While venture money keeps pouring into AI at record size, a small group of founders is quietly building the opposite. TechCrunch AI calls it the “together tech” wave, and it might be the most interesting startup bet of the coming year. The pitch is simple: instead of another model or another chatbot, build products that pull people back into the physical world and into each other’s company.
On TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane broke down the trend alongside the week’s bigger AI headlines. The contrast is the whole story.
What’s actually happening
A few signals stand out, according to TechCrunch AI:
- Brynn Putnam, who founded the connected-fitness company Mirror, raised money for a new startup called Board. The focus is in-person games and social experiences, not screens.
- Cyberdeck builders are going viral with whimsical DIY computers designed to get people to, as the saying goes, touch grass.
- This is happening next to a market where Alphabet just raised $80 billion for AI and Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO.
What stands out here is the framing. This isn’t the same as the AI-free browser crowd that defines itself by what it rejects. TechCrunch AI describes it as people genuinely gravitating toward things that feel a little more human. That’s a different and more durable motivation than backlash.
Why it matters now
The timing isn’t an accident. When every pitch deck has the same three AI buzzwords, “different” becomes a moat. Founders who can’t outspend Alphabet or OpenAI on compute are looking for ground the giants can’t easily take. In-person connection is exactly that kind of ground. You can’t bulk-generate a board game night.
There’s also a demand signal underneath it. Screen fatigue is real, loneliness numbers keep climbing, and a lot of people are getting tired of feeds that feel increasingly machine-made. “Together tech” reads as a market response to that exhaustion, not just a vibe.
The honest counterpoint, which the Equity hosts raise, is whether any of this changes the money flow. Big AI raises dwarf these smaller bets, and a lot of capital still routes back to the same handful of incumbents. So is together tech a real category or a charming footnote? That tension is the actual debate.
My read: both things are true at once. The infrastructure money will keep flowing to the big guys. But consumer attention is the scarce resource, and that’s where together tech is competing. Those are two different games on two different boards.
The forward view
Look one to three years out and a pattern gets easier to see. As AI-generated content floods every channel, “verified human” and “in real life” stop being nostalgia and start being premium features. Expect more startups to sell the absence of AI as the product, and expect investors who missed the social wave the first time to start writing checks here.
That doesn’t mean AI loses. It means the market splits. One lane optimizes for automation and scale. The other lane sells everything automation can’t replicate: presence, friction, surprise, real people in a real room.
Practical takeaways
For builders and operators watching this:
- If you’re a founder priced out of the AI arms race, look at categories where human presence is the value, not a cost to cut.
- If you run a brand, audit how much of your output now reads as machine-made. “Made by people” is becoming a differentiator, so treat it like one.
- If you invest or advise, watch retention and word-of-mouth on these companies, not just download counts. Together tech lives or dies on whether people actually show up.
- Don’t position as anti-AI. The signal from TechCrunch AI is that gravitating toward human beats reacting against machines.
The AI fundraising machine will keep breaking records. The more interesting question for 2026 is whether the products that win our evenings look nothing like it. You can hear the full discussion on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.