Startup companies

Startup companies

In fact, some companies have already garnered impressive traction in key markets around the world, with regulators seeming to be intrigued by the innovative technology these companies are putting forward. With these aircraft resembling a mix of airplane and helicopter technology, the idea is that urban transport between key areas (say, a large urban center and an airport) could be much quicker and more efficient in the air than on the roads.

Three years ago, Luminal co-founder Joe Fioti was working on chip design at Intel when he came to a realization. While he was working on making the best chips he could, the more important bottleneck was in software. "You can make the best hardware on earth, but if it's hard for developers to use, they're just not going to use it," he told me.

The recent crypto boom has been marked by blockchain companies working to expand their appeal to mainstream consumers. That now includes Aave Labs, the developer behind a popular decentralized lending service, which on Monday announced plans to launch an app in Apple's App Store and opened up a waitlist for interested users. Aave is well-known in crypto as a leading project in DeFi, or decentralized finance.

We had retention that was 3-4 times better than other meal delivery services. We had low awareness, lots of room for product innovation, and a seemingly clear path to an IPO. Then the war broke out in Ukraine, and capital markets started to get spooked. All of the sudden, fast-growing, unprofitable consumer businesses were out of vogue. We managed to raise $32mm, not a small sum, but it felt like a failure.

But, despite the indisputable significance of a founder's strong presence to provide direction and shape the culture, is it wise for a company to be unable to survive without them, even for a short time? If a short-term absence of a few weeks halts operations and makes it impossible for everyone to perform their daily tasks, then the organization is not truly thriving.

"There's this bullshit that we're seeing from Meta and OpenAI and others where they decided that somehow we're better off with all AI-created social media content," Rabble said in an interview with Business Insider. "That's not where social media came from. Social media was social first. It's about humans and our connection, not just pretty videos."

Powered by the Arkade protocol, Lendaswap uses HTLC-based atomic swaps - a technology similar to that of the Lightning Network - to deliver a seamless experience for anyone looking to swap BTC and stablecoins "without giving up self-custody, creating accounts, or relying on wrapped tokens," according to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. Lendaswap will support Ethereum and Polygon at launch, with planned expansion to Base, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Technologies that have both military and civilian applications are known as "dual-use". Drone start-ups, arms giants, and satellite manufacturers are among the tech companies which are increasingly marketing surveillance products for both military and civil applications, leading to a blurring of the lines between the two domains. This has serious implications for our freedoms, the militarisation of our societies, and the use of publicly-funded research, particularly from the European Union.

Most tech events follow a familiar recipe: a sleek venue, several high-profile speakers, and plenty of formal networking. The first AWS Community Day in Hong Kong on 2 November 2025 built on this foundation, but what stood out was its community-first ethos. There were no top-down announcements or flashy product demos, instead it presented an opportunity for builders, innovators, and users that make up Hong Kong's cloud ecosystem to come together.

From the start, Nicholas and his team focused on solving real problems rather than chasing hype or inflated valuations. He is a firm believer that conviction should come from customers, not VCs, and that once Forethought delivered tangible value to real users, the hype and valuations naturally followed. His "7-Failure Rule" urges founders to embrace iteration over perfection and to expect a few misses before finding what truly clicks.

Two of the UK beauty industry's most successful founders, Susie Ma of Tropic Skincare and Jenna Meek of Refy, are set to join the BBC's Dragons' Den as guest dragons in 2026. The pair will sit alongside Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Touker Suleyman and Steven Bartlett, as well as fellow guest dragons Tinie Tempah and Gary Neville, in a line-up designed to bring a new generation of entrepreneurial voices into the Den.

WisdomAI, the new AI data analytics startup from Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar, has landed a fresh $50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from new investor NVentures (Nvidia's venture capital arm). This round comes roughly six months after the startup announced a seed round of $23 million led by Coatue. WisdomAI offers AI-driven data analytics that can answer business questions from structured, unstructured, and even "dirty" data, meaning data that hasn't been cleaned of typos or errors.

I wake up between 6:30 and 7 a.m. I don't use an alarm clock because I hate them. The first thing I do is turn on the "Today" show, grab my phone, and have a cup of black coffee. Everyone says, "Don't get right on your phone in the morning," but I love getting on my phone for at least 30 minutes to check emails and catch up.

Seattle-based e-bike giant Rad Power Bikes has filed official notice to Washington State as well as the company's 64 Washington employees that the company could end operations "as early as January 2026." A Nov. 7 filing with the state ( PDF) warns both service-level workers at the company's retail and repair shop as well as corporate workers at its Seattle headquarters that layoffs could start as early as Jan. 9, 2026.

After I graduated from college, I moved to Maine for a year to start my own company in the supply chain AI space. But after living in the Northeast for a year, shelling out over a thousand dollars each month on renting an apartment I often wasn't at because of the amount I was traveling for work, I decided to move back to my parents' house in the Bay Area. It made sense to move back home temporarily, from a career and financial perspective.

HOUSTON, Texas -- Holiday spirit fills every corner at The Round Top Collection.

More than half of startup employees can tell when their founder is stressed, and they are making career decisions based on these observations. New research from Startup Snapshot, developed with The Inner Foundation and Ignite DeepTech, reveals that teams that identified visible founder stress reported significantly higher rates of burnout, disengagement, and intention to leave. Employees who leave are not necessarily being disloyal; often, they're just reading environmental signals for survival. But what exactly are they detecting?

Global cross-border payments are projected to exceed €268 trillion by 2030, driven by the globalization of trade and remote work. Yet, international transactions still face delays or hidden fees due to outdated banking systems. As demand for faster, more transparent money movement accelerates, EQWIRE, UK Electronic Money Institution, licensed and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA, FRN 901100), enters the market with a regulated, technology-first solution designed to close this gap.

Honestly, it just could not be more different from all the playbooks that we've all been taught in tech in the past,

For the past months I've been working on Wave - an open source, AI-native terminal that knows your context (we know, the hook still needs work). In this time, we've gone from zero daily active users (DAU) and zero GitHub stars at launch in November 2023 to approximately 3000 DAU and 12k GitHub stars today. My biggest lesson: The tried and trusted SaaS go-to-market (GTM) playbook doesn't apply for AI-native products. We're consciously breaking all my cardinal rules, such as:

That's a crowded market where even her previous firm, 6Sense, offers agents. "I'm not playing in outbound," Kahlow tells TechCrunch. Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales, going all the way to "closing the deal," Kahlow says. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and, Kahlow says, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also be the onboarding specialist, setting up new customers.

"I could never take notes and pay attention to the teacher at the same time," Dhawan said.

Without really knowing how work is done, it is really hard to know where to improve it, where to automate it, where agents can help.

In the fast-emerging market for AI legal tools, a two-horse race is taking shape. Harvey, the OpenAI-backed startup that has become the industry's breakout success, is now facing an ambitious challenger: Stockholm-based Legora, which is pitching law firms a new way to protect and monetize their intellectual property. Harvey has sprinted to $100 million in annual recurring revenue and an $8 billion valuation, turning the AI-for-law market into a serious money sport.

On November 6, Sweetgreen announced that it was selling Spyce, its division that developed and made its Infinite Kitchen technology to automate the assembly of its bowls and salads. The acquirer is Wonder, the " restaurant and mealtime superapp," as Fast Company dubbed it earlier this year. With that, it's time to eulogize Sweetgreen's star-crossed life as a tech company. No more dreams of AI, blockchain, or robots.

When I went to college in 2017, I already knew I wanted to work in startups and make a difference in the world. After my freshman year at the University of Michigan, I switched majors from business to computer science, which I felt would be more useful for running an early-stage company. But in late 2018, at age 19, I dropped out of college for a full-time job.

A Long Island widower who'd made a fortune selling his insurance firm a few years earlier, Durnan had put $250,000 into Nolan and Grace's nascent Hamptons-themed swimwear and sunglasses brand, East x East. Nolan, a 33-year-old Irish immigrant, was betting everything on this start-up and had pitched Durnan on a grand vision for the company: East x East would one day be sold on Revolve and in upscale department stores like Saks.

Maybe there's an extension to that dream where you sell it for millions, or where you build a company that allows you to retire. But the core of the dream is this: you have a thing that you think needs to be built, you build it, and then people come and give you money for it because they actually need it.

Many entrepreneurs launch beauty startups because they see a glaring gap in the market. It's only after they've formulated their products and launched them that they learn how incredibly difficult it is to turn a profit as a beauty business. That wasn't the case for Tisha Thompson, founder of LYS (short for Love Yourself), a clean cosmetics brand that is inclusive to all skin tones.

Thanks to the cornucopia of SaaS products and B2B services offered by companies on this year's Inc. Power Partners list, you don't have to. After all, the more administrative work you offload to your software stack, the more time you can spend on the things that actually made you want to be a founder in the first place.

I worked in tech sales for about four years, mainly selling software and AI solutions to restaurant companies. I did well and consistently hit my quotas, but I didn't have control over my future. Even after a strong quarter, management would suddenly announce changes, and I never had a say in the matter. That's just how big companies work. Eventually, I knew I had to go out on my own if I wanted to shape my own future.

Mom, these are made just for me. At first, the mom didn't understand. She asked her daughter if she wanted to try on a pair. She started crying: You don't understand. These are made for girls like me. Moments like these are the most fulfilling for White, the founder and CEO of Moolah Kicks the company that engineered the first basketball shoe made specifically for women.