#startups

#startups

The partnership aims to strengthen support for emerging businesses by giving founders streamlined access to secure stablecoin processing and payouts architecture, direct multi-chain connectivity and node infrastructure, automated on-chain settlements and liquidity management solutions.

Simtheory brings agentic AI infrastructure: its platform allows teams to build AI assistants that understand their business context, co-ordinate across tasks and applications, and complete work with the reliability and auditability enterprises require.

"We are building qualification panels to send to our first customers that will demonstrate that these two dimensional photovoltaics have the efficiency and the durability to survive space," Shearer said. "We're going to prove that out at a larger scale over this next year, and in doing so, we are refining the processes necessary to make every single layer of our photovoltaic to produce these in a roll to roll fashion."

Fusion power seeks to use the energy released from the fusing of atoms to generate electricity. Humans have known how to fuse atoms for decades, from the hydrogen bomb to various fusion devices built in labs.

The lowest ticket prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, along with the exclusive 50% off +1 pass for the first 500 registrations, are almost gone. If you've been eyeing which tech conferences to lock into your calendar this year, this is your moment. Register now to save up to $680 on your pass and get a second ticket at 50% off. This offer ends next week on January 30, or once the first 500 tickets are claimed - whichever comes first.

South Korea has launched a landmark set of laws to regulate AI before any other country or bloc (the EU's regulations are set to go into effect in stages through next year). Under Korea's AI Basic Act, companies must ensure there is human oversight for "high-impact" AI in fields like nuclear safety, drinking water, transport, healthcare, and financial uses like credit evaluation and loan screening.

Delaying, dropping out of, or skipping college altogether have long been popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison have all done some version of it. As artificial intelligence hype draws young founders to San Francisco, programs at companies like Palantir Technologies are rolling out anti-college initiatives for high school graduates. Meanwhile, startup entrepreneurship programs like Y Combinator skew increasingly younger, as taking a gap year has become less contrarian and more mainstream for aspiring technocrats.

Reading the media these days, you would be forgiven for thinking the technology, journalism, and investment communities were inadvertently wishing an AI 'bubble' into existence. Whether a bubble exists or not remains debatable, but the conversation itself has taken on a life of its own. Every article predicting the collapse of the NASDAQ increases investor nervousness, which leads to another article about the collapse of the NASDAQ, and so the world turns ad infinitum.

One of the first modern coworking spaces, C-Base in Berlin, was launched 30 years ago by a group of computer engineers as a "hacker space" in which to share their tech and techniques. Similarly, many of the people we first encountered in our anthropological research into the emerging world of digital nomadism in the mid-2010s were hackers and computer coders.

Shalini Aggarwal: Andy and I began working together in 2015, after I relocated to the US from India. He was a dev engineer, and I worked on the product and program execution side. Aggarwal: We quickly realized that we took a lot of systems and tools for granted when we were in an enterprise company. The startup world is completely different; here, we have to build from scratch, and there was a lot about our mindset we had to unlearn.

Series, a small New York-based start-up, thinks it has a shot at winning a profitable share of the market. The business, only launched last year, is today revealing it has now signed up 10,000 daily active users who have collectively exchanged more than a million messages so far. Series is the brainchild of two Yale University students, Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, who saw an opportunity to do something different in the social networking space.

A Harris Poll survey commissioned by Dub in June highlights the contradiction: While 60% of Gen Z and 66% of millennials are investing in the stock market outside of their 401(k)s, just 17% of Americans feel "very confident" in their understanding of how markets actually work. Most believe investing, rather than a traditional nine-to-five career, offers the fastest path to wealth-a dream increasingly shaped by viral TikTok finance videos or meme-stock success stories rather than grounded investment knowledge, Wang told Fortune this summer.

Today, we meet James Eder, the 42-year-old cofounder of Student Beans (a discount coupon company targeting the college crowd), who is now a work-life coach splitting his time between London and the French Alps, and author of The Collision Code.Eder was inspired to build Student Beans in 2005 after organising his university's summer ball-a party for over 600 students where he was responsible for sponsorship. "My calls to big brands led to me asking for samples and raffle prizes," Eder recalls to Fortune.