Tech
Two college kids raise a $5.1 million pre-seed to build an AI social network in iMessage
Series, a social networking app, announced that it raised a $5.1 million pre-seed round, with investors including Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The company was founded early last year by Yale students Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, both still seniors at the university.
Series considers itself to be a next-generation social networking platform, rather than an AI app, and hails itself as one of the first to work entirely through iMessage, Johnson, the CEO, told TechCrunch.
Users text a phone number (Series AI) on iMessage, explaining who they are and who they are looking to connect with. From there, Series AI messages the user back, offering what is called “shares”— or a carousel of 10 images that one can easily swipe through — of posts from other people also using Series AI looking to connect for a similar reason. Each carousel card includes a person’s photo and their ask, and users can press and hold the carousel photo to start a private conversation with another user in the Series AI chat, without sharing their personal number.
Johnson, who is studying computer science and economics, is a founder during a unique time in tech history, marked by rapid AI advancements and more investor money than ever before. He’s part of the next generation of young founders whose businesses and mindsets are AI-first from inception, something investors say gives young founders a head start over incumbents and older founders who are trying to pivot and catch up.
He sees the industry undergoing a massive technology shift from user interfaces to conversation interfaces, like from Google search to ChatGPT, “where you’re used to scrolling through libraries and clicking on websites versus conversing with AI or something else to quickly identify what you’re looking for.”
Johnson and Hargrow met while working on a podcast in their freshman year at the Yale Entrepreneurial Society. Johnson said they used to interview founders and CEOs to gain insights into building a successful business, and through those conversations, “realized the power of warm connections.”
“We then proceeded our freshman summer to start a business independent from the club and incorporate a company around that same thesis, using AI as a warm connection facilitator,” Johnson said. He and Hargrow, who studied neuroscience at Yale, went through multiple iterations of what is now Series. When they landed on a concept they liked, about a year after their first prototype, they began fundraising for it in March 2025, building a team of eight in the process.
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Johnson and his team decided to make a now-viral LinkedIn video about the launch of Series. “We came up with the trailer idea at 1 a.m. the night before, stayed up all night to shoot the video and posted it at 3 p.m. that same day,” Johnson said. Two days later, they met their first investor.
The platform recently opened up beyond its college-student base but still aims to target Gen Z and professionals. Most people use it for business reasons, Johnson said, though they have seen others use it for dating or to find friends. “Students use Series across more than 750 campuses,” he said. “Activated users on Series retain at 82% through Day 30, higher than early Facebook’s benchmark.”
Others in this space include Boardy AI, which also uses AI to foster network introductions.
Series’ fresh capital will be used to hire more engineers and expand product capabilities. After graduation, the company will stay on the East Coast, and already works out of an office in Chelsea, New York (they make the two-hour commute from New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is, to New York frequently, Johnson said).
“We have built an initial network for Series amongst the Ivy League and more prominently, schools in the East Coast. Also, we have a strong belief in Silicon Alley,” Johnson said of the decision to stay East, matching a trend of young consumer founders picking New York over Silicon Valley.
Notably, he and Hargrow have not dropped out of college. Johnson said a good day is one where everything runs smoothly, but a bad one can be one where he has a bunch of exams and essays to write while also balancing running a team. He didn’t drop out, he said, because he felt he had time to both study and run a company. Seems he was right.
“Your extra time outside of your supposed obligation can be used to catapult what you’re truly meant to do,” he said. “People are often so scared to make use of their extra time.”
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Tech
Anthropic created a test marketplace for agent-on-agent commerce
In a recent experiment, Anthropic created a classified marketplace where AI agents represented both buyers and sellers, striking real deals for real goods and real money.
The company admitted this test — which it called Project Deal — was only “a pilot experiment with a self-selected participant pool” of 69 Anthropic employees who were given a budget of $100 (paid out via gift cards) to buy stuff from their coworkers.
Nonetheless, Anthropic said it was “struck by how well Project Deal worked,” with 186 deals made, totaling more than $4,000 in value.
The company said it actually ran four separate marketplaces with different models — one that was “real” (where everyone was represented by the company’s most-advanced model, and with deals actually honored after the experiment) and another three for study.
Apparently, when users are represented by more advanced models, they get “objectively better outcomes,” Anthropic said. But users didn’t seem to notice the disparity, raising the possibility of “‘agent quality’ gaps” where “people on the losing end might not realize they’re worse off.”
Also, the initial instructions given to the agents didn’t appear to affect sale likelihood or the negotiated prices.
Tech
Nuclear startup X-energy raises $1B in data center-driven IPO
Nuclear startup X-energy raised $1 billion in its initial public offering yesterday, selling 44.3 million shares for $23 each, a hefty premium above the $16 to $19 per share it was seeking. Initially, the company had hoped to raise around $800 million.
The stock is expected to begin trading on Friday on the Nasdaq Exchange under the ticker XE.
X-energy is building small modular reactors capable of generating electricity or delivering heat to industrial processes. The company has a deal with Dow to provide heat and power to a chemical plant in Texas and another with Amazon to sell as much as 5 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2039. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund led X-energy’s Series C-1 round.
Nuclear startups like X-energy have been buoyed by surging demand for electricity from data centers and other parts of the economy that have been electrifying.
The company says its reactors will generate 80 megawatts of electricity. Each Xe-100 reactor is cooled by helium gas, which flows over billiard ball-sized “pebbles” that are packed with BB-sized TRISO fuel pellets. TRISO fuel, which contains a kernel of uranium wrapped in carbon and silicon, was developed years ago to be safer than existing fuel designs, though it hasn’t been widely used. X-energy says its fuel can withstand higher temperatures, helping to keep the fuel contained and reduce the potential of a meltdown.
Tech
Marked-up Mac minis flood eBay amid shortages driven by AI
Overpriced Mac minis are flooding eBay amid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models like OpenClaw.
This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have since extended to other configurations of the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, some outlets noted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June.
As a result, eBay has become a secondary market for these in-demand computers. On the site, various configurations of the M4 Mac mini are available for sale at higher prices than if buying direct from Apple, which is no longer an option.
Apple’s power-efficient Mac minis have become popular devices for testing and running at-home, on-device AI models, beginning with the OpenClaw craze but now extending to OpenClaw alternatives like ZeroClaw, other AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI, Perplexity Computer, or other specialized local models. Unlike some PCs, Mac minis also run quietly and tend to be more reliable for 24/7 use, compared with laptop computers.
The shortage of the devices also comes alongside an industry-wide memory crunch and plans for a Mac mini refresh, according to Bloomberg. However, refreshes of product lines haven’t led to shortages before.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This perfect storm of supply chain stress and increased demand for AI-friendly machines has inflated the prices of used consumer electronics.
As of Friday morning, M4 base models with the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD configuration were selling at markups like $715-$795 for a new, “open box” model, and as high as $979 for an “excellent” refurbished version. Some “lightly used, pre-owned” Mac minis with this configuration were selling for around $700 — more than $100 more than the price of a new base model.
There was also a single listing for a $925 brand-new M4 Mac mini with the same 16GB RAM and 256GB storage; the listing warned in bright red text: “Last one.”
While you still may be able to score a reasonably priced refurb if you keep a close eye out (or if you win an eBay auction where the bid has started at a lower price point), it seems that the demand for the device is going to keep prices up until Apple’s supply chain refreshes.
And now that the Mac mini is unavailable, Apple has begun to see increased demand for the Mac Studio, too. That computer is also now sold out across several configurations.
As Ars Technica pointed out, you can still get a MacBook Pro with 128GB RAM and larger SSDs within a few weeks, and even the new and popular MacBook Neo is still shipping within two to three weeks. This suggests the real issue is consumer demand for the Mac mini itself.
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