How businesses began, found their footing and faced what came next.
The full archive, in the appSwipe-right job app whose AI agent fills application forms; 25,000+ interviews facilitated and 100M+ organic social views, while critics call it parasitic.
Read the caseA Vallejo prefab startup raised its first institutional round to ship modular classrooms at $250-300 per square foot into California's school overcrowding.
Read the caseMamo grew from a wallet idea into UAE SME payments, cards and expenses, crossing AED 1.2B in processed volume.
Read the caseTwo Aalto students shrank radar satellites below 100 kg to image Earth through cloud and darkness; seven governments now buy their sovereign systems.
Read the caseLilium raised ~$1.5B for regional electric jet taxis, listed via SPAC, won 780+ orders, then went insolvent in 2024 and 2025 with zero deliveries.
Read the caseJordanian startup turns any phone camera into a 60-second cardiometabolic risk scanner; 500 Global/Sanabil grad now anchored by 2080 Ventures.
Read the caseIndonesian courier SiCepat raised a record $170M Series B in 2021 by betting that serving small social-commerce sellers beats chasing only big platforms.
Read the casePublora rebuilt its human scheduler as an agent-first API and MCP layer for 10 networks; the June 10 PH launch took #1 day with 597 upvotes.
Read the caseModular bet Mojo and a unified runtime could replace fragmented AI infrastructure; Qualcomm agreed to buy the startup for ~$3.9B in stock in June 2026.
Read the caseEx-Forty Seven co-founder Mark Chao launched TenSixteen Bio with a $40M Series A to turn CHIP, a blood-mutation biomarker, into earlier disease treatment.
Read the caseTwo Finnish engineers built the first commercial sand battery in 2022; by 2025 a 100 MWh unit heats a whole town, with a 250 MWh grid project next.
Read the caseLA startup StoreClaw bets cross-channel merchants will hand store ops to AI agents that execute; launched May 2026, PH #1 Day and Week, thousands of merchants.
Read the caseA design-first Saigon cafe chain rode TikTok virality from 10 stores to 120+, then got burned twice: a tone-deaf typhoon fundraiser and waits of 45 minutes.
Read the caseAfter pandemic reading losses, Ello built a tablet app whose speech recognition listens to children read and bills parents $24.99 a month for five books.
Read the caseGuideline sold small businesses software-run 401(k)s for a flat per-employee fee; payroll giant Gusto bought its longtime partner in 2025.
Read the caseGoogle's most senior AI and systems researchers — Dean, Ghemawat, Le, Vinyals — left to automate the experimental loop with frontier models and massive compute.
Read the caseFully reusable two-stage Nova is assembled for a late-2026 debut; Stoke has raised $1.34B and is seeking ~$1B more at a ~$9B valuation.
Read the caseEx-Rappi COO Caroline Merin's AI copilot tames doctors' WhatsApp inboxes: $14M seed led by a16z, live in 14 countries.
Read the caseTokyo startup T2 raised another ¥5B to turn Japan's trucker shortage into a business: Level 4 autonomous trunk-line freight, targeted for fiscal 2027.
Read the caseYC Spring 2026 startup smol machines boots hardware-isolated Linux microVMs in under 200ms, packable into one .smolmachine file; its Show HN drew 499 points.
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