Techin' Geek

Also, a spinoff from Rivian, is set to commence deliveries of its inaugural e-bikes to customers next week, after enduring several months of delays tied to unclear supply chain challenges.

On Friday, the company informed TechCrunch that the Launch Edition of its TM-B e-bike, priced at $4,500, has begun shipping from its manufacturer to its U.S. warehouse. It also indicated that it anticipates delivering all Launch Edition bikes between next week and September.

Also originated as a skunkworks initiative within Rivian in 2022, initiated when CEO RJ Scaringe began exploring the development of an e-bike to enhance his lineup of electric outdoor vehicles. The company spent several years experimenting with the concept and even engaged Jony Ive’s design firm LoveFrom for initial design assistance, as TechCrunch first disclosed in 2025.

In March 2025, Rivian established Also as a standalone entity, supported by $105 million from Eclipse. The startup unveiled its first e-bike, the TM-B, in October of the previous year. It initially aimed for a “spring” 2026 delivery date, but supply chain obstacles necessitated a shift in the timeline to July.

“The main reason for our revised summer schedule is the current strain on global supply chains. A sudden, industry-wide surge in demand for raw materials and electronic parts has affected critical components needed for the TM-B. This has temporarily delayed our planned manufacturing acceleration and shifted our initial delivery dates beyond our original spring timeframe,” the company explained in June on a support page. “Our engineering and production teams are diligently working to alleviate these constraints without compromising safety or quality.”

Also refrained from specifying which components were responsible for the delays.

Beyond the TM-B, Also has ambitious aspirations. The startup primarily identifies as a “vehicle” company and is working on developing four-wheel pedal-assist cargo vehicles for Amazon. The company is also engaged in creating an autonomous delivery vehicle for DoorDash.

However, for the moment, Also needs to concentrate on delivering its debut e-bikes while tackling the next set of challenges for a company involved in shipping such products: customer service. On Friday, the last day of July, several customers were airing their frustrations in a thread on the r/ALSOmicromobility subreddit regarding the persistent delays.

“I’m truly annoyed by the lack of communication and the actual misinformation/distortions from Also about shipment timelines,” the thread’s original poster commented. “Why do they continue to make these assurances regarding shipping timelines only to completely disregard them without any communication or actual updates? It really makes no sense.”

“Hey, we’ve still got a few business hours left in July. Perhaps we’ll receive an email later this morning ☺️,” replied another user.

Not everyone displayed such patience.

“Couldn’t hold on any longer and canceled my reservation,” another user stated.

For Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, there is no compromise. According to him, he either establishes a business as valuable as Google, or he fails and finds himself on the streets. He began coding at 15 in his home country of Kazakhstan, participated in a few summer programs in San Francisco, and contacted every Y Combinator founder he could locate on LinkedIn until one provided him with an angel investment for his first venture at 17.  

That venture, now the YC-supported Nozomio, serves as an API index for AI agents — a resource that assists AI agents in locating and utilizing software services — and has garnered over $6 million in funding thus far. “It’s a win or lose situation for me, and many young entrepreneurs share this mentality,” he shared with TechCrunch. “They simply want to succeed.”

Young entrepreneurs like Rakhmetzhanov are navigating a new set of challenges. Investors are allocating more funds to them, yet the pressure to achieve that “north star” milestone — the significant figure that investors pursue — remains intense, and each misstep is now publicly scrutinized on social media.

While Silicon Valley venture capitalists have historically favored young college dropouts, they preferred them to be accompanied by technical co-founders or to possess some relevant experience — preferably with a FAANG company (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — on their CVs. In many respects, this remains true. However, AI tools have leveled the playing field, accelerating the timeline for success and allowing more young individuals to launch successful businesses without ever entering a major tech company.

Pranjali Awasthi, 19, embodies this shift. She left high school to create an AI startup, later attended Georgia Tech before dropping out again to launch Slashy, a YC-supported startup that describes itself as the “Cursor for emails” and assists users in managing their email inboxes. After over a year running that company, she recently revealed that she’s now developing yet another startup currently in stealth mode.  

When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalled that investors she pitched often questioned her motives for starting a business. “It’s become more accepted now,” she noted, “post-18.”   

It appears that investors increasingly look to founders like Awasthi, whose experiences can be evaluated through “GitHub activity, open-source contributions, communities they’ve already established, and proficiency with the latest AI tools,” Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage firm Vermilion, informed TechCrunch. “Many young developers acquire software-building skills by contributing to open-source initiatives or experimenting with the latest AI tools,” she said. “They have more time to engage in that while in college or at a younger age than someone with full-time employment and mortgage responsibilities.”

Smith remarked that a “significant” portion of her portfolio comprises companies founded by those under 30, with several even younger than 21, emphasizing that she’s “definitely not doubtful of youth.”  

“What they may lack in experience, they compensate with enthusiasm for experimentation and an absence of fear,” she added.

However, she acknowledges that the market has turned more unforgiving. “It no longer allows for slow learning,” she stated. Funding opportunities abound, regardless of age — accelerators, incubators, pre-seed funds. Yet, these funds come with conditions: Founders like Rakhmetzhanov and Awasthi, overflowing with cash, are anticipated to achieve growth in months rather than years.

“The leniency that once characterized early stages and the assumption that one would evolve toward product-market fit no longer exists,” Smith continued. “Everyone is hunting for the next Cursor, even though that growth path is an anomaly, not the standard.”

For many founders — particularly those building in the public eye — the unrelenting pressure to succeed may lead to questionable ethics or even predatory deal arrangements, as younger founders are frequently too inexperienced in the industry to recognize what’s customary, yet ambitious enough to pursue growth regardless of the consequences. To keep pace, revenue figures may start appearing exaggerated, while content creation for social media increasingly overshadows quality coding. This excessive posturing seems inevitable, as capturing attention is now trickier than ever in a saturated AI landscape.

It’s all about who can persuade “the most people [they] are more intelligent than everyone else in the field,” Smith stated, “and create the loudest buzz about it.”

“Back in 2004, you could quietly refine your product for years without an audience,” Awasthi recalled. “Now there’s this constant ambient pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter where each funding round, every achievement, every shift is disclosed publicly.”

This implies that some young founders are not only anxious about reaching competitive revenue benchmarks or funding valuations — they’re also compelled to project the image of being a successful entrepreneur. This pressure has always been part of startup culture but has intensified. “If you’re a startup competing in a market, typically you focus on established competitors,” Timothy Chen, an investor at Essence Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Now, you’re concerned about your peers.”

For instance, “everyone is creating eye-catching, stylish launch videos,” he observed. “It wasn’t even a concept three years ago.” This trend gained popularity through Cluely founder Roy Lee, now around 22, whose startup initially promised to assist students in cheating on assignments — a concept that captivated investors like Andreessen Horowitz and helped the company secure $20 million.

Although Cluely now serves more as a note-taking tool, Lee became a representative of youthful Silicon Valley talent. “The pressure is arising from, ‘I need to showcase my brilliance more quickly,” Chen elaborated.  

Failing to meet expectations has generated new levels of anxiety. “When Zuck was developing Facebook, there wasn’t this enormous negative social backdrop,” Aidan Guo, 20, informed TechCrunch. He is the co-founder of the AI desktop assistant startup Attention Engineering, which has secured approximately $1.6 million in funding to date.

Much of the tension, as he depicts it, is self-generated. “You constantly have a nagging fear of failure. You have to navigate the ship and learn everything as you progress. And things can go awry all at once,” he remarked. “Then you have all these observers critiquing your every mistake. I believe people should practice greater empathy.” 

Amid all this stress, Awasthi draws on lessons from the past. “By concentrating on what truly needs to be accomplished, it’s manageable,” she stated.

“The best product that remains engaged and interacts with customers ultimately prevails,” Rakhmetzhanov concluded.

Ultimately, all the entrepreneurs express a similar sentiment: The core principles of a successful startup remain unchanged — “commitment, intellectual integrity, and customer obsession,” as Smith articulated. None of this is related to age.  

For many years, India held the title of the largest app download market globally but was also one of the hardest regions for monetization. This is starting to evolve as consumers in India increase their spending on AI, entertainment, and other high-end applications.

In the second quarter of this year, India’s mobile app industry reached an unprecedented $345 million in consumer expenditures, marking a 35% rise compared to the previous year, as indicated by a recent report from Sensor Tower. The app-market analysis firm highlighted that the growth is being fueled more by generative AI, streaming, and productivity applications rather than gaming, with Indian users showing a greater readiness to invest in digital subscriptions.

This record-setting quarter reinforces a larger trend of enhanced app monetization. Over the last three and a half years, India’s revenue per download has more than doubled, while the quarterly app downloads have stabilized at approximately 6.3 billion since 2023.

“We would characterize India as a swiftly progressing mobile market today, with a significant user base and an increasing willingness to pay for digital services,” stated Eve Chen, an insights analyst at Sensor Tower, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Chen attributed this shift to the broader acceptance of digital payments, including India’s Unified Payments Interface (which allows users to make payments directly from their bank accounts) and digital wallets, which have minimized the barriers to in-app purchases, combined with a growing acceptance of app-based subscriptions and premium digital offerings.

This trend is also notable on a global scale. According to the data shared with TechCrunch by Sensor Tower, India’s app revenue experienced the most rapid growth in Q2 among major app markets, generating over $200 million in quarterly consumer spending. In comparison, Mexico saw a growth of 30% and Turkey 25%, while U.S. app revenue actually fell by 3% during the same timeframe.

“These statistics indicate that India is transitioning from merely being the largest market by downloads to also becoming one of the fastest-growing markets for app monetization,” Chen remarked to TechCrunch.

However, India still lags considerably behind more established app markets. Revenue per download is around $4.60 in the U.S., $3.90 in South Korea, and $6.10 in Japan, compared to a much lower figure in India. Still, Chen emphasized that the growth trajectory is more significant than the absolute figures, as India’s continuously improving monetization indicates ample potential for long-term development.

Generative AI has surfaced as one of the quickest-growing segments, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude together securing nearly 83% of India’s AI app revenue in Q2, based on the data from Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch.

A substantial portion of India’s growth in app revenue is also being propelled by non-gaming applications. According to Sensor Tower, non-gaming categories represented 68% of India’s mobile app revenue in the first half of 2026, up from 58% three years prior.

Recent data also indicates that global subscription apps remain among the primary beneficiaries of the increasing app spending in India, with Google One emerging as the highest-grossing mobile app in the country during this quarter. Streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Sony LIV, and JioHotstar have also experienced a rise in consumer spending. Despite a global downturn, gaming saw a 3.7% revenue increase from the previous quarter, according to Sensor Tower.

The app intelligence company Appfigures also anticipates the Indian app subscription market will keep expanding, although it notes that the pace has decelerated following an AI-induced surge in the last two years. Subscription earnings continue to rise, though much of the initial enthusiasm surrounding AI has faded, as noted by Ariel Michaeli, the company’s founder and CEO, in a discussion with TechCrunch.

“The figures are still impressive,” Michaeli remarked. Appfigures estimates that ChatGPT brings in around $60,000 daily in India and secured approximately 1.8 million downloads over the past month, despite a decrease from about $80,000 a day last October.

A recent study from Imperial College in the U.K. and Emlyon Business School in France has outlined the methods by which Silicon Valley’s venture capital-backed entrepreneurs engage in fraudulent activities — and the influence of investors in these scenarios.

For this report, released online in June, researchers created a database of tech entrepreneurs and firms that encountered civil and criminal securities fraud actions from the SEC and DOJ from 2000 to 2023. 

Notable instances of tech entrepreneurs being found guilty of fraud in recent years include Frank’s Charlie Javice, Kalder’s Gökçe Güven, Terraform Labs’ Do Kwon, and GameOn’s Alexander and Valerie Lau Beckman.

Across X, the preferred social network for the tech sector, discussions surrounding fraud and its milder term “scam” are prevalent, as individuals ponder the boundaries of ambition and success. “Fraud is much more prevalent and accepted in the startup scene than we care to acknowledge,” Tim Weiss, one of the report’s authors, informed TechCrunch.

He referenced another study from the University of Toronto (UT), also published in June, which examined 654 fraud incidents involving U.S. venture-capital-backed startups from 2000 to 2023. It revealed that while fraud is generally rare, companies with venture backing were more susceptible to fraud accusations compared to those without venture funding. Furthermore, it indicated that startups established during overheated markets with inadequate oversight and investor diligence are 19% more prone to committing fraud later on. 

“The issue here is not solely with the founders, but also with those who establish and reinforce sometimes unrealistic expectations for rapid growth,” Weiss stated. He noted that the current exuberant AI startup landscape creates the ideal environment for founders to engage in fraudulent behavior.

The paper authored by Weiss, alongside Emlyon researcher Nevena Radoynovska, addresses the potential outcomes when founders encounter a discrepancy between investor expectations for their startups and actual performance. They might resort to “façading,” as termed in the paper, occurring in three progressively dishonest stages: surface, reinforced, and deep. 

Surface façading occurs when founders misrepresent the success level of their companies. This often takes place in the early stages when seeking investment by pitching a vision. It constitutes a greater degree of deceit than merely presenting an aspirational vision or an exaggerated total addressable market.

Following the surface façade, the founder may progress to “reinforced façading,” as outlined in the paper, which involves producing false evidence to support their earlier deceptions.

The paper provided an example of a mobile testing application that fabricated customer contracts and invoices, inflated reported revenue, and utilized these false documents to persuade VCs to fund it at a unicorn valuation.

From that point forward, founders may enter “deep façading,” wherein they amplify their deceptions to include areas such as exaggerating their technology’s capabilities, complete with manipulated demonstrations. This involves creating entire “parallel realities” based on falsehoods, according to Weiss.

However, investors are not always innocent parties, as the researchers discovered. Aside from the excessive growth expectations that drive founders toward fraud initially, some investors inadvertently “co-create fraud,” Weiss noted, by continuing to support founders—often the same individuals—who have been previously accused of fraud, thereby somewhat normalizing the behavior.

In fact, the UT study found limited evidence suggesting that allegations of fraud hinder founders from securing funding for new ventures, even when those fraud incidents garnered significant media coverage. 

“New investors and the broader VC landscape do not penalize historical misconduct,” the UT study stated, which is “also in line with the Silicon Valley ethos that accepts failure irrespective of its origins.”  

The research also indicated that startups with founder-controlled boards were twice as likely to commit fraud compared to those with boards controlled by investors or shared control. 

Even more notably, it observed that after VC-backed startups become public, they are more likely to confront securities class-action lawsuits within two years in comparison to public companies backed by private equity.

The prolonged duration companies remain private also plays a role in this issue. Public entities face more scrutiny than their private counterparts. “Founders lack a professional organization or association to govern or enforce standards of entrepreneurial and investor conduct regarding being effective founders and maintaining reasonable growth expectations,” Weiss remarked. 

Weiss advocates for the SEC to routinely conduct investigations and formal audits on startups once they surpass a significant “investment threshold.” Currently, the SEC typically waits for events like a whistleblower complaint or a lawsuit from investors or former employees to initiate an investigation.

Weiss’ paper further suggests that investors should bear more responsibility when urging founders to achieve extreme growth metrics.

“Investors should be held accountable for failures in corporate governance and breaches of their fiduciary responsibilities,” he asserted. He calls for more research into “entrepreneur-investor interactions” that could help mitigate fraud and also “balance the disproportionate focus on the entrepreneur as the lone instigator of wrongdoing.”

Fraud is seldom a singular act, in other words, and until investors are held responsible for the pressure they exert, founders will likely continue to be tempted to fake it until they make it.

This piece was updated.