Tech
A Stanford grad student created an algorithm to help his classmates find love; now, Date Drop is the basis of his new startup
As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be gearing up for first dates — not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop pairs students with potential dates once per week based on their responses to a questionnaire.
A Stanford whiz kid is trying to disrupt an established industry from his Palo Alto dorm? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before! But young adults are deeply disillusioned with the frustrating, demoralizing state of online dating. Why not try something different?
Over 5,000 students at Stanford have given Date Drop a try since its launch in the fall. It has also rolled out at 10 more schools, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, and Weng says he wants to roll out Date Drop more broadly in some cities this summer.
“Our matches convert to actual dates at about 10x the rate of Tinder,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Instead of swiping, we get to know each person deeply and send them one compatible match per week.”
At first, Weng didn’t intend to turn Date Drop into the foundation of a startup. Then, a close friend of his met their partner via Date Drop. “That was when I got the sense that this was less of a project,” he said.
Now, Weng thinks of Date Drop as just the first service from his startup, the Relationship Company, which is a public benefit corporation — — a type of company legally required to consider social impact alongside profits.
“This started as something I just wanted to exist on campus, and it became a company because people kept on asking for it in their schools and I needed resources to do that,” he said.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Already, Weng has raised “a few million” from some angel investors, including Zynga founder and early Facebook backer Mark Pincus, who has taught business courses at Stanford (including to Weng). Andy Chen, a former partner at Coatue, and Elad Gil, an early backer of Airbnb, Stripe, and Pinterest, also invested in the Relationship Company.
“The long-term vision at The Relationship Company is about facilitating all meaningful relationships: friendships, professional connections, community, events,” he said.
It’s par for the course to use algorithms to predict if users of a dating service may be compatible with one another — that’s how dating apps work. But Weng says his model is more geared toward forging long-term connections, with 95% of Date Drop users saying they’re interested in relationships.
Weng explains that there are two core elements at play. First, the questionnaire needs to be thorough enough to capture a real picture of who someone is. “We do that through the questions, open-ended responses, a voice conversation, and other data that the users provide,” he said.
The next challenge is compatibility prediction. “Because we help people plan dates, we have data on which matches actually work out. So we have a model trained on real-world outcomes,” he said. “Once you have those two components, the actual matching is standard stuff from matching theory literature.”
Currently pursuing a computer science master’s degree at Stanford, Weng has oriented his education around the economic and mathematical concepts of matching. As a Stanford undergrad, he’d created his own major to study humans, matching, and incentives.
“I started to see how matching shapes so much of our lives,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Who your life partner is, who your friends are, what college you go to, which company you work for are all matching problems.”
Beyond his technical education, Weng found an unexpected class useful for learning to manage a startup: “Intro to Clown.”
“A core principle of clowning is that clowns are failures, and instead of fearing failure, they revel in it,” he said. “As a product builder, your entire journey is just repeatedly failing and getting back up. Clown class was a wonderful microcosm of that.”
So far, The Relationship Company has two employees besides Weng, along with 12 students who serve as campus ambassadors. Because their work revolves around forging matches, Weng has extended that mindset to how he manages the company. He offers employees a $100 monthly “relationship stipend,” which they can spend on dates, gifts, experiences, or anything that helps them deepen an important relationship of any sort.
“Relationships are the single most important factor in a person’s life,” Weng said. “There’s also great research showing that money spent on other people makes you happier than money spent on yourself.”
Weng’s fascination with how people form relationships has also informed how he goes about his day-to-day life.
“Date Drop has shown me how many interesting people are out there that you’d never encounter through your normal routines,” he said. “It’s made me more open to people I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.”
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
400K MagSafe power banks recalled after fatal fire, the 10th power bank recall in a year
The new Dyson Supersonic Travel is the cheapest Supersonic yet
The gorgeous yet budget-friendly Samsung QN70F Neo QLED TV is the cheapest its ever been
Tech
A Stanford grad student created an algorithm to help his classmates find love; now, Date Drop is the basis of his new startup
As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be gearing up for first dates — not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop pairs students with potential dates once per week based on their responses to a questionnaire.
A Stanford whiz kid is trying to disrupt an established industry from his Palo Alto dorm? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before! But young adults are deeply disillusioned with the frustrating, demoralizing state of online dating. Why not try something different?
Over 5,000 students at Stanford have given Date Drop a try since its launch in the fall. It has also rolled out at 10 more schools, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, and Weng says he wants to roll out Date Drop more broadly in some cities this summer.
“Our matches convert to actual dates at about 10x the rate of Tinder,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Instead of swiping, we get to know each person deeply and send them one compatible match per week.”
At first, Weng didn’t intend to turn Date Drop into the foundation of a startup. Then, a close friend of his met their partner via Date Drop. “That was when I got the sense that this was less of a project,” he said.
Now, Weng thinks of Date Drop as just the first service from his startup, the Relationship Company, which is a public benefit corporation — — a type of company legally required to consider social impact alongside profits.
“This started as something I just wanted to exist on campus, and it became a company because people kept on asking for it in their schools and I needed resources to do that,” he said.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Already, Weng has raised “a few million” from some angel investors, including Zynga founder and early Facebook backer Mark Pincus, who has taught business courses at Stanford (including to Weng). Andy Chen, a former partner at Coatue, and Elad Gil, an early backer of Airbnb, Stripe, and Pinterest, also invested in the Relationship Company.
“The long-term vision at The Relationship Company is about facilitating all meaningful relationships: friendships, professional connections, community, events,” he said.
It’s par for the course to use algorithms to predict if users of a dating service may be compatible with one another — that’s how dating apps work. But Weng says his model is more geared toward forging long-term connections, with 95% of Date Drop users saying they’re interested in relationships.
Weng explains that there are two core elements at play. First, the questionnaire needs to be thorough enough to capture a real picture of who someone is. “We do that through the questions, open-ended responses, a voice conversation, and other data that the users provide,” he said.
The next challenge is compatibility prediction. “Because we help people plan dates, we have data on which matches actually work out. So we have a model trained on real-world outcomes,” he said. “Once you have those two components, the actual matching is standard stuff from matching theory literature.”
Currently pursuing a computer science master’s degree at Stanford, Weng has oriented his education around the economic and mathematical concepts of matching. As a Stanford undergrad, he’d created his own major to study humans, matching, and incentives.
“I started to see how matching shapes so much of our lives,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Who your life partner is, who your friends are, what college you go to, which company you work for are all matching problems.”
Beyond his technical education, Weng found an unexpected class useful for learning to manage a startup: “Intro to Clown.”
“A core principle of clowning is that clowns are failures, and instead of fearing failure, they revel in it,” he said. “As a product builder, your entire journey is just repeatedly failing and getting back up. Clown class was a wonderful microcosm of that.”
So far, The Relationship Company has two employees besides Weng, along with 12 students who serve as campus ambassadors. Because their work revolves around forging matches, Weng has extended that mindset to how he manages the company. He offers employees a $100 monthly “relationship stipend,” which they can spend on dates, gifts, experiences, or anything that helps them deepen an important relationship of any sort.
“Relationships are the single most important factor in a person’s life,” Weng said. “There’s also great research showing that money spent on other people makes you happier than money spent on yourself.”
Weng’s fascination with how people form relationships has also informed how he goes about his day-to-day life.
“Date Drop has shown me how many interesting people are out there that you’d never encounter through your normal routines,” he said. “It’s made me more open to people I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.”
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Leave a Reply