Startup companies

Startup companies

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.

Deepinder Goyal, the co-founder and CEO of food delivery service Zomato and its parent Eternal, is stepping down from his role and handing the top job to Albinder Dhindsa, the CEO of its quick-commerce division Blinkit. Goyal on Wednesday said he would remain on Eternal's board as vice chairman as he shifts focus to "higher-risk exploration and experimentation," which he says may be harder to pursue within the constraints of a listed company.

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.

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.

The ground beneath our feet holds so much energy that experts at the Department of Energy think geothermal power could generate 60 gigawatts - or nearly 10% of U.S. electricity - by 2050. Zanskar co-founder and CEO Carl Holland thinks that lofty number is too low, mostly because it's discounting conventional geothermal's potential. The DOE's figures assume advances in enhanced geothermal, which uses fracking techniques to access hot rock deep underground.

What started as a three-person team has grown into a global company of around 250 employees, with teams across the United States, India, and Mexico. The company's mission is straightforward-create better experiences for customers, employees, and operations using smart, human-focused technology. Rather than replace existing platforms, Epik builds around them. "We extend the value of what's already working," says the CEO. "That's what makes our solutions adaptable."

But he'd been considering an idea for new technology-an autonomous, wind-powered cargo ship. Then, while on paternity leave in 2024, he discovered a free program that helps scientists and engineers launch businesses for the first time. Weeks after finishing the program, called 5050, Cymbalist had launched a startup called Clippership. The company's first ship is being built in the Netherlands this year. Without the accelerator, he says, the company likely wouldn't exist.

"the godfather of consumer generative A.I."

Ohanian stepped down from Reddit's board of directors in June 2020 following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. At the time, he wrote on Reddit that it was a "long overdue" move to "do the right thing." He urged the Reddit board to fill his seat with a black candidate, after the company had been criticized for providing a platform for racist and hate speech.

Elon Musk made the unusual offer when xAI's engineers were setting up new GPU racks, according to then-technical staff member Sulaiman Ghori. "Elon's like, 'OK, you can get a Cybertruck tonight if you can get a training run on these GPUs in 24 hours,'" Ghori said on "Relentless." The engineer - whom Ghori only referred to by their first name, Tyler - won the bet. Now, Ghori said he sees Tyler's Cybertruck outside his lunch window.

The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies. Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in "phase two" of NASA's commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space.

"I would try to come up with prompts that were like, 'This is bad,'" Weinberg said.

"It always felt like it was three years out," he said of autonomous driving. "And then every year it shifted by a year. So we wanted to have self-driving cars everywhere in 2020 at Zoox. And then it was 2021 and so forth." Von der Ohe left Zoox in 2018. Instead of fixating on robotaxis, von der Ohe wanted to stay in mobility but work on something that could be faster to bring to market

And companies reject it. Companies cocoon them.

At those jobs, Puchalski developed deep connections in the automotive industry, and we crossed paths all week. There he was at an industry networking party one night. On another night, in my hotel lobby at 10 p.m., he was debating how to balance quality and manufacturing yield with Sanjay Dastoor - founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of which also got off the ground at YC.

Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from December 2025. I have included some additional information such as industry, company description, round type, founders, and total equity funding raised to further the analysis. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Learn More →

Rivian started producing "manufacturing validation builds" of the R2 at its plant in Normal, Illinois, on Thursday. It's a big step toward full-scale production. The R2 will start around $45,000, and Rivian reiterated plans for customer deliveries to start in the first half of this year. The Rivian R2 is one of the most anticipated electric vehicles of 2026 and a make-or-break product for the startup.

The Council is limited to 1,000 members globally. Each member is selected through an application and review process. The Council is designed to bring together experienced leaders who want peer conversations, meaningful connections, and visibility through editorial and event participation. Members gain editorial participation opportunities across the platform, access to curated expert panels, and verified executive profiles. They receive priority access to conferences, invitations to private gatherings and closed sessions, and entry to a curated network of founders and senior executives.

"Our users have significant disposable income and are spending it on DTC products and services elsewhere - e.g., medications; wellness and fitness products; luxury experiences; travel; networking," the document reads. "We are creating new business lines to capture some of this spending, knowing some of it will fail," it continues. The strategy document also includes an expansion of its AI bet, going beyond existing products like A-List and Discover, which are referred to as "just the first examples."

Atoms is the first AI team that autonomously builds, launches, and grows real businesses, not just repos, without additional hiring costs and time investment in long recruitment processes. Powered by open-source models, Atoms deliver results that are 45% better than those of top proprietary tools, at up to 80% lower cost. Atoms runs an AI-dedicated team right in your browser: a team lead, a researcher, a product manager, an architect, an engineer, a marketing executive, a SEO specialist, a data analyst, etc.

With this post, voting is now officially open! Help pick the 15 legal tech startups that will get to compete at the 10th-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW, March 25-28,2026. Your votes determine the 15 companies selected to face off in a live pitch competition that will be the opening-night event of this year's TECHSHOW in Chicago. They also get to exhibit in a special Startup Alley portion of the exhibit hall.

Crypto custody firm BitGo has launched its initial public offering, seeking to raise up to $201 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Palo Alto, California-based company is offering roughly 11.8 million shares of Class A common stock at an expected price range of $15 to $17 per share. The offering includes 11 million shares sold by BitGo and about 821,600 shares offered by existing stockholders, with the company not receiving proceeds from those secondary sales.

Whenever an idea pops into Oscar Rachmansky's head, he whips out a notebook or whatever scrap of paper is closest and writes it down. It's a habit you might expect from a Gen Xer or elder millennial clinging to analog comfort. Rachmansky is neither. He's 24, and the company he founded about five years ago generated $40 million in sales revenue in 2025 (confirmed from documents reviewed by Business Insider).

Brooke Meister and Alex Dochter have unveiled new digital creator talent firm Link Management, which reps digital creators including social media personality Danielle Walter, NFL Majorette and lifestyle creator Chloe Holladay, viral TikToker Yolanda Diaz, and "Love Island USA" Season 7 vet Jalen Brown. Link Management, which began operations in 2025, was created to "go beyond transactional brand deals and offer personalized, holistic representation that helps talent diversify revenue streams, strengthen personal brands and build sustainable, long-term careers."

we are an application that helps people to buy and sell Bitcoin directly with each other, without any intermediaries, without KYC. Vexl works without custody, so peer-to-peer, but what's most important is that it is always within your own community, meaning we are not a global marketplace. We are basically a peer-to-peer notice board where you can connect with your first and second level degree of connections.

Tailwind, like many startups, has a small head count. In a podcast posted on X, Wathan said that the company had four engineers on staff. Now, there's one. Wathan's post highlights the challenges that startups, which already face tough odds of success, can encounter as AI models grow more capable. The CEO founded the web developer tool in 2017. Tailwind's model is free and open-source, with a paid "pro" tier driving the company's revenue.

The ElectricFish 400squared can be installed in as little as a few hours instead of months. That's because it doesn't need costly grid upgradesand the secret lies inside the box. America's EV charging infrastructure is growing nicely, but there's still more to do if charging anxiety is to become a thing of the past. The U.S. has over 14,000 DC fast charging stations with more than 67,000 individual ports, but one startup reckons it can speed up installations by eliminating one of the main bottlenecks: