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A decade ago, inventor Jeneva Bell launched a startup called Ruggable that seemed radical at the time: A rug brand with products that you could throw in your home washing machine when they got dirty. Rugs have been a household staple for thousands of years, adding warmth and color. But wool and cotton rugs are delicate and require expert cleaning—which creates challenges for people who have toddlers, or pets, or cups of coffee that occasionally spill. Bell knew there was another way, so she designed a rug with two parts—a base and a polyester top layer—that could be separated and cleaned in a home washing machine. She believed that if she created a product that lo…

If a single type of building could define our present time, it would undoubtedly be the data center. Underpinning the increasingly online way we work, shop, and entertain ourselves, data centers provide the computing power and storage to handle all the Zoom calls, Amazon purchases, and Netflix streams a person can cram into their day. And now as compute-hungry artificial intelligence dominates the future of nearly every sector of the economy—and possibly society as a whole—the data center will become even more ubiquitous. A headlong data center building boom is already underway. One report finds that average monthly spending on data centers has increased 400% in the l…

The woman behind Instacart’s successful IPO, Fidji Simo, is joining OpenAI’s C-suite. On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Simo’s new role as CEO of Applications. She will report directly to him after transitioning out of her current role at Instacart later this year. “In her new role, Fidji will focus on enabling our “traditional” company functions to scale as we enter a next phase of growth,” Altman said in a blog post. “Fidji brings a rare blend of leadership, product and operational expertise, and genuine commitment to ensuring our technology benefits everyone.” Before joining OpenAI’s executive team, Simo served as a member of its board of direct…

Around a decade ago, Chad Dale watched as some of his friends started to leave Seattle. “They wanted to stay in an urban environment, but the city was too expensive for them to have all the things that they wanted to have,” Dale says. His friends who were beginning to have kids wanted backyards and guest rooms for visiting in-laws; they looked for single-family houses in the suburbs. But Dale, a developer, wondered whether there could be a different solution. What if he and several friends joined together to build their own apartment building—and all lived in the same place? Some friends had already bought a vacation home together on nearby Whidbey Island, and…

Shares of Krispy Kreme Inc. (NASDAQ: DNUT) plunged over 28% on Thursday after the donut-and-coffee chain said it will no longer pay out its quarterly dividend and that it was “reassessing” the deployment of its planned McDonald’s rollout, and fell short of earnings expectations, according to Bloomberg. Krispy Kreme’s earnings missed expectations for the first quarter of 2025, with the company posting an EPS (earnings per share) of negative $0.05, coming in below the EPS forecast of negative $0.04. It posted revenue of $375.2 million, within previous guidance but below a forecast of $385.11 million. Following the announcement, Krispy Kreme’s stock fell by 28.18% in…

Digital banking fintech firm Chime disclosed a rise in 2024 revenue in its IPO filing on Tuesday for a long-awaited U.S. stock market launch. Financial technology companies have increasingly entered the U.S. lending space, aiming to wrest market share from major players such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. Chime’s revenue rose to $1.67 billion in the fiscal year ended 2024, up from $1.28 billion, a year earlier. The IPO window has reopened as markets recover sharply amid progress in trade talks, offering companies an opportunity to list their shares after months of turbulence driven by tariffs. A strong debut by Chime could pave the way f…

I-P-Go! Shares of Navan, a travel-tech firm based in Silicon Valley, hit the exchanges on Thursday. The company priced its initial public offering at $25 per share, raising roughly $923 million. The $25 per-share price is within the $24–$26 range the company zeroed-in on last week, when it also announced it would sell nearly 37 million shares of common stock. The IPO puts Navan’s valuation at around $9.2 billion. Navan shares will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker “NAVN.” Founded in 2015, the company bills itself as “an all-in-one business travel, payments, and expense management platform that makes travel easy for frequent travelers,” helping customers fin…

As a woman in the United States, turning 21 means beginning a lifelong journey of getting a pap spear every three years. It’s not a pleasant experience. You’ll lie down with your legs in stirrups, while your doctor inserts a speculum inside your vagina. Then, she or he will take a sample from your cervix with a hard plastic device to figure out if you have any trace of HPV (the human papillomavirus), a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer, or cancerous and precancerous cells. Starting today, however, there’s an easier solution. Teal Health, a woman’s health company founded in 2020, has developed a new product that allows you to take a sam…

Uber is on Wednesday launching its own version of a bus system along busy routes, calling it its most affordable ride option yet. The rideshare company has introduced Route Share, a new service offering pickups every 20 minutes along busy corridors during weekday commute hours. Available from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time, the service will launch in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Boston, and Baltimore Riders can select the Route Share option to see nearby routes and book a seat anywhere from seven days to 10 minutes before their intended pickup. They’ll then be prompted to walk to the set pickup area where the drive…

San Francisco Bay Area residents woke up to some bad news for their Friday commute. Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, the region’s main commuter rail system, which connects San Francisco’s peninsula with the East and South Bay, systematically shut down due to a “computer networking problem” affecting train control. The agency announced it was closing all 50 stations at 4:24 a.m. on Friday morning, the East Bay Times reported. As of this writing on Friday morning, BART said that train service had resumed, although passengers should expect “major delays.” “Technicians are on site trying to get to the bottom of the situation, but right now, that is the infor…

Construction and real estate are in a challenging moment, with prices beyond reach for many buyers and little sign of near-term relief. Still, several recent breakthroughs could bring the goal of homeownership closer for more Americans, while other innovations focus on providing shelter for those who might otherwise go without. Beewise For a buzzy way to help resurrect the bee population Honeybee colonies in the United States could decline by as much as 70% in 2025, according to researchers at Washington State University. Beewise aims to counter that trend with the BeeHome, an autonomous hive that manages routine tasks and helps commercial beekeepers reduce colony loss…

There’s an ear-piercing war brewing at the mall. Claire’s, the biggest player in the market, has hit hard times, leaving room for upstarts to impinge on its territory. For 60 years, Claire’s has billed itself as a place for kids and teens to get their first piercings. The company says it has pierced more than 100 million ears since 1978. But after declaring bankruptcy in August (its second bankruptcy in seven years), Claire’s was acquired by the holding company Ames Watson for $140 million. These new owners have plans to turn the business around, including drastically shrinking its retail footprint which had ballooned to more than 1,000 stores. It recently annou…

Paris Hilton’s been an entrepreneur, a reality TV star, a DJ, an author, a model, a singer, and an activist. But she says school felt like torture. “Sitting still under fluorescent lights surrounded by beige walls made me feel trapped instead of inspired,” she tells Fast Company via email. “Traditional environments were too flat, too uniform, and too quiet to support the way I think.” It wasn’t until after being diagnosed with ADHD in her late 20s that Hilton began to understand how to hone her energy and creativity — and how the physical spaces where she worked impacted her ability to focus. “Over the years, I’ve learned that when a space feels alive, so do …

I recently spoke to a donor who reviewed a batch of proposals from different groups—different names, different logos, but nearly the same projects. Teams had reinvented the same wheel in parallel. Individually, some of those projects might get funded. Collectively, the sector missed the chance to pool efforts and solve a larger piece of the problem. That felt wrong, not because anyone was bad, but because our systems make it easier to duplicate than to unite. Here’s what should terrify donors: Even as funding tightens, duplicated projects still get financed while collaborative funds report backing organizations that figured out how to work together, with $2–3 billion …