Prototype

The real-world fitness economy is booming: billions of gym visits, run clubs tripling in a year, tens of billions of dollars a year. And yet, Sig Siedentopf argues, almost none of it runs on anything. There is no shared infrastructure beneath it, no common place where the people who put on real events can find each other, run the event, and finally measure whether it was worth it. His company, AVA, wants to be that missing layer, a marketplace for the fitness world. But the real prize is underneath: the ground-truth data on how people actually move in the physical world, the kind that exists nowhere else. He calls it Palantir for fitness. Sig is a serial builder who has had a hand in more than twenty startups across ten countries, the kind of founder who tries something and moves on. This is the first one he has decided to bet a decade on, and he is doing it from Bangkok, not Austin.

Climate risk is financial risk: a factory that floods, an oil reserve worthless by Friday. Yet most investors carrying that exposure are just guessing. Linda Wu spent her early career quantifying it by hand inside a capital firm, then decided the problem was too big to do by hand. Her company, SustainAlpha, is an AI that turns climate risk into an actual number a portfolio manager can act on.

More than 700 million households cook from a gas cylinder they can't see inside: a black box that runs out mid-dinner, leaks unnoticed, and is often sold underfilled. Mike Otieno's Tulasoft makes BaseSentry, a $25 smart scale that sits under any cylinder and finally makes it speak, catching leaks and fraud, working even on basic phones, and turning gas use into credit visibility for the people the tech world forgot.

Miko Matsumura has spent his career showing up a decade early. He hand-coded a neural network at Yale in 1990, grew Java to five million developers, and helped sell Infravio to webMethods for $38 million. Today he runs gumi Cryptos Capital, a roughly $110 million fund with five unicorns in its portfolio, and argues that as intelligence becomes a commodity, the rarest edge left is shrewdness.

AI has made faking a résumé nearly free, and Gartner projects that one in four job candidates will be fake by 2028. Binoy spent a decade at LexisNexis building the systems banks use to verify identity and catch fraud, then asked why hiring never tried. With The Trust Loop, he is betting the only thing left worth trusting is a real former colleague willing to put their name on yours.