Amazon’s Prime Air is taking off in nearly 500 US cities

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1:36From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. Amazon's Prime Air is taking off in nearly 500 U.S. cities. I'm Emron Shaikh and your Thursday Daily Crunch starts right now. College has become a constellation of Venmo requests. I mean, your roommate's cut of the utilities, your half of an Uber ride, the ticket to your friend's acapella performance that you don't actually want to go to, and so on and so forth. So, on Wednesday, Venmo's parent company PayPal announced that you'll now be able to use its services to pay your tuition. Venmo and PayPal are partnering with the education payment platform Illumia, Nelnet, Campus Commerce, and TouchNet, which collectively serve thousands of colleges and universities, giving students and families, well, another way to pay their tuition.

2:22Yeah, that's right. You can make one of the largest payments of your life on the same app where you can see that someone from high school is paying for leaf emoji, fire emoji, smoke emoji, whatever that could possibly mean. You might open the Venmo app when your friend gets you a latte, then think, oh, right, I haven't paid my tuition yet. Let me do that real quick. For students and families, tuition is the single biggest financial decision they'll navigate for higher education, said Nelnet Campus Commerce President Jackie Strobin in a statement. Continuing, every payment option we add, including PayPal and Venmo, is about meeting them at the moment with more flexibility and less friction, so affordability isn't a barrier to staying enrolled.

3:06Whew, kids these days don't know how good they have it. Meanwhile, TikTok's developing a feature that would allow users to send each other money via direct messages, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Now, if this is rolled out, the feature would use the social media services TikTok pay offering, which is already available in Southeast Asia for TikTok shop purchases. References to the potential feature were found in code hidden within the current version of TikTok's U.S. iPhone app, according to the report. The code indicates that recipients would be able to tap to accept payments, while senders could include messages with their payments similar to Venmo.

3:43TikTok told Bloomberg that the future is not being tested, which suggests that it's in early development. Given that the future is still under development, it's unknown when or if TikTok plans to widely release peer-to-peer payments. TikTok did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time TikTok has tried to push further into financial services. You see, Reuters reported earlier this year that TikTok had applied to Brazil's central bank for approval to operate as a financial technology company, offering lending and payment services.

4:17Although TikTok is widely described as a social media giant, it has gradually expanded beyond that category thanks to additions such as robust search, TikTok shop, a local discovery map, games, hotel bookings, and a whole lot more. On Wednesday, Amazon announced a major expansion of Amazon Prime Air, its drone delivery service, with plans to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities by the end of 2026. Now, this marks a significant milestone as it expands the service's footprint by roughly 6x its current reach. Prime Air will soon launch in 11 locations.

5:05The return to Toleson is particularly notable given a drone accident that occurred there last year. You see, in October 2025, two drones collided with the boom of a crane. Amazon's drones have also previously drawn scrutiny following incidents, including clipping an internet cable and crashing into a garden and an apartment building. Now, this is likely why Amazon reiterated its focus on safety as part of the announcement. The company highlighted Prime Air's industry-leading detect-and-avoid system, which is designed to continuously monitor the airspace and surroundings of each drone. The drones also rely on onboard cameras and sensors for navigation, obstacle detection, and, of course, delivery.

5:44Plus, Amazon said the drones are designed to operate in real-world conditions, including light rain and a range of temperatures. Additionally, Prime Air operates under Federal Aviation Administration Part 135 certification, the same regulatory framework used by commercial air carriers. Prime members receive free, ultra-fast drone delivery on eligible orders of$50 or more. For Prime members placing eligible orders under$50, the delivery fee is$2.99. cents. Non-prime customers pay a$4.99 delivery fee. Nearly all items, five pounds or less, can be delivered by drone. Now to the latest in startup business news, all in about one minute with our friend, producer Dennis.

6:28Thanks, Emron. And Etched on Tuesday announced that it has raised another$700 million at a$21 billion valuation. This was led by Jane Street after the famed Quant Fund tested and bought the startup's AI hardware. Even by AI standards, this valuation step-up is jaw-droppingly fast. Etched was valued at$5 billion in December. It raised a$300 million Series A at a$10.3 billion valuation in July. Now investors have doubled its valuation to$21 billion, up nearly$11 billion in a month. Etched delivers its AI tech as full systems that it calls Frontier Inference Clusters. And Anthro Energy broke ground on Tuesday on a factory in Louisville, Kentucky that can make enough battery materials for more than 300 ,000 electric vehicles.

7:22But the facility's headline output, 25 gigawatt hours worth of electrolytes, is just part of the story. Anthro's factory could give solid-state batteries a much-needed boost in the U.S. Battery manufacturers are scoring the planet for materials that aren't encumbered by foreign entity of concern problems. In other words, materials that aren't somehow controlled by Chinese companies. Anthro hopes its new facility, scheduled to start production in 2028, can help fill that need for many U.S. companies. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Amanda Silberling, Aisha Malik, Lauren Forrestal, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

8:03We'll see you here tomorrow. Same Tech Time, same Crunch channel. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.