Top News
Co-founder Drew Houston exits Dropbox: Houston co-founded Dropbox at age 24 along with his former MIT classmate Arash Ferdowsi, and went on to become the very first entrepreneur to take a tech startup from the Y Combinator program all the way to IPO. In a memo to staffers sent on Tuesday, he announced plans to transfer the CEO title to former Dropbox product lead Ashraf Alkarmi, after a transitional period during which they’ll serve as co-CEOs. CNBC credits Houston with helping to “pioneer the cloud storage market,” despite going head to head with industry titans like Google and Apple. While Dropbox was once valued north of $10 billion in the 2010s, its market cap today sits at around $6.2 billion. Everyone recognizes Dropbox as an innovative concept for its time, and it still counts around 18 million paid users. But no company is safe in the SaaSpocalypse era, and a legacy brand name only goes so far as larger chunks of enterprise budgets get swallowed up by inference and tokens.
China limits overseas travel for top AI talent: Almost exactly one month ago, the Chinese government blocked Meta’s plans to acquire AI startup Manus, which was founded in Beijing before relocating to Singapore. Now, in a demonstration that this was not a one-off concern, China has set new restrictions on overseas travel for leading AI founders, researchers and executives, including staffers from big-name international firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek. These individuals now require specific approval from authorities before leaving the country. It’s a strong indication of how highly the Chinese government prizes native AI talent, and the competitive advantages that go along with it. Bloomberg, however, cautions that these steps will likely make it more difficult for native Chinese AI firms to recruit and retain S-tier talent.
Training robots on human recordings goes mainstream: In a since-deleted but super-viral tweet over the holiday weekend, journalist Jeremy Loffredo claimed that New Yorkers are taking temp jobs for OpenAI, installing 360-degree cameras around their homes that record them doing chores. (According to Loffredo, the actual “job” consists of regularly collecting and replacing the cameras’ memory cards and not much else.) It’s unclear if OpenAI is really moving forward with this scheme, but if so, they’re not alone. TechCrunch today reports on Human Archive, a Bay Area startup partnering with food delivery services in India. Human Archive distributes camera-enabled caps to staffers at cloud kitchens and home care services (like house cleaners), which record them at work, then compile the footage to train robots. HA has more than 1,000 headsets already deployed. They’ve raised $8.2 in funding from Y Combinator and others, along with angel contributions from big-time AI names like OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, and Mercor.
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Just today, we cited some US vs. China OpenRouter LLM comparison data on “This Week in AI.” Turns out, they have such a compelling insight into the AI marketplace because they’re growing very rapidly. The NYT reports today that the startup has laid the groundwork for a $113 million fundraise, led by Alphabet’s investment arm CapitalG, that values the company at around $1.3 billion. (More than double its valuation from its June 2025 round.)
Founder and CEO Alex Atallah was on TWiST just 6 months ago, in November 2025, in a prescient segment unpacking the rise of smaller, specialized language models trained for maximum resourcefulness. (Of course, SLMs have since become a major headline for the industry and a near-constant topic on TWiST and “This Week in AI.”) Alex also sagely predicted that companies would soon spend more on AI inference costs than human employees, a trend that also appears to be coming to pass just this week.
While announcing the new funding, Atallah told the New York Times that he sees OpenRouter as essentially Stripe for AI, a platform that helps developers find the right “vendor” and conduct fast, efficient transactions. The company now processes a hefty 25 trillion tokens each week. OpenRouter plans to put the new capital to work on continued growth, including the expansion of their (human) developer team. – Lon
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This Week in Startups
E2292: Jason and Lon start off the episode with Divergent Technologies’ co-founder and CEO Lukas Czinger. He tells us about their proprietary 3D printing component platform, which interconnects AI-powered design and in-house 3D printers with computer vision-enabled robotic assembly systems. The company has shifted from a focus on luxury vehicle components to parts for the defense and aerospace industries. Then, Brendan Goode and Dr. Mark Horowitz of Outro Health join the show. They’re helping patients wean themselves off of anti-depressants using a “hyperbolic tapering” method.
E2291: Why raise $200 million if you are already profitable? That’s the question Jason and Alex put to Mercury’s founder and CEO, Immad Akhund, after the entrepreneur raised another massive round for his upstart, technology-friendly bank. TWiST then welcomed Kled founder Avi Patel to discuss the startup he considers a clear ripoff of his own company. Jason gavels in verdicts on all parties involved, including Y Combinator and venture capital firm General Catalyst. The show closes with a news lightning round, including OpenAI’s decision to offer $2 million in token credits to hundreds of startups.
E2290: Multiple 2026 commencement addresses have been interrupted by a chorus of boos when the speakers raised the topic of AI innovation. Why are America’s students SO NEGATIVE about the prospect of working with AI tools, and is it too late to turn things around. Jason and Alex discuss the growing backlash to datacenters, AI apps, and technology more generally among mainstream Americans, why it’s happening, and whether it’s still fixable. PLUS thoughts on how OpenAI and Anthropic gained such massive dominance in terms of actual AI-related revenue, and the growing visibility of Flock Safety’s surveillance network.
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