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This startup wants to make city streets searchable with AI
Orchestra has installed more than 100 cameras in San Francisco. Next up: 900 more, then the rest of the world.
In Mojave Desert, startup JetZero builds novel plane to take on Airbus and Boeing
Inside a cavernous aircraft hangar in the Mojave Desert, JetZero is building a full-size demonstrator of what could be a 200-plus-seat jet, a lucrative market segment expected to be at the center of future plane strategies for Airbus and Boeing .
Business News: Breaking N3W5 - Former AP CEO Bennahmias Announces First New Watch Brand
Ex-Audemars Piguet CEO François-Henri Bennahmias unveils 'N3W5' - the first watch brand under his 'The Honourable Merchants Group' luxury startup. It won't debut until late next year.
Berks LaunchBox announces winners of lifestyle business pitch competition
Three entrepreneurs took home prizes of up to $1,000 for their startups.
Wilmington Small Business Coalition: Building Momentum in 2026 by Heather McWhorter
This article was contributed by Lydia Thomas, UNCW CIE Program Manager. North Carolina continues to be one of the best states to start a business and in 2025, Wilmington, North Carolina earned a spot on the GoDaddy list of the top 10 most entrepreneurial cities in the U.S. While many know Wilmington as small beach town with exceptional food, lots of coffee shops, and fun, vibrant summer activities, a closer look reveals a thriving innovation economy. You’ll find startups emerging across industries including software, healthtech, bluetech, and fintech. At the core of this entrepreneurial ecosystem is the Wilmington Small Business Coalition, with small business advocates and entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) dedicated to helping founders grow, thrive, and succeed. “No Wrong Door” Established in 2016, the Coalition was designed to make it easier for individuals and small businesses to access resources most suited to their particular needs. The Coalition is designed to have a “no wrong door” entryway into the regional startup ecosystem. Whether you are exploring a new idea sketched on the back of a napkin or leading a more established, growth-stage company, Coalition members can help connect you with the programs, funding opportunities, mentors, and resources best suited to your needs. No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, any Coalition organization can help point you in the right direction. Coalition Members and Leadership Coalition members include the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (UNCW CIE), AARP, Brunswick Community College Small Business Center, Cape Fear Community College Small Business Center, Cape Fear Region SCORE, Genesis Block Foundation, Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington (NEW), Small Business & Technology Development Center (SBTDC), Greater Wilmington Chamber of Commerce, YWCA Living the Dream Center for Entrepreneurship, Carolina Community Impact Fund (CCI Fund), Partner Community Capital, 717mkt Office Collaborative, NC Biotech, and Institute NC. In May 2026, the Coalition held its leadership elections, resulting in the selection of a new executive team. The following officers were elected to serve two-year terms: Chair: Lydia Thomas, UNCW CIE Vice Chair: Diane Lantz, CCI Fund Secretary: Aariene Hansley, Genesis Block Foundation Treasurer: Gloria Monroe, SBTDC Vision for the Wilmington Small Business Coalition In 2026, the Wilmington Small Business Coalition continues its work as a collaborative network of organizations. By connecting programs, expertise, and services across partner organizations, entrepreneurs can more easily find the right support at the right time. Rather than operating in silos, the Coalition aims to function as a unified, cohesive system of support for small businesses and entrepreneurs, ensuring that resources and expertise across partner organizations are visible and accessible. Through stronger collaboration and shared pathways, entrepreneurs can move more seamlessly from idea to startup to growth. Looking to dive into the Wilmington entrepreneurial ecosystem? Connect with any of the Coalition partners to get started! Connect with CIE To learn more about CIE and our services, programs, and events, join the CIE newsletter. You can also follow us on social media: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, or YouTube. CIE’s website is uncw.edu/cie. Heather McWhorter is the director of the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). CIE supports innovation-forward start-ups and helps to build a vibrant innovation economy for all in southeast NC.
Acti puts AI agents directly into your smartphone keyboard
Startup Acti is betting the smartphone keyboard is the next home for AI assistants. Its new keyboard for iOS and Android works across apps and lets users create custom AI-powered shortcuts using natural language.
Three UW Startups to Graduate from Impact 307 Business Incubator July
Three startup companies will be leaving the incubator.
Arena, the AI leaderboard everyone uses, is now a $100M business
The startup, which runs a popular free AI leaderboard, launched its commercial service just last September.
Third Coast Foundry opens San Francisco hub for Midwest startups
UChicago, Illinois and Northwestern have opened the Third Coast Foundry in San Francisco to help Midwest startups reach Silicon Valley investors.
Israeli health-tech conference opens in Jerusalem with 1,800 participants from 40 countries
MIXiii Health-Tech.IL 2026 brought together investors, doctors, researchers, startups and global health-tech leaders, with a focus on Israeli emergency medicine, tech-bio, and technologies.
How six venture capital giants are reshaping startup financing
The venture capital landscape is becoming increasingly concentrated, with six megafirms— Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Founders Fund and General Catalyst—now raising more capital than all other U.S. venture firms combined over the past two years, Inc. reports. Their growth has been fueled by the enormous capital requirements of AI startups, […]
Why a creator economy startup founder pivoted to data centers
Leonhard Soenke founded a creator economy startup. Now he splits his time between San Francisco and Texas working in data centers. Here's why.
Investment in Israeli health tech startups dove 40% in 2025
Data shows that while the global industry saw a resurgence in private funding, investments in Israeli startups hit a five-year low amid geopolitical uncertainty
Swipeless online dating? How AI is reshaping the search for love
Traditional dating apps including Tinder, Grindr and Bumble and California startups are experimenting with how AI could reshape how people find love online.
On a mission to support the Valley’s small businesses
The SBDC goal is to help small Valley businesses thrive, not just during the startup process.
Perplexity, Kalshi, Replit insiders share how to get a startup job
We asked startup founders, recruiters, and hiring managers what to do — and not to do — to boost your chances of getting an offer.
Healey’s $305M economic development bill boosts defense, startups
This week, the Legislature's economic development committee released its own version of the bill, which includes money for defense and AI industries.
Starlink veterans launch startup to broaden megaconstellation ownership
Former SpaceX engineers who helped build and scale Starlink have launched a startup aiming to deliver megaconstellations for governments and companies seeking more control over space-based infrastructure.
Robot startup FieldAI achieves $100M milestone in revenue, contracts
FieldAI says it has crossed $100 million in revenue and contracts by building software for robots to work in mines, construction sites, and factories.
Phoebe Gates' startup advertises Series A on bodega in NYC
There's a Coachella-like ad in NYC for the Series A round raised by Phoebe Gates' startup, Phia. It's a wall of celeb-investor names.
How Outward Intelligence founders bootstrapped to seven-figure revenue
Three friends with résumés spanning Google, Palantir, and Harris Poll skipped venture capital and bootstrapped their startup instead.
America’s Friendship Recession Has Become a Startup Opportunity
A new “connection economy” is selling courses, clubs and confidence bootcamps to socially isolated adults, but scaling intimacy remains a challenge.
Pinky’s restaurant owner inks distribution deal for startup cheesecake business
“It’s a new challenge. I’m learning a whole new industry with something I’m familiar with, which is food,” said Steve DeRaffele, who launched Rio Cheesecakes earlier this year.
The biotech founder asking why good science gets stuck
As an undergraduate, Alinta Furnell led student societies, pitched startup ideas and built biotechnology ventures. Now, the UNSW alumna is investigating one of innovation’s biggest challenges – why so many scientific breakthroughs never make it beyond the lab.
Cognitive Science students pitch AI college counseling, productivity
From AI-powered social media content creation to college access platforms, cognitive science student entrepreneurs pitched their startups to potential investors at the Berkeley Accelerator
Anthropic Veterans’ Startup Seeks to Help Scientists Develop Their Own AI
Mirendil raises $200 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins to make AI that can do the job of an AI engineer.
Cityblock in talks to buy fellow General Catalyst-backed startup Homeward Health
Cityblock Health in talks to acquire General Catalyst-backed rural care startup Homeward, expanding into Medicare Advantage, source says.
Webber sponsors long-term funding bills to support Michigan business startups
LANSING, Mich. — Sen. Michael Webber on Wednesday introduced legislation to help create more Michigan jobs through long-term support for startup businesses in the state. “We created the Michigan...
Startup’s strategy challenges EV industry assumptions
A new EV startup led by a former Amazon executive is betting that a low-cost, highly customizable pickup starting at just under $25,000 could help it achieve something that has eluded many EV startups: profitability, CNBC reports. The central goal for Slate Auto and CEO Peter Faricy is to make a full-size, practical truck accessible […]
This startup is using AI to close gaps in women’s healthcare
Xella Health’s precision health platform combines biomarker testing, clinical guidance, and AI analysis to help women get earlier answers about hard-to-diagnose conditions.
OpenAI Touts Progress in 19-Week-Old Ad Business
OpenAI is promoting progress in what it expects to become a $100 billion ad business. The artificial intelligence (AI) startup is making its inaugural
Women's health startup Xella Health exits stealth
The women's health startup is starting with direct-to-consumer memberships.
Superhuman acquires GPTZero to enhance AI authenticity tools
Superhuman is acquiring GPTZero, the AI detection startup founded by 26-year-old Princeton grad Edward Tian.
Cadence raises $100 million to automate chronic disease care with regulated AI
Digital health startup Cadence has raised $100 million at a $1.23 billion valuation to expand its chronic disease management program.
Mobile health tops early RHTP funding trends
State rural health transformation programs aim to overcome high startup costs and allow rural providers to deliver complex care locally with remote ultrasound, RPM and other mobile health technologies, says one industry expert.
Google software engineer, podcaster, quit to pursue AI startup
A former Google software engineer explains why she turned down security, left a job she loved, and pursued an AI startup with her podcast cohost.
Google software engineer, podcaster, quit to pursue AI startup
A former Google software engineer explains why she turned down security, left a job she loved, and pursued an AI startup with her podcast cohost.
Sam Altman's Orb startup investigated financial misconduct allegations
Tools for Humanity hired two law firms to investigate alleged financial irregularities and bribery of foreign officials, sources say.
Small Business Tech News: Verizon CEO Sends Shocking Message To Employees
AI is reshaping business: Verizon says automation cut 13,000 jobs, while SMBs use AI to boost productivity. Retail, startups, and AI providers are rapidly expanding capabilities and lowering costs.
Ex-Nvidia leaders launch EverGreen to back AI startups
EverGreen, founded by ex-Nvidia execs like Greg Estes, supports AI startups through investment and mentorship, leveraging Nvidia alumni networks.
Billionaire Warren Buffett Disciple Warns: Don’t Quit Your Job To Start A New Business, Do This Instead
Billionaire investor Mohnish Pabrai has built a reputation for borrowing the best ideas from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, then applying them with ruthless simplicity. On a recent appearance on Big Deal with Codie Sanchez, he turned that same lens on a piece of conventional wisdom that gets repeated in nearly every startup pitch deck ... Billionaire Warren Buffett Disciple Warns: Don’t Quit Your Job To Start A New Business, Do This Instead
Replika founder warns of 'crazy protests' over AI's jobs impact
Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of the AI chatbot startup Replika, says fears about AI eliminating jobs are justified — and will lead to backlash.
I let robot-trainers clean my apartment for free
I invited cleaners and a chef from the startup Shift into my New York apartment. They worked for free — but recorded the process to train AI robots.
Mu-g Technologies enters the parabolic flight business
A startup has acquired an aircraft to offer commercial parabolic flight services even as NASA seeks to acquire its own aircraft for reduced-gravity flights.
The businesses that are doubling down on Seattle
As critics warn of an antibusiness climate in Seattle, the startup artificial intelligence industry is bullish on the city's talent.
AI Startup Midjourney Pivots to Health With Ultrasound Machine
AI startup Midjourney Inc. announced its first hardware project at an event in San Francisco, outlining an unexpected move into the personal health and medical industries.
AI Health Startup Wants to Assist Half of Latin American Doctors
An Andreessen Horowitz-backed healthcare startup born in Latin America wants to put its AI assistant in the hands of half the region’s 1.9 million doctors by the end of 2027, a bet that technology can help bridge a shortage of medical professionals across strained health systems.
This $91 Billion Fintech Startup Is Laying Off 10% of Workers Even Though the Business 'Has Never Been Stronger'
Here’s why layoffs happened anyway, despite business being strong.
Philippe Pouletty: Turning Europe’s Life Science Startups Into World Leaders
The French investor and entrepreneur reveals how he is building biotech and medtech giants to compete with China and the U.S.
Cornell convenes leaders to explore AI’s impact on business
A Cornell workshop united faculty and industry leaders to explore AI’s impact on finance, healthcare, startups and work.
Australian Predictive Healthcare Startup Raises $46 Million
Sydney-based Airtree Ventures led the financing, joined by Left Lane Capital in New York.
AI And Your HVAC Guy: HBS Founders Reveal Inside Business Strategies
AI startups succeed by solving real industry problems, prioritizing adoption, trust, workflows, and revenue.
How a biotech turned a trial failure into an AI model
In this edition of STAT Health Tech: How a biotech startup turned a failed clinical trial into an AI model, and more.
SpaceX confirms it is buying AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion
Elon Musk's rocket company announced on Tuesday that it had exercised its option to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.
This startup wants to pay for your photo and email to train AI
AI needs your photos, receipts, and emails to get smarter. This startup wants to help you get paid for it, and it's on a corporate shopping spree.
Dial in for a day to support business founders, celebrate big Startup Sioux Falls win
Sioux Falls won a big startup competition -- and now it's time to celebrate, with a day for founders and fun coming up this month.
Formation structure in venture-backed companies: Why getting it right early matters
Choosing the right entity early can ease fundraising, reduce tax risks and help startups avoid costly restructuring later.
MBA Roundup: Harvard Business School Names 2026 Rock Venture Catalyst Cohort
Harvard Business School announces the 61 students who are building their startups at the Rock Center this summer.
Colorado health startup helping people with cystic fibrosis stay active
An AI startup founder is trying to vibe code his own "Grand Theft Auto" game
Can Claude deliver a viable GTA ripoff before the most hyped game of all time releases this November?
This Guy Is Trying to Vibe Code GTA 6 Before Its Official Release
An AI startup founder is using Claude to make a GTA ripoff.
Months After the FBI Raided His Garage Chemistry Lab, Teen Science Prodigy Graduates from College (Exclusive)
"It was all an unfortunate misunderstanding," says 18-year-old Amalvin Fritz, who is applying to medical school and launching a biological science startup
Flying taxis are racing to carry passengers: I've seen all 3 rivals.
US aerospace startups Joby, Archer, and Beta are in a high-stakes race to bring the "Jetsons'" dream of flying cars to life. Here's how they compare.
Xbox's New Startup Animation Is Now Live For Everyone, Plus Four Other New Features
Or at least, it should be
Las Vegas ranks No. 2 in world in startup community activity
Las Vegas ranked No. 23 in the U.S., climbing four spots from last year, and ranked No. 67 globally, rising 17 spots, in StartupBlink’s Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2026.
Recent MBA launches locally-sourced food business
Caroline Feldmeier MBA ‘26 is featured on the June Startup Cornell podcast.
Human chief of staff not worried by her startups new AI chief of staff
A chief of staff working alongside an AI chief of staff at a San Francisco startup shares how she balances human work and outsourcing to AI.
SpaceX IPO will test how Wall Street prices ‘strategic tech’
The SpaceX IPO will test how Wall Street values "strategic tech" companies as Elon Musk's startup defies typical market buckets.
Free Broward business conference connects entrepreneurs to funding, AI and more
The Broward and Beyond Business Conference will take place June 12 at the Broward County Convention Center. The event is free and open to entrepreneurs, startups and businesses of all sizes.
Exclusive | Nvidia Is Developing an AI Healthcare Model With Startup Abridge
The chip giant is joining with the maker of AI note-taking technology to train a model tailored for clinical conversations.
Broward County to host free business conference for entrepreneurs
The Broward and Beyond Business Conference will take place June 12 at the Broward County Convention Center. The event is free and open to entrepreneurs, startups and businesses of all sizes. NBC6’s Constance Jones reports.
U.K. Needs to Take More Risks to Retain Startups, Business Secretary Says
The government has taken stakes in startups like Kraken, Wayve and Oxford Quantum Circuits in recent weeks, in a bid to prevent them from moving out of the country to look for funding.
Sam Altman's eye-scanning startup lays off staff
Tools for Humanity has struggled to show how its iris-scanning "Orb" can generate revenue. Now it's laying off employees.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
Steve Rao: The AI revolution must include Main Street
Whether it is a family-owned manufacturer exploring automation, a local retailer adopting AI-powered marketing tools or a startup building the next generation of innovative products, small businesses will be among the primary beneficiaries — and users — of AI.
Elation Health acquires Aster as it ramps up agentic AI for primary care
Health tech company Elation Health acquired startup Aster to propel the company's development of an agentic AI operating system for primary care. | Health tech company Elation Health acquired startup Aster to propel the company's development of an agentic AI operating system for primary care.
Serious Mental Illness Startup Vanna Health Taps New CEO
This is an exclusive BHB+ story. For the first time since its founding in 2021, serious mental illness startup Vanna Health has a new CEO. Dr. Liz
Serious Mental Illness Startup Vanna Health Taps New CEO
This is an exclusive BHB+ story. For the first time since its founding in 2021, serious mental illness startup Vanna Health has a new CEO. Dr. Liz
The Four National Science and Technology Institutes Including DGIST to Foster K-Deep Tech Unicorns
- Recruiting companies for the “2026 Emerging Tech Global Launchpad” program until June 19 - Providing full-cycle support for global growth, such as overseas PoC, investment strategy, and linkage with international conferences - Expanding the technology startup ecosystem based on the Daegu–Gyeongbuk region, the central region, the Honam region, and the southeastern region
Wealth Managers Circle Defense Tech
In the South Bay, where venture-backed startups and legacy firms churn out in-demand military and space technology, wealth is ballooning. As some of the
Startup Stage: Bliink targets Southeast Asia's SME business travel market
The startup is building an AI-powered corporate travel platform designed to bring managed travel services to small and medium-sized enterprises across Southeast Asia.
Melinda French Gates is done waiting for health care to take menopause seriously
Celebrities like Halle Berry and Naomi Watts have jumped on menopause startups. Now Melinda French Gates is throwing her weight behind the category—with philanthropic dollars.
Family offices bet on sports, from pickleball leagues to smart soccer balls
While AI startups dominate deal-making news, investment firms of the ultra-rich are still keen on sports.
Insight: Drone crashes and severed fingers at a $13 billion Silicon Valley military startup
A year ago, Ryan Tseng, the head of U.S. defense tech startup Shield AI, announced his company had turned a new page.
Apple approves Poke as the first AI agent on its Messages for Business platform
Poke, the startup that lets people use AI agents through simple text messages, has become the first AI agent approved for Apple’s Messages for Business platform.
Apple approves Poke as the first AI agent on its Messages for Business platform
Poke, the startup that lets people use AI agents through simple text messages, has become the first AI agent approved for Apple’s Messages for Business platform.
Wilmington Startup IQExit Targets a Blind Spot in Business Succession Planning
Wilmington startup IQExit is aiming to change the way banks prepare for business ownership transitions by surfacing exit signals years before a company is sold. At its core, IQExit is an advisor-in…
AI Startup Collate Raises $95 Million To Automate Life Sciences Paperwork
In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at breakthroughs from ASCO, Harrison.ai's U.S. expansion, Clear's move into healthcare and more.
Still facing copyright lawsuits, AI music generator Suno raises another $400M
The prominent AI music generation startup is now valued at over $5.4 billion -- about seven months ago, it raised at a $2.45 billion valuation.
7 Small Business Ideas You Can Start in Under 14 Hours Per Week
Looking to launch a startup in your spare time? These small business ideas are well-suited for aspiring founders with tight schedules.
An ex-lawyer has raised $70 million to take work away from law firms
Wordsmith, a startup building AI software for corporate legal teams, has raised $70 million in funding from Index Ventures and other backers.
Silicon Valley's new slogan: Let's get physical
Silicon Valley's AI boom is moving into robotics as OpenAI, Meta, Tesla, and startups race to give AI a body.
Tom Snyder: When AI helps create value, what does the platform get to learn from that process?
As AI platforms become embedded in how startups build products, they gain visibility into workflows, customer needs and emerging markets.
Sam Altman is backing a startup that's building software for robots and cars
A former Tesla designer's startup has won investment from Sam Altman and other top investors as money floods into physical AI.
Former St. Pete Science Center to become AI and startup campus
Plans for a $25 million redevelopment would transform the former St. Pete Science Center into an AI and startup campus.
Enzo Health launches agentic EHR for home health agencies
Health tech startup Enzo Health rolled out an AI-native electronic health record (EHR) system designed for home healthcare agencies, touting it as an industry first. | With the platform, organizations can seamlessly run all operations, including intake, scheduling, visits, quality compliance, billing and visibility for patients, the company said.
Ukraine's pitch to Silicon Valley: Bring AI, we'll bring experience
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants to deepen ties between Ukraine and Silicon Valley's defense tech startups.
I built a startup from scratch and still nearly died because of a broken healthcare system. That’s why I’m running for Congress
The American Dream isn't dead — but Washington is working overtime to kill it.
I built a startup from scratch and still nearly died because of a broken healthcare system. That’s why I’m running for Congress
The American Dream isn't dead — but Washington is working overtime to kill it.
Goalkeeper Startup to leave Manchester City
Manchester City goalkeeper Katie Startup will leave the club when her current contract expires next month.WSL Full-Time were informed of the news via an official media update from The Cityzens just a ...