TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg / Getty Images

📢 Go public already: Late-stage defense tech startup Anduril raised a $2.5 billion round that values the company at $30.5 billion. Existing investor Founders Fund wrote the company a $1 billion check as part of the round, the largest for the firm yet.

🧾 You get a data company: The trend of companies buying data startups continues. Today, Collibra acquired data access company Raito to help its customers automate data access requests in the age of AI. If you are a data company in line to be acquired, stay in line!

🕵 A spy empire? Today's addition to the ongoing feud between Rippling and Deel is that Rippling filed an 84-page amended complaint in its lawsuit against Deel, in which it accuses Deel of infiltrating and compromising four other competitors in addition to Rippling.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: PalmPay

💰 Potential funding for PalmPay: African fintech PalmPay is reportedly in the market to raise $50 million to $100 million in new capital. The startup has already raised $140 million in venture capital and is reportedly also profitable.

🏀 Let's bounce: The makers behind Bridgy Fed, the company that connects decentralized open source networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, has a new tool called Bounce that helps users migrate their social media followers across networks powered by different protocols.

⌚️ We needed this: Does Gen Alpha wear Apple Watches? Social media giant Snap announced that it is launching a watchOS app so users can access Snapchat from their wrists. While you could always view incoming Snap messages on an Apple Watch, this new app allows people to respond, too.

🫵 You are the data: X is looking to run a social experiment that will recognize posts that are liked by people who usually disagree. The data collected will be used to develop an open source algorithm that can identify posts liked by people of different perspectives.

🥊 AI competition: Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer Jared Kaplan said that the company cut Claude access to vibe-coding startup Windsurf because of rumors that OpenAI is going to acquire Windsurf. He said it would be odd for Anthropic to sell Claude to one of its biggest rivals. Fair enough.

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Around the web

📲 One app to rule all: Elon Musk has big ambitions to turn X into a super app that has everything from social media to payments. But super apps have yet to become a thing in the U.S. That's not the case in the Middle East, which is seeing an explosion of super apps.

👀 The girls are fighting: The inevitable deterioration of the relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump has begun. Musk was throwing jabs at Trump's "big beautiful [spending] bill," and Trump responded by saying he could just cancel Musk's companies' government contracts. Yikes.