Reddit has launched video comments for all users. The feature lets any Redditor upload or record a short-form video reply directly in the comments of any post. It rolls out across all public, safe-for-work communities starting Thursday.

A video icon now appears alongside the existing image and GIF options in the comment box. Users can either upload an existing video or record one in place. Videos do not autoplay. Reddit’s safety systems check video comments before they are posted.

“We are continually evolving Reddit to deliver a more immersive and authentic human experience,” said Chief Product Officer Maria Angelidou-Smith. “The ability to reply with video gives users more creative ways to engage in communities they love.”

The feature has been in limited testing. Reddit pointed to a video AMA with Mel C from the Spice Girls, conducted two months ago, as an example of the intended use case. Celebrity and expert AMAs are a natural fit: a host can record personalised video responses to individual questions in the thread.

Reddit’s user base has traditionally favoured anonymity and text-based discussion. There is no requirement that a posted video show the user’s face. In practice, video comments are likely to become another meme format, with users replying to posts with reaction clips rather than showing themselves on camera.

Subreddit moderators can disable the feature for their communities. Only public, SFW subreddits are eligible. Private and NSFW communities are excluded.

The launch reflects Reddit’s broader push to become a more visual platform as it competes for engagement with TikTok and YouTube. Reddit’s share price has risen sharply since its 2024 IPO, driven in part by its role as a training data source for AI models. Adding video to comments increases time on platform and creates more content, both of which support ad revenue and the data licensing deals that have become a growing part of its business.

Bluesky launched group chats on Thursday and outlined a broader pivot toward community features, a strategic shift for a social network that has so far focused on open public posting. Group chats support up to 50 people in the current release. The company says it may increase that limit later.

The feature arrives in version 1.124 of the app. Chat creators control who can participate and can generate invite links that display as embedded cards when shared in Bluesky posts. Users can set who is allowed to invite them: everyone, only people they follow, or no one. Media sharing in group chats is not yet supported because it requires additional safety and moderation systems.

The more significant announcement is what comes next. Head of product Alex Benzer said Bluesky will build communities, smaller spaces inside the platform where users go deeper on shared interests. Communities will have their own handle that doubles as a URL, like community-name.bsky.social. They can be public, invite-only, or private.

“Today, Bluesky is one big space. Communities will be smaller spaces inside that where you can go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff,” Benzer wrote. The features will be built on the underlying AT Protocol with support from the wider developer ecosystem.

The timing is deliberate. X shut down its own Communities feature in April, citing low usage and spam. Bluesky is picking up where X left off, targeting users who want more control over their online communities without Big Tech intermediaries. Bluesky’s Attie app already lets users customise their feeds with AI. Communities extend that philosophy to group interaction.

The pivot reflects a growth problem. Bluesky has 44.8 million registered users. X has 600 million monthly actives. Threads has hundreds of millions more. If Bluesky cannot match those numbers, it needs a different value proposition. Communities and group chats offer something X and Threads do not: user-owned spaces on an open protocol, where moderation rules are set by the community rather than the platform.

X recently moved in the opposite direction, launching a standalone XChat messaging app while shutting down its group community features. Bluesky is betting that small, controlled spaces matter more than massive public reach, especially for users who have already decided they want an alternative to platforms operated by Musk or Meta.

Whether 44.8 million users are enough to sustain vibrant communities is the open question. Reddit works because communities have critical mass. Bluesky’s total user base is smaller than many individual subreddits. The group chat launch and the communities roadmap are an acknowledgment that growth alone is not working, and that depth of engagement may matter more than breadth.

TL;DR

OpenAI expanded Codex from a coding tool into an enterprise work platform with Sites (hosted web apps), Annotations, and role-specific plugins connecting 62 business apps. Non-developers now make up 20% of 5 million weekly users and are adopting 3x faster than engineers.

OpenAI announced a major expansion of Codex on Tuesday, transforming its AI coding agent into a broader enterprise work platform with three new capabilities: Sites, a feature that lets users create and share hosted interactive web applications; Annotations, an in-place editing tool; and six role-specific plugins that aggregate 62 popular business applications including Snowflake, Figma, and Salesforce with 110 automated skills built in. The update signals OpenAI’s ambition to make Codex the default interface for knowledge work, not just software development.

The most telling data point is the user composition. Non-developers, including financial analysts, marketers, operations staff, and researchers, now constitute approximately 20% of Codex’s 5 million weekly users and are adopting the platform three times faster than traditional engineers. The vibe coding phenomenon, in which non-technical users build applications through natural language prompts, is no longer a curiosity. It is becoming a measurable share of a product used by millions.

Sites: from spreadsheet to web app

Sites, launching in preview for business and enterprise customers, lets Codex create interactive, hosted web applications that users can share via secure workspace URLs. The practical implication is that a financial analyst can take a static spreadsheet, describe what they want in natural language, and Codex will generate a live web application, a scenario planner, a dashboard, or an interactive model, that colleagues can use without downloading files or navigating spreadsheet tabs.

This directly threatens the workflow layer that tools like Tableau, Power BI, and even internal business intelligence teams currently occupy. AI-native enterprise spending is surging precisely because these tools can collapse the gap between wanting an interactive application and having one, from weeks of development to minutes of prompting.

Plugins and the SaaS integration play

The six role-specific plugins are OpenAI’s most direct assault on horizontal SaaS. By connecting 62 business applications and bundling 110 automated skills, Codex is positioning itself as an orchestration layer that sits above existing enterprise tools rather than replacing them. A marketing manager who currently switches between Salesforce, Figma, and Snowflake could theoretically manage workflows across all three through Codex’s natural language interface.

The strategic logic follows a pattern established by Salesforce’s Agentforce and Microsoft’s Copilot: build the AI agent layer that connects to everything, and capture the value of orchestration rather than competing with each individual tool. Every SaaS company is building AI features, but OpenAI is betting that the orchestration layer, the thing that connects them all, is more valuable than any single application’s AI capabilities.

The SaaSpocalypse accelerator

The Codex update arrives in the middle of the SaaSpocalypse debate over whether AI will destroy or enhance the SaaS industry. The answer from OpenAI’s product direction is clear: Codex is designed to let users build custom solutions that replace off-the-shelf software. AI coding platforms like Cognition are already producing software at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional development. Codex’s expansion to non-developers accelerates this dynamic by removing the last barrier: the user no longer needs to think of themselves as a developer at all.

The 3x adoption rate among non-developers is the statistic that should concern SaaS companies most. It suggests that the market for AI-powered work tools is expanding faster outside the engineering function than within it, which means the revenue opportunity, and the competitive threat, is broader than the coding use case alone.

Defenders of traditional SaaS argue that enterprise software’s value lies in domain knowledge, compliance, and integrations that AI tools cannot easily replicate. The plugin architecture in today’s Codex update is OpenAI’s response: if the domain knowledge lives in the connected applications, Codex only needs to orchestrate it. Whether that orchestration layer can match the reliability, security, and auditability that enterprises require is the question the preview period will answer.

British fintech Revolut has quietly begun rolling out its services in India as part of a controlled beta program ahead of a broader launch, marking a significant milestone in its years-long effort to enter the country’s fast-growing digital payments market.

Revolut started taking signups for its India app earlier this year, and some users who joined the waitlist have been gaining access to its services over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed the rollout and said a few thousand customers in India are already using the platform.

The rollout marks a significant milestone in Revolut’s years-long effort to enter India, a major digital payments market where the federal government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has transformed how consumers and businesses move money. UPI accounts for nearly half of global real-time payments transaction volume and processed a record 23.2 billion transactions worth ₹29.9 trillion (around $313.8 billion) in May, per Indian government data.

A Revolut spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is currently “in the controlled onboarding of waitlisters” and that a beta version of its app, localized for Indian users, is available through the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

“This is being done in order to gather feedback on core product functioning and enhance the overall customer experience and the value proposition before opening up the platform for a larger audience,” the spokesperson said.

The rollout is currently limited to a small subset of the company’s approximately 450,000 waitlisted users.

Users in the beta program can access UPI payments, e-money wallets, domestic prepaid cards, multi-currency cards, virtual cards, and disposable cards, the company said. Revolut plans to add its Lifestyle and RevPoints offerings before expanding the rollout. Family, or joint, accounts — available in some of Revolut’s overseas markets — will not be offered in India because such products require a banking license, the company said.

Revolut has been building its India business since 2021 and hired fintech executive Paroma Chatterjee to lead its local operations. In 2022, the London-headquartered company acquired Arvog Forex to strengthen its regulatory presence in the country and offer remittance and multi-currency account services. It later secured a prepaid payment instrument (PPI) license from the Reserve Bank of India, allowing it to issue prepaid cards, support digital wallets, and integrate with the UPI network.

The company told TechCrunch that it plans to open the app to direct onboarding of all users in the “near future” but declined to provide a specific launch timeline. Chatterjee had previously said in a LinkedIn post that Revolut was targeting a full product launch in India in Q2.

Revolut is targeting India’s growing base of digitally savvy consumers as it seeks to challenge incumbent banks and fintech firms in one of the world’s most competitive financial services markets. The company has previously said it aims to serve more than 150 million “globally aspiring, digitally native” Indians aged between 25 and 45, with a goal of onboarding about 20 million users by 2030 and processing at least $7 billion in transactions.

Consumer interest in Revolut has been building ahead of its broader India launch. According to Sensor Tower estimates shared with TechCrunch, Revolut’s app has been downloaded nearly 820,000 times in India since it became available in app stores. More than a third of those downloads occurred in 2025 and the first months of 2026.

While Revolut’s largest markets by app downloads remain in Europe, led by France, the U.K., Spain, Italy, and Germany, the company has increasingly looked to emerging markets for growth. Sensor Tower estimates downloads in Thailand and Vietnam grew 40% and 52%, respectively, in 2025, while downloads in Brazil surged 487% year over year to 1.8 million, highlighting the importance of markets such as India to its long-term expansion strategy.

TL;DR

Tencent will let PayPal users make cashless payments in China through WeChat Pay’s QR code merchant network, starting with US users. The move targets foreign tourists who struggle with China’s cashless economy, as visitor numbers surpass 35 million.

Tencent has announced that PayPal users will be able to make cashless payments in China by scanning QR codes through WeChat Pay’s merchant network. The integration, which will be available to US-based PayPal users first with more markets to follow, connects PayPal’s 400 million-plus user base to the payment infrastructure that covers virtually every taxi, restaurant, and shop in mainland China.

The move addresses a specific pain point. China’s economy runs on mobile payments, with WeChat Pay and Ant Group’s Alipay processing trillions of dollars in transactions annually. Foreign visitors who arrive without access to either platform often find themselves unable to pay for basic goods and services, since many Chinese merchants no longer accept cash and few accept international credit cards at the point of sale. Both WeChat Pay and Alipay have allowed foreigners to link international bank cards since 2019, but adoption has been limited by a cumbersome onboarding process that requires downloading Chinese apps and navigating interfaces designed for domestic users.

Why PayPal matters

PayPal integration sidesteps the onboarding problem entirely. A US tourist arriving in Beijing does not need to download WeChat, create an account, or link a bank card to a Chinese payment platform. They scan a WeChat Pay QR code with their existing PayPal app, the transaction processes through WeChat Pay’s merchant network, and the charge appears on their PayPal balance or linked card. The friction reduction is significant for a demographic that currently struggles with China’s cashless infrastructure.

Tencent is also waiving transaction fees for first-time users who link international bank cards directly to WeChat, a separate incentive aimed at encouraging deeper integration beyond the PayPal pathway. The company reported that foreign traveller transactions in China jumped nearly 80% year on year in the January-to-April period of 2026, suggesting that China’s broader tourism push is already driving payment volume growth.

China’s tourism strategy

The PayPal deal is part of a coordinated effort by Beijing to attract more foreign tourists after the pandemic-era collapse in international arrivals. China has expanded visa-free access to travellers from dozens of countries, including the UK, Spain, and Australia, though US travellers still require a visa except for brief transits to third countries.

The strategy is working by the numbers. Foreign visitors to China, excluding those from Hong Kong and Taiwan, surpassed 35 million in 2025, exceeding the pre-pandemic record of nearly 32 million set in 2019. Tourism contributed more than 4% of China’s GDP in 2024. China’s approach to technology adoption has created an economy where digital infrastructure is more advanced than in most Western countries, but that very advancement creates barriers for visitors who are not part of the domestic digital ecosystem.

Gary Ng, a senior economist for Asia Pacific at French bank Natixis, said the move aligns with a global trend of payment platform integration through mutually recognised cross-border QR codes. The same dynamic is playing out in Southeast Asia, where Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia have established bilateral QR code payment links.

Limited near-term impact

The practical significance of the PayPal integration depends on the volume of US travellers to China, which remains relatively low compared to pre-pandemic levels and is further constrained by the ongoing visa requirement. Ivan Su, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said the initial impact may be limited in terms of overall benefit for Tencent given those volumes.

The competitive dynamic between WeChat Pay and Alipay adds another dimension. As fintech platforms globally expand into cross-border payments, both Chinese platforms are racing to be the preferred gateway for foreign visitors. Alipay has its own international partnerships and has been more aggressive in marketing to tourists through in-app translation features and curated city guides. Alibaba’s broader technology ambitions give Alipay a parent company with deep resources to invest in cross-border payment infrastructure.

For Tencent, the PayPal deal is less about immediate revenue and more about positioning WeChat Pay as the default payment rail for international visitors. Chinese platform companies are navigating a regulatory environment that encourages international engagement while maintaining domestic control over data and financial flows. Connecting PayPal to WeChat Pay’s merchant network threads that needle, giving foreign users access to the payment infrastructure without giving them direct access to the underlying Chinese financial system.