March 10, 2026

Do You Have ‘Brain Fry’? A New Study Says This Everyday Technology Is Causing It

Over half of Americans use the technology that’s prompting the phenomenon.

Exponent Founders Capital, led by Plaid and Robinhood alums, raises $75M to invest in early-stage startups

January 4, 2024

Exponent Founders Capital, an early-stage venture firm founded by alumni of startups such as Plaid, Robinhood and Ramp, has closed on $75 million in capital commitments, TechCrunch is the first to report.  The firm, which is emerging from stealth today, raised $50 million for its first fund in November of 2021. Managing Partners Charley Ma […]

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Big, costly seed deals were the exception in 2023’s lackluster venture capital market

January 4, 2024

Hopes that it would become easier for startups to raise capital in 2023 were left unmet as the year ended. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. New data from business database PitchBook paints a modestly dim picture of venture capital investment […]

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Irene T. Cheng, SM ’78

January 4, 2024
“Thinking big, aiming high, and making a difference were rules of the road embedded during my time at MIT,” says Irene Cheng, SM ’78, who went on to a successful Wall Street career as a managing director at Lazard Asset Management after earning a graduate degree in chemical engineering from the Institute. “I was helped…

The art of unearthing history

January 4, 2024
Filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri, SM ’17, uses diverse media and techniques to delve deeply into his cultural identity, connecting him with the colonial history of his family’s ancestral home: Goa, India. An alumnus of the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, Sanzgiri uses a unique approach combining such things as analysis of historical texts and 3D…

Can AI provide better customer service?

January 4, 2024
Customer service experiences can really stick with you—a positive interaction can inspire brand loyalty, and a negative one can prompt a complete boycott. But encounters with automated customer interfaces, which often rely on limited phone menus or inept chatbots, rarely generate rave reviews. So Liz Tsai ’11, SM ’13, came up with an alternative. In…

Calculating the costs of war

January 4, 2024
What can be done to prevent war? That’s the question that drives Neta Crawford, PhD ’92, who chaired the political science department at Boston University from 2018 until 2022 and is now a professor of international relations at Oxford University.  The answer, she believes, is for people to reject armed conflict as an acceptable way…

“Every project is a new adventure,” says architectural shape-shifter

January 4, 2024
When Royal Dutch Shell solicited proposals for a new research center in Belgium in 1985, it received the usual series of plans for lifeless concrete bunkers. Philippe Samyn, SM ’73, took a different tack. Noting the site’s sloping valley and charming beech forest, he envisioned a grouping of administrative buildings and labs connected by streets…