Forbes Daily Briefing

If Jay Shetty was going to level up his podcast, he figured he needed to upgrade the studio in which he records it. So before his seven-year-old show, On Purpose, relaunched this month on Netflix, the 38-year-old self-help guru says he spent around $500,000 to renovate the space with specific colors and custom artwork (including a piece of glass covered in bubble wrap) to evoke the kind of vulnerability and fragility he hopes to encourage from his guests.

Sitting inside his sprawling Hollywood Hills home, worth an estimated $8 million, Shetty’s digs are a far cry from the Hindu monk principles of humble detachment he once practiced and has encouraged to display. But for a star in media’s hottest category—who recently signed a new podcast deal with Spotify and Netflix that will pay him a combined $100 million over the next three years—the studio and residence are fitting.

“I mean, I’m not a monk anymore,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Today I consider myself an entrepreneur and a leader in this space, and that allows me to have the ability to use money as a resource to do good in the world and create impact in the way that we've chosen to do that.”

By Matt Craig,

Reporter

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On a Tuesday evening in early July, Anushka Ahuja, a dentist in Gurgaon, India, opens the door for the house help she booked ten minutes ago on Pronto, an app that provides instant professional cleaning services like sweeping, mopping and laundry across 11 cities in India. A woman clad in a crisp uniform greets her with a polite smile, then asks: Can she strap a small camera onto her head to record her work? 

Ahuja isn’t surprised to see the camera. In fact, she paid an extra nine rupees (about nine cents) so her cleaner would record everything from her elbows to her fingertips. Now she’ll receive a video recording a few hours later, giving her peace of mind that her house was cleaned properly and nothing was stolen or broken in her absence. 

Despite disclosures in the consent form she signed, Ahuja initially didn’t realize that there’s another purpose to the camera footage: AI training data. After a cleaning session, the video is stripped of personally identifiable information like personal documents and people’s faces and then sold to American AI companies. 

Bangalore-based Pronto launched the video recording service, called Pronto Verified, in May, stirring widespread backlash in India and government scrutiny over privacy concerns. Customers consent to the recording and workers are paid double for Pronto Verified bookings, CEO Anjali Sardana says. 

“Trillions of dollars are going into AI capex every year. All the money in the world is getting invested in AI, but your blue-collar worker in India is not capturing any of that,” Sardana, 24, tells Forbes. “And there is an opportunity to actually redistribute that capital.”

By Rashi Shrivastava,

Forbes Staff

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OnApril 4, 2022, less than six weeks after Russian forces launched their attack on Ukraine, officers from Spain’s Guardia Civil, the FBI and Homeland Security boarded Tango, a 255-foot superyacht in the Spanish port city of Palma de Mallorca. 

Allegedly owned by sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg (net worth: $9 billion), per the United States government, the $90 million vessel was seized under a U.S. warrant alleging bank fraud, money laundering and sanctions violations. It was the high-profile opening salvo in a Western campaign to punish the Russian oligarchs who “supported tyranny for financial gain.”

“Today marks our task force’s first seizure of an asset belonging to a sanctioned individual with close ties to the Russian regime,” boasted then–attorney general Merrick Garland. “It will not be the last.” Weeks later, Garland doubled down, promising to use all available Justice Department resources to seize the assets and transfer the proceeds directly to Ukraine. 

By Giacomo Tognini,

Deputy Editor

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When Jay Shetty started his podcast On Purpose in 2019, he remembers people telling him he was too late. The medium was already saturated, they said, with little room for growth. And wasn’t he really just a content creator? 

Seven years later, the 38-year-old self-help guru hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world, competing not only with the biggest TV, radio and internet-native talk shows but blurring the lines between them entirely. Just as many people watch his lengthy interviews with celebrities (including Michelle Obama and Matt Damon) on YouTube as listen on the iHeartMedia network—distribution deals that Forbes estimates paid Shetty $21 million over the past 12 months. And when those deals expired this year, Shetty landed a new kind of contract, in which the audio and video of his show will not only be distributed by Spotify; it will also stream on Netflix, with the two companies combining to pay him an estimated $100 million over the next three years. 

“When I started, video wasn’t normal for a podcast,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Now we had the four largest streamers bidding for the show. To see that kind of interest and enthusiasm was pretty amazing—for me and for the industry overall.”

By Matt Craig,

Reporter

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For a dozen years, Forbes has partnered with TrueBridge Capital Partners to highlight the companies that are likely to become unicorns in the near future. To qualify, startups must be venture-backed, based in the U.S. and worth less than $1 billion. In a sign of the times: Nearly all this year’s list members use AI in some fashion as they work on everything from bone marrow to biological threats, cybersecurity to creative design. Our track record is striking: Of the 275 alumni of this list, 60% did indeed become unicorns, including household names Duolingo and DoorDash. Another 60 were bought (or were merged). Nearly half of last year’s picks already are worth more than a billion. There have been surprisingly few disasters—just six companies, about 2%, imploded or shut down.

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On Jesse Vega’s first date with Deaunda Lira, a romantic sushi dinner in Colorado Springs three years ago, he was upfront: He has epilepsy and suffers severe seizures. “It could be scary,” Jesse, 49, recalls telling her. Deaunda, 52, was wary at first, especially after witnessing one of his seizures firsthand. But she shortly came around. “He’s so handsome, I’m gonna have to give it a try,” she remembers thinking, laughing.

The seizures started in 2002, when Jesse was 25. At first, they were minor, leaving him flushed and nausea­ted before smelling a scent of ammonia. These temporal lobe seizures (sometimes referred to as “déjà vu” seizures) happened about 60 times a day and left him exhausted. They eventually progressed to grand mal seizures: violent shaking and stiff muscles, vomiting, tongue-biting and a loss of bladder or bowel control. The couple married in 2023, and Deaunda quit her nearly $50,000-a-year job in medical billing to take care of Jesse. He wasn’t working either: He had to give up his job at the Department of Defense because of his condition. Money got so tight that the middle-aged newlyweds moved in with Jesse’s dad.

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Twenty years ago this month, Tesla introduced itself to the world with the electric Roadster, the $100,000 sports car that kickstarted the modern EV era. Now the company’s two original founders are betting on TELO, an EV startup with an aesthetic rebuttal to Tesla’s brutalist Cybertruck swagger.

Rather than start with another compact crossover chasing Tesla’s top-selling Model Y, San Carlos, California-based TELO – located in the same Silicon Valley office park where Tesla was headquartered when it launched the Roadster – is coming to market with a whimsical truck roughly the size of a MINI Cooper. Priced from $41,520, the MT1 looks like something from the world of Japanese anime, with none of the militaristic menace of Tesla’s pickup. But TELO is borrowing one important page from Tesla’s original playbook: start small and build slowly. CEO and cofounder Jason Marks told Forbes the company initially plans to make just 500 units, and then scale up to a 5,000-vehicle-per-year run rate after a year or so. And even at that relatively low volume, he thinks the company can turn a profit. 

By Alan Ohnsman,

Senior Editor

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In Lafayette, Indiana, a small city with a population of just over 70,000, the local police force decided to try out a new AI tool sold by law enforcement tech giant Axon, the company with a $35 billion market cap best known for making the Taser. Called Form One, it promised to save officers time by listening to the audio from their body cameras, then filling out the administrative details of a police report: officers and citizens’ names, ID documentation, license plates and other vehicle information. For Lafayette’s captains who’d worked closely with Axon on previous AI projects, it seemed like a no-brainer.

But after seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn't save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague.

By Thomas Brewster

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In early 2023, Keith Peiris’s AI-powered presentation startup Tome was growing quickly. It had become the fastest productivity tool to reach 1 million users, Forbes reported at the time, a number that eventually climbed to 25 million. He raised $80 million from top Silicon Valley investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Greylock and billionaire Reid Hoffman.

But by late 2024, Peiris realized he was building the wrong company. 

It turned out that most people didn’t want to pay for its tools, which generated beautiful slides within minutes. Tome’s users, mainly students and small business owners, were largely on free plans or paying $10 monthly subscriptions—not nearly enough to sustain the business. And the startup couldn’t quite crack the market for professionals like marketers and salespeople because it wasn’t connected to their data and did not have the context needed to make good presentations. Users were still growing, but the company’s annual revenue plateaued at around just $3 million. 

“Being frank about Tome, our technology thesis and our cultural thesis was very immature,” Peiris admits now.

By Rashi Shrivastava,

Forbes Staff

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Back in October 2024, Poolside was an early AI star. Cofounded by former Github CTO Jason Warner, the startup had raised $500 million on a $3 billion valuation to build coding agents for governments and large companies. But over the next 18 months, Poolside largely disappeared from view, while OpenAI and Anthropic ballooned to nearly trillion-dollar valuations with a crop of Chinese labs building open source models nipping at their heels. 

Now Poolside is back with a new model called Laguna that on public benchmarks beats its American and Chinese open source competition — with the very notable exception of Chinese lab Moonshot’s latest AI model, Kimi K3. 

"As an American company building for the West, we'll be the most capable open model in the West,” Warner, Poolside’s co-CEO and cofounder, tells Forbes. “Globally, in this weight class of the 118 billion parameter model, we are the leader.”

Warner claims that the startup spent those 18 months where it went quiet building the infrastructure for a “model building factory” that could pump out Laguna and continue with new and more powerful iterations every five weeks. "The classic notion of model building is an artisanal process…We've built an industrial model-building process,” he says.

By Iain Martin,

Forbes Staff

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