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
Fintech lending giant Figure confirms data breach
Figure Technology, a blockchain-based lending company, confirmed it experienced a data breach.
On Friday, Figure spokesperson Alethea Jadick told TechCrunch in a statement that the breach originated when an employee was tricked with a social engineering attack that allowed the hackers to steal “a limited number of files.”
The statement said the company is communicating “with partners and those impacted,” and offering free credit monitoring “to all individuals who receive a notice.”
Figure’s spokesperson did not respond to a series of specific questions about the breach.
The hacking group ShinyHunters took responsibility for the hack on its official dark web leak website, saying the company refused to pay a ransom, and published 2.5 gigabytes of allegedly stolen data.
TechCrunch saw a portion of the data, which included customers’ full names, home addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers.
A member of ShinyHunters told TechCrunch that Figure was among the victims of a hacking campaign that targeted customers who rely on the single sign-on provider Okta. Other victims of the campaign include Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Tech
Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it’s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.
“We think this is going to be massive because not only does this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge step change,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest he believes the AI would do a better job than its human counterparts in resolving some issues.
The company also touted its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, poached from Meta for his AI expertise, and its plans to create an AI-native experience.
With his guidance, Chesky said that Airbnb was poised to introduce an app that doesn’t just search for you, but one that “knows you.”
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that’s why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built the Llama models. He’s an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we’re going to transform the Airbnb experience,” Chesky noted.
Like other businesses poised for disruption by AI, Airbnb’s leadership is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can’t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he pitched the idea of layering AI over the Airbnb experience, which he claimed would help to accelerate growth.
The company forecast revenue growth would be in the “low double digits” this year, after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates of $2.72 billion. This quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know if AI platforms could be a risk in the long-term, assuming they moved into the short-term rentals market. Chesky, however, pushed back at that idea, saying that Airbnb isn’t just the consumer-facing app; it’s also the host app, the customer service, and the protections it offers, like insurance and user verifications.
“We’ve built this over 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots serve a function similar to search, in that they deliver top-of-funnel traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the shift to AI would benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power its search, with the feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic, while it experiments with making its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within search.
While Spotify this week told investors its best developers hadn’t written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a more high-level metric on its own internal AI adoption. The company said that 80% of its engineers now use AI tools, and it’s working to get that to 100% soon.
Tech
Airbnb plans to bake in AI features for search, discovery and support
Airbnb has taken its time to launch AI features within the app, but CEO Brian Chesky on Friday said the company is now planning to bake in features powered by large language models that would help users search for listings, plan their trips, and aid hosts in managing their properties.
Speaking at the company’s fourth-quarter conference call, Chesky said the company wants to increase its use of large language models for customer discovery, support and engineering.
“We are building an AI-native experience where the app does not just search for you. It knows you. It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” he said.
The company separately said it is testing a new feature that lets users search and ask questions about properties and locations using natural language queries.
Currently, Airbnb offers an LLM-powered customer service bot, for some personalization, and communications. The new AI search feature is expected to “evolve into a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience that extends through the trip.”
Questioned by analyst whether Airbnb would roll out sponsored property slots within AI search, Chesky said the company wants to get the design and user experience right first.
“AI search is live to a very small percentage of traffic right now. We are doing a lot of experimentation. Over time, we are gonna be experimenting with making AI search more conversational, integrating it into more than the trip, and, eventually, we will be looking at sponsor listings as a result of that,” Chesky said, adding that Airbnb would consider designing an ad unit that fits the conversational search flow.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Chesky said Airbnb plans to tap the AI expertise of its new CTO, Ahmad Al-Dahle (he worked on Meta’s Llama models previously), to use its trove of identity and review data to make the app more useful.
Airbnb claimed its AI-powered customer support bot, launched in North America last year, now handles a third of customer problems without needing any human intervention. Chesky noted there are plans to enable customers to call the AI bot for support, and expand language coverage to customer support as well.
“A year from now, if we are successful, significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a custom service agent, in many more languages, in all the languages where we have live agents. AI customer service will not only be chat, it will be voice,” he said.
The company is also thinking about increasing AI usage internally. Airbnb said 80% of its engineers use AI tools, but the goal is to get to 100%.
Airbnb reported better-than-expected revenue of $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, up 12% from a year earlier.
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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
Fintech lending giant Figure confirms data breach
Figure Technology, a blockchain-based lending company, confirmed it experienced a data breach.
On Friday, Figure spokesperson Alethea Jadick told TechCrunch in a statement that the breach originated when an employee was tricked with a social engineering attack that allowed the hackers to steal “a limited number of files.”
The statement said the company is communicating “with partners and those impacted,” and offering free credit monitoring “to all individuals who receive a notice.”
Figure’s spokesperson did not respond to a series of specific questions about the breach.
The hacking group ShinyHunters took responsibility for the hack on its official dark web leak website, saying the company refused to pay a ransom, and published 2.5 gigabytes of allegedly stolen data.
TechCrunch saw a portion of the data, which included customers’ full names, home addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers.
A member of ShinyHunters told TechCrunch that Figure was among the victims of a hacking campaign that targeted customers who rely on the single sign-on provider Okta. Other victims of the campaign include Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Tech
Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it’s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.
“We think this is going to be massive because not only does this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but the quality of service is going to be a huge step change,” CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call this week. This seems to suggest he believes the AI would do a better job than its human counterparts in resolving some issues.
The company also touted its recent hire of CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, poached from Meta for his AI expertise, and its plans to create an AI-native experience.
With his guidance, Chesky said that Airbnb was poised to introduce an app that doesn’t just search for you, but one that “knows you.”
“It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” Chesky explained, adding that’s why Airbnb brought Al-Dahle on board.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading AI experts. He spent 16 years at Apple, and most recently led the generative AI team at Meta that built the Llama models. He’s an expert at pairing massive technical scale with world-class design, which is exactly how we’re going to transform the Airbnb experience,” Chesky noted.
Like other businesses poised for disruption by AI, Airbnb’s leadership is pushing the idea that it has a unique database and product that other AI chatbots can’t replicate.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can’t message the hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts during the earnings call. Instead, he pitched the idea of layering AI over the Airbnb experience, which he claimed would help to accelerate growth.
The company forecast revenue growth would be in the “low double digits” this year, after pulling in $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, above estimates of $2.72 billion. This quarter, it expects revenue of $2.59 billion to $2.63 billion, above Wall Street forecasts of $2.53 billion.
Investors still wanted to know if AI platforms could be a risk in the long-term, assuming they moved into the short-term rentals market. Chesky, however, pushed back at that idea, saying that Airbnb isn’t just the consumer-facing app; it’s also the host app, the customer service, and the protections it offers, like insurance and user verifications.
“We’ve built this over 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform,” he said.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots serve a function similar to search, in that they deliver top-of-funnel traffic, he noted. That traffic also converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google, Chesky pointed out, suggesting that the shift to AI would benefit Airbnb.
The company is already using AI to power its search, with the feature now enabled for a “very small percentage” of Airbnb’s traffic, while it experiments with making its search more conversational. Later, the company plans to integrate sponsored listings within search.
While Spotify this week told investors its best developers hadn’t written a single line of code since December, thanks to AI, Airbnb offered a more high-level metric on its own internal AI adoption. The company said that 80% of its engineers now use AI tools, and it’s working to get that to 100% soon.
Tech
Airbnb plans to bake in AI features for search, discovery and support
Airbnb has taken its time to launch AI features within the app, but CEO Brian Chesky on Friday said the company is now planning to bake in features powered by large language models that would help users search for listings, plan their trips, and aid hosts in managing their properties.
Speaking at the company’s fourth-quarter conference call, Chesky said the company wants to increase its use of large language models for customer discovery, support and engineering.
“We are building an AI-native experience where the app does not just search for you. It knows you. It will help guests plan their entire trip, help hosts better run their businesses, and help the company operate more efficiently at scale,” he said.
The company separately said it is testing a new feature that lets users search and ask questions about properties and locations using natural language queries.
Currently, Airbnb offers an LLM-powered customer service bot, for some personalization, and communications. The new AI search feature is expected to “evolve into a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience that extends through the trip.”
Questioned by analyst whether Airbnb would roll out sponsored property slots within AI search, Chesky said the company wants to get the design and user experience right first.
“AI search is live to a very small percentage of traffic right now. We are doing a lot of experimentation. Over time, we are gonna be experimenting with making AI search more conversational, integrating it into more than the trip, and, eventually, we will be looking at sponsor listings as a result of that,” Chesky said, adding that Airbnb would consider designing an ad unit that fits the conversational search flow.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Chesky said Airbnb plans to tap the AI expertise of its new CTO, Ahmad Al-Dahle (he worked on Meta’s Llama models previously), to use its trove of identity and review data to make the app more useful.
Airbnb claimed its AI-powered customer support bot, launched in North America last year, now handles a third of customer problems without needing any human intervention. Chesky noted there are plans to enable customers to call the AI bot for support, and expand language coverage to customer support as well.
“A year from now, if we are successful, significantly more than 30% of tickets will be handled by a custom service agent, in many more languages, in all the languages where we have live agents. AI customer service will not only be chat, it will be voice,” he said.
The company is also thinking about increasing AI usage internally. Airbnb said 80% of its engineers use AI tools, but the goal is to get to 100%.
Airbnb reported better-than-expected revenue of $2.78 billion in the fourth quarter, up 12% from a year earlier.
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