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A former missile engineer has turned his expertise toward a very different kind of target. Alex Toussaint, once of defense firm MBDA, has built a forty-gram autonomous drone for YC-backed startup Tornyol that hunts and kills mosquitoes using AMD ultrasonic phased-array sonar. The eleven-hundred-dollar device weighs less than a AA battery and currently operates within a three-minute flight window — a constraint the team is actively working to extend.
On the security front, AI tools are now being pointed at cryptographic systems in ways that are surfacing real vulnerabilities. A new report from zkSecurity details how AI-assisted analysis uncovered bugs inside OpenVM's zero-knowledge virtual machine — a finding that raises pointed questions about how much hidden fragility exists in the infrastructure underpinning blockchain and privacy tech.
And in the funding world, a TechCrunch Disrupt two thousand twenty six session is promising to help pre-seed founders navigate an increasingly crowded landscape. With AI startups absorbing enormous amounts of early capital, founders without a finished product are being asked to compete on conviction and storytelling alone — which is either an opportunity or a warning, depending on how you look at it.
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