Tech
CPO Paul Gubbay says Squarespace is training its AI tools with curation and taste
Will generative AI tools help people build better websites, or will they just fill the web with spam? With the recent launch of Design Intelligence, a new website builder full of generative AI tools, Squarespace is betting on the former.
I spoke with chief product officer Paul Gubbay about Design Intelligence and Squarespace’s broader AI strategy. Our conversation began with a glimpse at what other (unspecified) AI-powered website builders deliver when prompted to create a generic spa website: confusing, ugly websites.
This was, of course, a setup for a demo of Design Intelligence, which began with a few prompts allowing Gubbay to specify things like the kind of website he wanted to build and the personality of the brand being featured. The resulting website featured AI-generated design, text, and images, but it looked — for lack of a better word — like a “real” site, with plenty of options for further customization.
Gubbay argued that while other website builders have “scrambled very quickly” to launch AI features, those competitors are asking, “How can we take this technology and use it to stand out to our customers?” while Squarespace has been asking something a little different: “How do we take all these latest technologies and really use it to help our customers stand out?”
Read a transcript of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
When I imagine an AI website generation product, I imagine it looking like a prompt — like everything at the beginning of the demo. But here, with every step, you could still go in and customize it. It looks, in some ways, like Squarespace today. So I’m curious: How did you decide where you wanted the AI to step in and generate elements of the website versus where you wanted it to still be customizable by humans?
We’ve taken our time to really think about how these things come together. So we have this principle when it comes to building something like a website or anything visual: I know it when I see it. And I think that holds true for not just professionals, but for anybody.
Trying to build a website through a chatbot is really challenging. It’s like being in a car and typing in “turn left” or “turn right.” You want the system to be able to show you things, and when you see the thing you like, you want to go, “OK, that’s it.” But then you don’t want to be limited by that; you want to be able to continue playing. We want it to feel like a playground.
And so for us, it really was taking this “I know it when I see it” concept. And every time the team came and said, “How about we add a chat? How about we do these things that everyone’s doing?” we were like, “I don’t think that’s really the way people want to do this.” That just became the model for us, and once everyone adopted that, it became very natural for all of us just to think through that ideology.
It was very important for us, also, that we treat the customers’ information that they give us with a lot of respect. You’re telling us something about who you are, you’re entrusting us to take that and use it effectively for you. So we wanted to make sure that the concepts that we showed you in Blueprint would carry through into the system as well, so that you would feel like those choices you made up front weren’t just for naught.
You also talked about this idea of curation and technology. Often those things are set in opposition to each other, but it sounds like you’ve actually tried to build curation into the technology. You even said that you have a curation engine. Can you talk a bit more about what that looks like?
Our CEO says this sometimes; I think it’s true: The fact that we have text generation inside of our website tool, it’s great. But you could also go to Open AI and ChatGPT, type in something, get the text, and copy and paste it [into Squarespace], and that’s fine as well. The challenge a lot of people have is knowing how to prompt those engines the right way to actually get the right output from them.
We have a very specific, proprietary point of view on how we prompt engines and how we curate the content that comes out of them, to get the look and feel and the views that we think are going to be really valuable to our customers based on our experience, based on what they’re telling us, and based on our taste.
AI imagery is a great example of that. We built our whole library of how we prompt [AI models] specifically to get the type of imagery that we want to get out, that we feel is very Squarespace, very right for our customers. We tag and curate those things, and then we feed that back into the system again.
We do that when we look at color palettes; we do that when we think about layout switching. That’s the curation element. It’s our design and creative team spending lots of time thinking about: How do these elements come together? How do we prompt engines? How do we choose what comes out of this and discard the things that we don’t want that come out of this? We keep getting better and better, so you don’t have to do it. The whole point of coming to us is that you don’t have to do it.
It sounds like part of your approach is, you’re not necessarily trying to build all these models yourself. You’re focusing on how you present it and make it accessible and bring it together.
Look, we’re not the LLM experts in creating all these different types of content. We leverage them. We leverage Google, we’re leveraging OpenAI, Anthropic. We have great partnerships. But for us, the secret sauce is how we’re prompting and curating that content as it’s coming out, and making sure it fits what we know about you.
Obviously, Squarespace has made it easy to create and customize websites already. How do you think bringing more generative AI into the process will change that ecosystem? Are Squarespace websites going to look different than they do today?
I’d like to think that they’re going to look even better. It’s very, very important for us, and it’s always been incredibly important for us, that design is always at the forefront. People come to Squarespace because they believe that design is going to make a difference. And a big part of that difference is not just capturing their brand and who they are, but it’s about making sure that the thing that gets pre-created, at the end of the day, feels bespoke.
When you ask a question like that, it could imply they all look the same in some way. And that’s absolutely not what we would want, right? So I think we are going to give people the tools to get even better results faster, but we will always make sure that it’s going to adhere to the vision of what they want.
Squarespace works very closely with designers; you just wrapped up a whole event with design partners. How do you think designers, especially Squarespace partners, should be looking at a tool like AI? To what extent should they see it as a threat versus an opportunity?
I think it’s important to look at it as an opportunity. AI technology is clearly a huge part of our future, and just like any new technology, learning how to leverage it and use it the right way is going to enhance what you’re able to do. I 1 million percent do not believe it replaces design. It’s meant to enhance it. We will continue to play our role to ensure that it enhances it for our customers and our creators.
We just had Circle Day with many [design] professionals. And when I think about something like design intelligence, for me, it just helps them bring a vision to life faster to share with a customer. But of course, [customers are coming to us] to implement all of the things that they want on top of that. If we can inspire them with some choices that they will then change and go deeper on, fantastic. We’re just going to make the job faster for them and maybe easier for them, but we would never replace them.
Tech
Cursor makes its biggest India push yet ahead of SpaceX acquisition with localized pricing
Weeks before its expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet, launching its first country-specific subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to drive its next stage of growth.
On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a ₹649-a-month (about $7) subscription built specifically for India — and priced well below Cursor’s standard $20-a-month Pro subscription.
The move reflects India’s growing importance to Cursor’s business. The startup says India is already its third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its user base in the country more than tripling over the past year.
That scale, coupled with India’s deep pool of software engineering talent, made it the first market where Cursor chose to localize pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt that we had an opportunity there to right-size the commercial model and drive scale,” Green said. “The technical competency of the country and the engineering talent that already exists make it a very natural fit.”
India has emerged as one of the world’s largest software developer hubs. Earlier this year, GitHub said that the country has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the U.S., with more than two million joining in 2026 alone.
Cursor Start includes access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, alongside cloud agents, its iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. The startup said the plan is aimed at developers who need more AI-assisted coding capacity than the free tier offers without upgrading to its full Pro subscription.
The lower-priced plan is intended to broaden access rather than replace Cursor’s flagship offering, Green said. Unlike the $20-a-month Pro subscription, Start does not include access to frontier AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, or advanced features including Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK.
The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments through credit and debit cards as well as India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Green told TechCrunch that Cursor would use multiple checks to ensure the India-only subscription is available only to individual users in the country, including measures to deter people from accessing the plan through virtual private networks (VPNs).
Cursor is not alone in tailoring its pricing for India. OpenAI and Anthropic have also rolled out India-specific plans over the past year as global AI companies compete for users in one of the world’s fastest-growing AI markets.
While Cursor Start is initially limited to India, Green told TechCrunch that the startup could expand localized pricing to other markets if the model proves successful.
“We will continue to do everything we can to fuel the demand and serve those clients that are using us,” Green said. “Now, if this model proves that we could take it to other markets, perhaps we will. But I think it’d be crazy to say we would never do it elsewhere.”
OpenAI provides one precedent for this strategy, having launched its sub-$5 ChatGPT Go in India before expanding the lower-priced subscription to other markets.
In addition to the localized pricing strategy, Cursor is also expanding its presence in India through new hires. Green told TechCrunch that the startup recently hired its first salesperson in India and expects another leader to join in Delhi. The company is also building out its a government affairs office, alongside three technical customer support hires, as it expands its presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.
Cursor’s enterprise push is still in its early stages in India, Green said, where adoption has so far been driven largely by individual developers, startups, and universities. He said Cursor sees significant opportunities in sectors including banking and large enterprises as it expands its local sales efforts.
Green said, the India-specific pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader. He said the lower-priced plan is viable because it is built around Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party frontier models.
Cursor’s India expansion comes a little over a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI coding startup in a $60 billion all-stock deal, following SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3. However, SpaceX has been partnered with Cursor since April to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI.”
Green said Cursor will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes and that the company’s India expansion plans were already in motion before the deal. Once the acquisition closes, however, Green said SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.
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Tech
Lyft and Baidu enter London’s robotaxi battleground as testing begins
Chinese tech giant Baidu has started testing autonomous vehicles in London as part of its partnership with Lyft and Freenow, the German taxi and multi-mobility app that Lyft now owns. Baidu is the latest in a string of companies to test self-driving technology in the UK ahead of commercial robotaxi deployments.
The testing, which began Tuesday with human safety operators, comes nearly a year after the two companies struck a strategic partnership to deploy Baidu’s purpose-built Apollo Go RT6 robotaxi across key European markets through the Lyft platform. The vehicles will eventually be available through Freenow, which Lyft acquired in 2025 for about $197 million.
That deal gave Lyft a foothold in Europe’s ride-hailing market, where a handful of well-funded companies are now jockeying to be first to market with robotaxis.
London is particular is shaping up to be a key battleground in the region. In April, Waymo began testing its autonomous vehicles with human safety operators in the city. Uber and its self-driving tech partner, Wayve, also announced plans to launch a robotaxi service in London this year. That initial service — which customers can now sign up for on an interest list — will have human safety operators behind the wheel before fully driverless operations begin later.
Baidu and Freenow by Lyft (as the latter service is now called) said they expect to invite the public to hail their robotaxis in 2027. The companies, which didn’t provide a more detailed timeline, noted that the launch will depend on regulatory approval.
For now, dozens of test vehicles will operate within London’s borough of Brent. Lyft and Freenow said they continue discussions with safety and city officials, including Transport for London (TfL) and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV). The UK government is in the process of creating autonomous vehicle regulations and opened applications in May for companies interested in an AV pilot program that lets companies test self-driving vehicles under government oversight.
When the service does launch, Freenow by Lyft said it will operate a hybrid network — employing the same language rival Uber has used — meaning human drivers operating taxis and private-hire vehicles will work alongside the robotaxis.
“As a platform with deep roots in the taxi industry, our priority is ensuring that autonomous technology supports the professional drivers who keep London moving,” Thomas Zimmermann, CEO of Freenow by Lyft, said in a statement.
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Tech
Granola launches an Apple Watch app
AI note-taking app Granola is launching an app for the Apple Watch in hopes that its users will want to record meetings and take notes without using their smartphones.
Users can set the Granola app as one of the watch faces to start transcribing at any time. The app can also surface reminders about upcoming meetings, and works with the iOS app, which launched last year.
The company’s co-founder, Chris Pedregal, told TechCrunch that the Apple Watch app is meant to be a way to capture in-person meetings without having to take your phone out of your pocket — for example, if someone is having a walking one-on-one meeting.
When Granola tested its app with employees who had Apple Watches, a big chunk of their mobile usage switched from iOS to the Watch, the company said.
In the past year, companies have released auxiliary devices that can be used with smartphones to record and transcribe meetings. Granola said it considered it easier to develop an app for Apple Watches rather than integrate with another hardware product at this point. Dictation app Monlogue earlier this year also added support for meeting note-taking, for both online and offline modalities, along with Apple Watch support.
Granola became a unicorn earlier this year with a $125 million Series C round that was led by Index Ventures.
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