Startup companies

Startup companies

Flying taxis are officially known as electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs. The idea is that 10 to 20-minute flights can make commutes easier compared to driving a car. Unlike helicopters, which face numerous restrictions due to their noise, the fact that eVTOLs are electric means they're much quieter. The company has previously said it expects a seat on board to cost about the same as an Uber Black, or around $150.

RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company. "We're in this kind of renaissance where there's a lot of renewed interest in manufacturing," Cassel told Business Insider.

This isn't about raising capital, it's about giving our community/fans a chance to invest while we're private and join us on the journey,

Ostium, a decentralized exchange founded by two Harvard graduates, has raised a $20 million Series A round led by the marquee venture outfit General Catalyst and the crypto arm of the quantitative trading firm Jump Trading, Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, cofounder and CEO, told Fortune. Ostium lets users bet on real-world assets like stocks, metals, oil, and some cryptocurrencies. Traders can take on higher risk through perpetual futures. Unlike traditional futures, these derivatives don't expire on a set date-assuming traders maintain the necessary margin requirements.

The rapid succession of robotaxi deployments from companies like Waymo and Zoox have people in the industry, once again, dreaming about how autonomous vehicles might change our daily lives. That includes driverless taxi rides, sure, but also headier ideas like sending an autonomous vehicle to fetch groceries or pick up dry cleaning. If those things are ultimately going to happen, navigating the handoff moments - like where exactly a vehicle should stop to receive the groceries - will be a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Starting a business is an enticing venture, but it's far from smooth sailing. In fact, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that over 20% of small businesses across various sectors don't even make it past the first year. Starting a business isn't for everyone. It demands not only skills and resources within your control but also factors beyond it. There's a degree of luck and timing involved. However, positioned between both sides is an essential element: the expertise of others.

Logan Brown, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer, began the year billing hours at the global law firm Cooley. Now she's building a tech-first law firm that meets the routine needs of startups, without the Big Law price tag. Soxton, Brown's new venture, has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively. "I didn't have a deck. I didn't have a team," Brown said. Instead, she told investors, "I am building the solution for founders. That is not the billable hour."

The Trump administration has agreed to inject up to $150 million into xLight, a semiconductor startup developing advanced chip-making technology, marking the second time the U.S. government has taken an equity position in a private startup and further expanding a controversial strategy that has put Washington on the cap tables of American companies. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Commerce Department will provide the funding to xLight

When I wrote that maintaining a work-life balance will keep you mediocre in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in August, I didn't think my views were that controversial. I built my first company, Step Up Social, from my dorm room during my 2021 and 2022 sophomore and junior years at Miami University. I received thousands of comments beneath the article and on social media on the three-and-a-half hours I slept on average each night, the classes I skipped, the friends I lost, and how I outsourced everything nonessential, including cooking food, meaning I gained 80 pounds.

When the model for the company was curated at a hackathon in São Paulo, Foody knew that he, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha had built something that couldn't be replicated in classrooms. Its AI-powered hiring platform automates aspects of the hiring process, such as resume screening, candidate matching and AI-powered interviews. Within nine months, he and his co-founders had turned the idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate, which they claim is one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era.

Entrepreneurship is entering a new era-one defined not by hustle culture, but by clarity, systems, and smart leverage.In 2026, the entrepreneurs who win won't be the ones grinding the longest hours. They'll be the ones who think strategically, adapt quickly, communicate clearly, and build businesses that function even when they step away. Here's the mindset shift every founder needs before stepping into the next year.

The two-time founder told Fortune that he approaches it the way he approaches his business: always on. "It's just like in business, you have to, consistently, every day, show up and don't have any excuses for poor performance." He said that not all his Ironman training days are great, but he has to make sure he follows his plan. It aligns with how he works.

Now our AI platform is powering real sales teams and growing faster than we imagined,

it's relatively easy to create a vibe coding tool.

"The thought process is building AI products for billions of Indians, as well as supporting AI products built in India for global markets," Prayank Swaroop, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch. India is an appealing market with the world's second-largest internet and smartphone base after China and its deep engineering talent. Still, it's also country that lacks frontier model development and hasn't produced many companies pushing the technical frontier of AI, where development remains concentrated in the U.S. and China.

Nicholson is also tasked with refining onboarding practices and defining project scopes and timelines for the Austin-based company. Adam Nicholson Adam brings a deep background in professional services leadership across mortgage and financial technology, said Tedd Smith, co-founder and CEO of FirstClose. His ability to build strong teams, streamline processes and deliver measurable results will help us further accelerate implementation efficiency and reinforce the value lenders experience when partnering with FirstClose.

"Why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?" Cuban said. It is the right question to be asking. Because while the debate over wealth inequality continues, the solution has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The top 10% of U.S. households now control 67% of all wealth, while the bottom half holds just 2.5%.

Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day, with companies benefitting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before to be relevant and make a living out of it, especially as more AI-generated slop is infiltrating these platforms.

The company that pioneered small launch has had a big year. Rocket Lab broke its annual launch record with the Electron booster-17 successful missions this year, and counting-and is close to bringing its much larger Neutron rocket to the launch pad. The company also expanded its in-space business, including playing a key role in supporting the landing of Firefly's Blue Ghost mission on the Moon and building two small satellites just launched to Mars.

I started there in November 2006, when there were only around 10,000 employees, and became an executive - the director of American media relations - in 2022. Google's amazing; I bleed Google colors. I loved the impact I was having, the future of opportunities I saw for myself, and the feedback I was getting as a leader. I'm also the breadwinner for my family.

"I try to instill this into the rest of the team, but certainly I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit," he told the MIT Technology Review in 2014. "Like, it's just terrible, and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though."

We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that's what we want and that's all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter,

While the 996 parlance and laser focus on AI may be new, hustle culture has always been embedded in Silicon Valley to some degree. Some business leaders, perhaps most famously Elon Musk, have long demanded those hours from their employees: "There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week," he once said of the "hardcore" work ethic promoted at his companies.

Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, has raised a massive $1 billion round at a $11 billion valuation, according to a person familiar with the deal. The round comes less than two months after the seven-year-old startup announced its previous fundraise of $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. The latest round is led by the company's returning investors Sequoia and CapitalG, the person said. Other investors in Kalshi include Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Anthos Capital, and Neo.