Tech
Meta says AI is making it easier to build new apps — and more are coming
Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week’s second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social giant has new apps in the works, following a recent spate of other launches that included an app for Marketplace sellers, one for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experiment involving AI bedtime stories.
Meta has spent years trying and failing to produce new, stand-alone social apps to complement its core platforms. Now, the company says that large language models (LLMs) make it possible to ship software faster, allowing it to test new ideas at a quicker pace.
“I’m … excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday’s call. “Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a stand-alone Groups app, and Seller, a stand-alone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps. So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them,” he said.
“AI is improving our core business; it’s making our apps more relevant and delivering better results for businesses. We’re starting to deliver more novel products, and we’ll have a lot more there soon as well,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta has been down this road before. In its earlier days, Meta (then known as Facebook) ran an internal incubator called Creative Labs, which aimed to test new social concepts.
That effort produced a handful of launches: the photo-sharing app Slingshot, the anonymous chat app Rooms, a Flipboard competitor called Paper, the Moments photo-sharing app, and a collaborative video app known as Riff. Those experiments came to an end in 2015, and the apps were eventually all shuttered, as the company struggled to find an audience for its efforts.
In the early 2020s, Meta tried again, this time with an internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tested apps that included the chat app Bump, social music app Aux, task app Move, dating app Spark, calling app CatchUp, zine maker E.gg, events app Venue, creator Q&A app Hotline, Cameo competitor Super, couples app Tuned, music app BARS, and others.
Again, none became a breakout success, and the apps were shut down.
Now Meta can point to at least one example of how AI is helping new apps scale. It has finally delivered a modest hit with Threads, which now has 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg likes to say Threads will one day become the company’s next billion-user app.
With Threads, Meta learned to heavily lean on its existing user base to help initially seed the app with people, then continued to heavily promote it across its existing platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. But LLMs are another key factor in Threads’ growth, as the company said it sees “significant gains” from its AI-powered content recommendations.
“We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains,” Meta’s CFO Susan Li told investors on the call. “First, they make our existing systems smarter by understanding what the content is actually about and generating better training data. Second, LLM-powered agents are also helping with engineering development by evaluating content quality, detecting trends, and testing ranking changes.”
Li added that earlier this year, Meta reached a milestone: Every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM and analyzed for topic and tone, which helps improve recommendations.
The company is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which could help it to better scale new apps as they arrive.
Investors didn’t follow up with company executives to ask more questions about the new apps Meta has in the works, as they were more concerned with AI spending and Meta’s growing enterprise ambitions. However, Zuckerberg suggested that people won’t have long to wait to see what’s next, saying the “new consumer products” were “releasing soon.”
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Tech
Repeat founder Ryan Williams raises $10M seed for an AI startup for private credit managers
Ellis AI announced Thursday its emergence from stealth with $10 million in seed funding from investors including First Round Capital, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Slow Capital, Kearny Jackson, and Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson.
Ellis uses AI agents to tackle the fragmented workflow private credit managers deal with, including managing documents, spreadsheets, and correspondence. The company was founded by Ryan Williams, best known for co-creating the real estate investment platform Cadre alongside Josh and Jared Kushner back in 2014. That company raised more than $160 million in funding and, at its peak, was valued at $800 million before being sold for an undisclosed sum to the alternative investment company Yieldstreet in 2024.
“At Cadre, I saw the next major constraint,” Williams said. “Even as the front end of private markets became more modern and accessible, the operating infrastructure underneath it remained fragmented.”
He started working on Ellis last year. The company seeks to connect and centralize all the scattered software, accounting information, and documents a private credit firm would use into one easily accessible platform. The system can flag discrepancies in the data and uses AI agents to help perform tasks like portfolio monitoring and preparing reports.
For example, Williams promises the agents can help close a fund’s books at the end of the month.
“A team may have to download files from several systems, reformat the data, compare balances, investigate discrepancies, and re-enter information by hand. In many firms, Excel becomes the operating system,” he continued. “Ellis connects to the systems and documents a firm already uses rather than forcing it to rip everything out and start over.”
It keeps a human in the loop, too, he says. “Material decisions and actions remain with the human experts,” he said.
“I expect the human loop to become narrower, but not disappear,” he continued, when asked if he sees a day when the AI works fully autonomously. “Our goal is not to replace human judgment; it’s to help people cut through the noise and make educated decisions faster.”
This piece was updated to add an investor.
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Tech
Tesla reportedly might sell its China business ahead of a SpaceX merger
Tesla is reportedly considering cleaving off its entire business in China to grease the wheels of a merger with SpaceX, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper reports that “some Tesla executives have been told to prepare for a separation of the China business,” which could include a “spinoff, sale or closure,” citing unnamed sources. The company reportedly would be able to do this fairly quickly because CEO Elon Musk had already tasked executives to prepare for a split in the event that Beijing invades Taiwan.
Separating China from Tesla’s global operations could make it easier to integrate the company into SpaceX, which is a defense contractor that has to follow strict rules around citizenship and national security. That would also be a major concession. China has grown to dominate Tesla’s business, not only as a market for its vehicles, but as a production hub that serves Asia more broadly, and also Europe.
Tech
WhatsApp is testing a new folder for messages from large businesses
During Meta’s Q2 2026 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that other revenue in the family of apps segment crossed $1 billion, largely thanks to WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions.
As more businesses use WhatsApp to reach consumers, users’ inboxes often get cluttered, making it hard to find personal and group messages. Meta is now trying out a new feature where it will place messages from larger businesses like banks or airlines in a separate folder, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
When a user receives a message from a large business, WhatsApp will automatically move that message to a new “Offers & Updates” folder after a set number of hours. The company said it is testing different durations, up to 24 hours, to move messages to a new folder.
Users who prefer their messages to be on the timeline can turn this setting off. However, they don’t control when messages are moved automatically.
Meta said that with this feature, messages like discount codes and delivery updates are out of the inbox in a few hours, and the main chat timeline feels less cluttered. For businesses, this means that users can look for their messages in a specific folder rather than getting lost in all chats.
WhatsApp is starting to test this feature with select partners using its WhatsApp Business Platform, and will look to expand based on observations. At the moment, small businesses and individual accounts using WhatsApp Business are exempt from this feature. WhatsApp said it could explore moving business messages from small businesses to the new “Offers & Updates” folder in the future.
In the last few years, WhatsApp has taken steps to reduce business message spam. In 2024, it started allowing users to unsubscribe from marketing messages from brands. Last year, it put a curb on the number of broadcast messages businesses and individuals can send in a time frame. In October 2025, it went one step further and limited the number of messages businesses could send without getting a response from users. The company has fully rolled out the first two features while it is still iterating on the third feature.
Despite these steps, the WhatsApp inbox can feel chaotic. From my own experience, there have been days when I have cleared unread messages at the start of the day only to end with more than 30-40 unread messages. Even at the time of writing, more than half of my unread messages were business communications. I am not alone in feeling this.
The new feature might reduce the clutter a little, but it won’t be effective until users have control over filtering out messages from the main inbox.
WhatsApp made its AI business agents available globally in June, with more than 1 million businesses already using them. During the earnings call, Zuckerberg mentioned Brazil’s car rental company Movida and said that it has seen an uptick in conversions and customer support issue handling through AI agents. In the coming months, we could see more businesses use AI within WhatsApp for sales, marketing, and support use cases. A chat app with over 3 billion users must strike a balance between personal and business messages before it becomes a vehicle for AI spam.
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Eduardo Rodriguez, Diamondbacks shut down Pirates
Report: Browns signing S Grant Delpit to 3-year, $48M contract extension
