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Jotform founder Aytekin Tank describes building the online form-builder outside Silicon Valley's typical playbook, launching the product free for its first two years before introducing pricing. He says he avoided venture capital, skipped relocating to Silicon Valley, and built the company around long-term thinking and teamwork rather than rapid VC-fueled growth.
Andreessen Horowitz is opening The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a one-year, tuition-free program in San Francisco for about 50 high school graduates who haven't attended college. The program mixes technical coursework with mentorship from tech industry figures, and is backed by $42 million in funding as a for-profit venture led by CEO Gagan Biyani.
TechCrunch is offering early registration discounts of up to $200 off passes for its Disrupt 2026 conference, plus 50% off a second ticket, with the deal expiring September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. The event runs October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco and will feature over 10,000 attendees, 200+ sessions, and 250+ tech leaders across six stages.
Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million into a two-year academy positioned as an alternative to traditional college education. Several other Bay Area tech companies and figures are also supporting the effort, signaling broad industry interest in reshaping how young talent is trained for tech careers.
Verda, a Finland-based AI cloud infrastructure company, closed an oversubscribed $189 million Series B round led by Emergence Capital, with backing from MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi, and several angel investors. The round pushes Verda's total funding past $450 million in combined equity and debt, and values the company at unicorn status, making it one of Europe's newest billion-dollar startups.
Weather modification startup Rainmaker has secured $100 million in Series B funding from investors including NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, and Dream Ventures. The company, led by founder Augustus Doricko, uses drones for cloud seeding to generate rain and snow, and plans to expand operations to new locations following successful test flights in Alaska.
Benchmark's entire current partnership—Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria—will join a single main-stage panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, marking the first time the full team has appeared together on the Disrupt Stage. The session, titled 'What We Believe Now,' will focus on where future startups may emerge and which founder assumptions deserve rethinking. The panel follows Benchmark's recent expansion, having raised roughly $2 billion this year across a new flagship fund and its first growth fund.
Corridor, a startup co-founded by former Scale AI product lead Jackson Wagner along with Eric Qian, Nikhil Aggarwal, and Jason Dong, has raised a $25 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company pairs human advisors with AI agents to serve small businesses seeking health benefits, an area it says larger brokerages neglect due to low commissions relative to the administrative workload involved. Corridor's AI handles tasks such as verifying network coverage, scheduling appointments, and relaying updated insurance details to providers.
Bloomberg reports that Wall Street investors are increasingly worried the AI industry's financial structure is a precarious 'house of cards,' built on massive capital expenditures and debt tied to data center buildouts. Analysts note AI-related spending now accounts for roughly half of US GDP growth, meaning any slowdown could trigger a financial shock comparable to the dot-com crash.
UP.Labs has rebranded as Vantora after raising $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners, shifting its model from building startups for the broader market to creating proprietary ventures exclusively for corporate partners. The firm still works with clients like Alaska Airlines and Porsche, and is now expanding into industrial manufacturing and oil and gas, with a heavier focus on physical AI applications such as retrofitting factory hardware for autonomy.
Wealthy family offices are increasingly skipping traditional venture capital fund commitments in favor of buying secondary shares or striking direct deals with AI companies, according to Atlas Capital advisor Djoann Fal. He says these investors are drawn by the prospect of tripling returns in months rather than years, and want direct exposure to top AI names rather than ceding control to fund managers for a decade.
At Fast Company's Innovation Festival, Nasdaq president Nelson Griggs discussed with senior writer Ainsley Harris how prospective massive public listings from AI leaders such as Anthropic and OpenAI could transform public markets. He framed these mega-IPOs as a distinct new category that could alter how capital flows into major industries and the broader economy.