So it was 2020, prime time of COVID, and I was feeling a little bit unsure what I wanted to do with my life. I was still, at the time, sophomore in college, sent home halfway through university. And one of my friends had been sharing that she was working on a mobile app around biking. I basically contacted her. We decided to work together, and from there really grew from working and contributing as an intern, to founding engineer.
Marketers have spent decades optimising for blue links on a search results page. Now every CMO conversation starts with the same question: 'How do we look in ChatGPT?' People ask an AI assistant and get a short list of recommended options. If your brand isn't in that answer, you're effectively invisible, even if you did everything 'right' in SEO. Kime exists to make that visibility gap measurable and give teams a way to act on it.
The Next Web (TNW) is making a bold move: its flagship conference is relocating to London, placing TNW's main annual event at the centre of one of the world's most powerful technology and investment ecosystems. The move marks a significant moment for TNW and signals a broader evolution of the brand's global events strategy. A new concept: TNW Gathering Alongside the move to London, TNW is introducing a new global event concept: TNW Gathering.
Founders don't scale alone. They scale by learning from peers, building at the same pace, connecting with those who have already been there, and meeting investors aligned with what they're building. On June 23 in Boston, TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 brings together 1,100 founders and investors for a day focused entirely on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Tickets are now live at the lowest price of the year.
Last week, I published a deep exploration into Palantir and its founder factory and how the company's power and success can be explained by its ability to attract elite talent and how it empowers them to develop their skills and learn new ones in the projects they pursue.
Handshake began in 2013 as a platform for hiring college grads and launched a human data labeling business about a year ago to serve foundational AI model companies. Cleanlab, founded in 2021, is a startup that provides software for improving the quality of data produced by human labelers. The deal's purpose is primarily to acquire talent, aka an acqui-hire, adding nine key Cleanlab employees to Handshake's research organization.
Through strategic advisory engagements, Tommy S. Shields works with founders to evaluate leadership roles, business models, operational systems, and market positioning. These assessments help uncover misalignments that often undermine investor confidence. When a company lacks focus or internal structure, valuation becomes speculative rather than strategic. By addressing these issues early, Tommy S. Shields helps ventures build credibility before capital is ever introduced.
Footage of the incident, which took place January 15, shows the robot sitting motionless on the tracks, seemingly making no attempt to get out of the way as the unmistakable blare of the train horn gets louder and louder. "Oh it's gonna crush it!" the onlooker taking the video can be heard saying moments before the train, operated by Brightline, flattens the unfortunate bot into the tracks. Sparks can be seen flying from beneath the train before the video cuts off.
Elon Musk's tunneling startup, The Boring Company, has welcomed its newest Vegas Loop station at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas. The new Vegas Loop station is located on level V-1 of the Fontainebleau's south valet area, as noted in a report from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. According to the resort, guests will be able to travel free of charge to the stations serving the Las Vegas Convention Center, as well as to Loop stations in Encore and Westgate.
Slush, the Finnish nonprofit behind one of the most influential startup gatherings in Europe, has named Noora Saksa as its new Chief Executive Officer, a shift that indicates a strategic evolution for the organisation as it expands beyond its flagship event model. Saksa assumes the top role after years as Slush's Chief Operating & Financial Officer and Head of Partnerships, where she managed core operations, finances, and ecosystem programmes.
This surge was likely triggered by concerns over TikTok's change in ownership and its unfortunately timed technical glitches. TikTok had announced on January 22 the establishment of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, designed to comply with Trump's executive order requiring the company's U.S. operations be sold to a group of American investors. TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance will now own less than 20% of the new entity.
Glean Chat offers an experience very similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, but limited to an enterprise's content and resource boundaries, Jain said. When a user makes a natural language-based query, the company's search technology uses APIs to check all the content and activity - including information in applications - pertaining to the query before storing it in a customer's cloud environment. The data stored is then fed to large language models (LLMs), which have been trained on that particular enterprise's data,
Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a "central nervous system" for the human-plus-AI economy. The startup's " AI for empowering humans " framing has dominated early coverage, but the company's actual ambition is more novel: building a new foundation model architecture designed for social intelligence, not just information retrieval or code generation.
Abbie Beggs is a business owner and content creator. In 2020, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, when she was 20 and facing into her final year at university, she decided to launch Bound Apparel to fill a gap she identified in the market. There were plenty of leggings suitable for time spent at the gym, but what about the other hours of the day?
Food carts are a staple of New York City dining, dispensing everything from dosa and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum in short order. But no matter how enticing the aroma of a cart's food, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights on threaten to put customers off their meals. Cart owners and customers may not have to suck on fumes much longer.
We are building the first vertically integrated full-service platform for legal. We allow the end-to-end completion of legal requests with the help of AI agents and experts in the loop. Lawyers are trapped in the time-for-money model. Their expertise is sold by the hour. Lawyers are selling their most valuable asset, their intellect, in finite blocks of time, effectively capping their potential. nu:legal breaks this ceiling by allowing professionals to transform their knowledge into scalable, agentic services.
LiveKit, a developer of infrastructure software for real-time AI voice and video applications, has announced the raise of $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The round, which comes ten months after LiveKit's previous fundraise, was led by Index Ventures with participation of existing investors including Altimeter Capital Management, Hanabi Capital and Redpoint Ventures.
For several years, my brother, Mike, and I talked about wanting to go into business together. We considered a few ideas but hadn't settled on one. In February 2022, we rented an Escalade from Turo for a family trip. Almost exactly a year later, we launched our own Turo business, JDM Whipz. By 2024, JDM Whipz was making six figures in profit.
Spend an hour talking to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, and you'll find yourself drawn into his fixation on three frustrating facts about productivity tools today: They're boring. They're complicated. They're overpacked with overhyped AI features that fail to do what they promise and end up providing little in the way of practical value. Those same realities are the reason Fried decided to launch Fizzy -a new app that aims to reinvent organization software by undoing everything that's happened to it over the past several years.
"You can have as much money as you want to pour into the algorithm and buy ads," Kaplan told Business Insider. "But if you don't have the right founder who's able to build a community and the attention that you need to build a real product that people want, all of that money ... is meaningless."
Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. "When we were applying for Y-Combinator, the feedback we got was, 'great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,'" Wagh told TechCrunch.
Founded in 2014, Zipline developed its own drone delivery ecosystem, including the logistics software, launch and landing systems, and the aircraft. The company got its commercial start in 2016 using its autonomous drones to deliver blood in Rwanda. Today, Zipline's drones deliver food, retail, agriculture, and health products in five African countries, several cities in the United States, and Japan.
From greater flexibility to a sense of ownership and the hope of financial gain, solopreneurship feels like the new American dream. However, there's a hidden cost to that dream that has nothing to do with the unending hustle that comes with being both a business owner and that business's sole employee. It's the undeniable cost to the planet. In 2025, about 41 million businesses in the U.S. were run by a sole individual who is both its owner and only employee.
