All posts tagged: alumni

DOGE Alumni Launch AI Startup To Target Waste On Main Street – And Already Have Their First Target

DOGE Alumni Launch AI Startup To Target Waste On Main Street – And Already Have Their First Target

Published by Jenni Sidey

Two alumni of the Department of Government Efficiency are bringing their cost-cutting experience from Washington to the private sector, launching Special, a startup that aims to harness artificial intelligence to wring inefficiencies out of what it describes as America’s $10 trillion Main Street services economy. Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox spent much of 2025 at DOGE, where they spearheaded the Small Agencies team. Their government stint, under the high-profile effort led by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, contributed to approximately $215 billion in estimated savings. The pair departed in September 2025. In the spirit of DOGE, Figure Health plans to open source all of its billing claims, allowing the public to have full visibility into our Medicare and Medicaid… – Nate Cavanaugh (@natecavanaugh) June 2, 2026 “Similar to the government, Main Street is massive, highly unoptimized, and provides essential services to Americans. One needs to look no further than childcare learning centers in Minnesota or hospice businesses in California to find immense waste at the state level from businesses that benefit from taxpayer dollars,” …

From the stage to the future: Where are Startup Battlefield’s alumni now?

From the stage to the future: Where are Startup Battlefield’s alumni now?

Published by skeptic

Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with a splashy fundraising announcement. They started with a pitch. Dropbox demoed to a room of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what edge networking meant. Discord was a scrappy game developer called Hammer & Chisel. Mint, Trello, Forethought, N26 — all of them passed through the same crucible: TechCrunch Startup Battlefield. That’s not a coincidence. Battlefield isn’t just a competition. It’s a launchpad, and the numbers back it up. More than 1,700 companies have competed on the Battlefield stage. Together, they’ve raised $32 billion in total funding and generated over 250 exits — including acquisitions by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber, and Amazon. The Startup Battlefield network runs so deep that alumni have even acquired each other: Dropbox acquired fellow Startup Battlefield alum DocSend in 2021. For thousands of founders, it’s become a defining milestone — not just a pitch competition, but the moment the world started paying attention. And you actually still have a chance to join that …

Fast-track ‘alumni’ boom: How short courses at Harvard and Stanford became big business

Fast-track ‘alumni’ boom: How short courses at Harvard and Stanford became big business

Published by Sam Flores

Achieving alumni status at an institution like the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School or Stanford used to mean years spent on campus and an outlay of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, some students can add top-tier schools to their resume after several weeks, and far less money. They’re attending a growing number of executive education programs across the U.S., contributing to a market that’s expected to swell to more than $1.2 billion over the next decade, according to estimates from trade group Unicon. Colleges are building new facilities and adding staff to bolster their offerings, as well as creating courses to keep up with demand and the trends of the moment. Right now, that means artificial intelligence: Wharton lists almost a dozen non-degree programs with AI in the title, while at MIT, participants can pay more than $12,000 to spend five days on campus immersed in “Leading the AI-Driven Organization.” The programs are a growing source of revenue for universities, some of which are facing financial crunches and higher taxes on their endowment earnings. …

Stripe alumni raise €30M Series A for Duna, backed by Stripe and Adyen execs

Stripe alumni raise €30M Series A for Duna, backed by Stripe and Adyen execs

Published by skeptic

Anthropic and OpenAI may be rivals, but their presidents Daniela Amodei and Gregory Brockman have one thing in common: they are both Stripe alumni. With former employees who went on to create dozens of startups, the fintech company has become one of the most prolific “founder factories” — and the money is following. The latest example: business identity verification startup Duna, which just raised a €30 million Series A to become the best-funded European member of the so-called “Stripe mafia.” The funding round was led by Alphabet’s growth fund CapitalG, which has also backed Stripe since co-leading its Series D in 2016. Based in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was co-founded by Stripe alumni Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber. With customers including Plaid, the startup helps fintech companies onboard business customers more efficiently, reducing the typical churn associated with corporate ID checks and other fraud prevention measures. Stripe is not a customer of Duna, van Lanschot said, but its executives were well placed to understand the opportunity that the startup is seizing, which is …