Tech
Insight Partners is closing in on a whopping $10B+ new fund
Insight Partners is reportedly on the cusp of closing on more than $10 billion in capital commitments for its 13th fund, per the FT.
The FT report notes that two of Insight’s portfolio companies were acquired in the last week. One of these, the threat intelligence company Recorded Future, which sold to Mastercard for $2.65 billion, was wholly owned by Insight Partners; it acquired the company in 2019 for $780 million.
The other, Own, a startup specializing in tools for backing up data in cloud-based applications, sold to Salesforce for $1.9 billion, roughly half the $3.5 billion valuation it was assigned by investors in 2021.
Insight, which is headquartered in New York and whose current portfolio includes the buzzy cybersecurity outfit Wiz, may ultimately close its new fund with roughly $12 billion, says the FT. That’s a big number but still far less than the $20 billion that Insight announced for its 12th fund in 2022, when fundraising was in overdrive across the venture industry.
Tech
AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users, per Have I Been Pwned
A cyberattack at AI music generator Suno last year allowed a hacker to steal the personal information of more than 55.3 million people, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, offering the first glimpse into the scale of the data theft.
Per Have I Been Pwned, which obtained a copy of the breached dataset, the stolen data included customers’ names, physical addresses and email addresses, phone numbers, purchases, and partial payment card numbers taken from the company’s Stripe account, including card expiry dates.
The breach happened in November 2025, but was only recently revealed thanks to reporting by independent news outlet 404 Media.
The data theft also included Suno’s source code, which revealed how the company allegedly scraped millions of songs and lyrics from popular streaming sites, including Deezer, Genius, and YouTube, to train its AI models. Several major record labels are currently suing Suno, claiming that its mass-scraping efforts violate copyright law.
Suno has not yet publicly disclosed the cyberattack, or notified individuals that their information was taken. Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment about the incident.
Tech
After TikTok, Snap settles social media addiction case
Snap is the latest big tech company to settle a lawsuit that claimed social media platforms are harmful to children and young adults. The company has reached a “tentative” agreement in a case that was set to go to trial later this month.
TikTok recently settled its portion of the case with the plaintiff, known by the initials “R.K.C.,” ahead of a jury trial that starts next week in Los Angeles.
YouTube has also reached a deal, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant.
Meta has lost similar child safety lawsuits focused on social media, including one in New Mexico earlier this year, which marked its first courtroom defeat over the matter. In March, a Los Angeles jury also handed the social media giant, along with Google, another defeat, and awarded the defendant in that case, who went by “K.G.M,” or Kaley, $6 million in damages.
The precedents set by these cases are encouraging a wave of lawsuits against social media platforms over their purported harms, including their addictive nature and algorithms that negatively impact children and teens’ mental health. The results of these lawsuits could see the companies reshaping their platforms with more robust child safety measures, parental controls, and other design choices that could help them avoid future litigation.
The terms of Snap’s agreement weren’t disclosed, but Bloomberg reports that Snap confirmed the settlement has been achieved.
Snap did not immediately return a request for comment.
Tech
Light made a flip phone. It’s colorful and it’s cheap.
Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr over 20 years ago. Now, 10 years into building Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Light Phone, he’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are begging for a flip phone.
“We’ve been interviewing young people that use flip phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept running into: Gen Z users love their flip phones but say the build quality is bad. “They’re describing the flip phones in negative language, but they stick with it, and they feel proud.”
So Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from its last three touch screen phones and put it into a flip phone? That’s how they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device that Light has ever released.
“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with our SDK developer program, all of the tools we already have today: alarm, calculator, calendar…” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s kind of the exact same experience, just one is fully tactile, no touch screen, and [the other] one is a complete touch screen experience.”

Pricing has always been Light’s hardest problem as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a “less” phone for a price people will actually pay, when the whole pitch is fewer features? Its previous release, the unlocked Light Phone III, retails at $799. But the Light Flip brings the cost down to $299 by dropping a touch screen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made of plastic, rather than sturdier aluminum, but that means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a range of colors: black, red, yellow, pink, navy blue, and light grey.
“I thought I was fully QWERTY, but I was having fun with the T9 predictive texting [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number], so I can see myself going flip phone also for the colors,” Hollier said. “Just having a yellow phone gets me so jazzed.”
Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing play. It recently piloted phone contracts with Andrew Yang’s anti-doomscrolling carrier Noble Mobile. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get the Light Flip for a two-year contract at $39 per month; the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month over the same time frame.
The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen on the inside and no screen on the outside, as requested by users. There will be a small light on the front of the phone, however, so that you can see if you have notifications without flipping open the device. With 5G and 4GLTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download podcasts online and play music that you upload to your phone, which you can listen to via either a 3.5mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with both eSIM and physical Nano SIM cards, and includes a 12-megapixel camera on the back.

The Light Flip is expected to ship in April 2027, which Light acknowledges is a long lead time. To keep preorder customers engaged (and, practically, to keep them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, including bi-weekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment of ditching a smartphone. It’s a community-building move as much as a marketing one. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes that the transition to using its products will be less jarring and that it sticks.
While Light believes that its phones can help people reclaim the time they may regret spending on mindless scrolling, the founders acknowledge that it’s not easy to quit smartphones cold turkey. It’s hard to sacrifice the convenience of instant internet access, Apple Pay, music streaming, and convenient communication tools like WhatsApp and iMessage, and it’s easier for the flip phone-curious to make this transition when they’re not going through it alone.
“I think something that’s so inspiring about this movement is it’s not coming from a place of just anger and hatred… It’s a movement of optimism, as well as skepticism,” Hollier said. “I think that’s what we’ve always tried to do with Light. We’re anti big tech in all these ways, but we’re always trying to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”
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