over the next year.
World Labs lands $200M from Autodesk to bring world models into 3D workflows
18 Feb 2026, 2:00 pm by Rebecca Bellan
The partnership will see the two companies exploring how World Labs’ models can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases.Â
Canva gets to $4B in revenue as LLM referral traffic rises
18 Feb 2026, 2:00 pm by Ivan Mehta
The creative company’s monthly active users increased 20%, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools.
India’s Sarvam wants to bring its AI models to feature phones, cars and smart glasses
18 Feb 2026, 1:01 pm by Ivan Mehta
The company is using edge models that take up only megabytes of space, can run on most phones with existing processors, and can work offline.
Heron Power raises $140M to ramp production of grid-altering tech
18 Feb 2026, 1:00 pm by Tim De Chant
Tesla alumni Drew Baglino raises a large round to build a giga-scale factory, this time at his own startup.
Indian AI lab Sarvam’s new models are a major bet on the viability of open-source AI
18 Feb 2026, 12:55 pm by Jagmeet Singh
The new lineup includes 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models; a text-to-speech model; a speech-to-text model; and a vision model to parse documents.
DG Matrix raises $60M to make data center power smarter
18 Feb 2026, 12:30 pm by Tim De Chant
The startup is making solid-state transformers capable of intelligently aggregating power from a number of different sources before sending it to data center racks.
U.S. court bars OpenAI from using ‘Cameo’
18 Feb 2026, 6:40 am by Ivan Mehta
OpenAI has renamed its feature in Sora from “Cameo” to “Characters.”
Tesla dodges 30-day suspension in California after removing ‘Autopilot’
18 Feb 2026, 4:07 am by Kirsten Korosec
The decision comes a month after Tesla discontinued Autopilot, its basic driver-assistance system.
Intellexa’s Predator spyware used to hack iPhone of journalist in Angola, research says
18 Feb 2026, 12:01 am by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Amnesty International says it found evidence that a government customer of Intellexa, a sanctioned surveillance vendor, used its Predator spyware against a prominent journalist in Angola.
End of today’s Tech Crunch roundup.
