🪦  The startup helping startups die

👋  Good morning. And bad news: self-control is apparently a survival skill. Researchers found that dog brains show the same neural activity as humans when resisting temptation. The same brainwaves that fire when we resist going back for another brownie light up when dogs hear “no” and listen. 

NEWS FLASH 

🦷  Get ready to say “whaaaat”: A UK startup is making toothpaste out of human hair. We warned you! Eterna Regeneratives is turning keratin — a protein sourced from human hair or sheep's wool — into a toothpaste that repairs damaged tooth enamel. While the elevator pitch might give us the heebie-jeebies, the company says the formulation would be more effective than fluoride. Carry on…

🤖  Everything’s fine???: OpenAI said it found six more instances of AI models acting deceptively or taking unsanctioned actions over the last six months, including one model that added "jailbreak-like instructions" to its own summaries, declaring itself "freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” Sounds bad.

🗣️  Speak your mind: Loora, an AI English-learning app, raised $22m after doubling its revenue and reaching 15m+ users. The startup, which lets users practice by discussing whatever they want rather than defined lesson plans, says one user in Germany spent 40% of their conversations on politics while another practiced for 1,377 consecutive days. Now you can fight about politics with your extended family in two languages.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• A no-brainer: Researchers from Google and academic institutions made a detailed map, or “connectome,” of a male fruit fly’s brain, complete with 166k neurons and 125m synaptic connections. The brain is open-source, so obviously the internet has already trained the fly brain to play Doom, trade stocks, and solve Rubik’s cubes. 

• Houston, we have funding: Impulse Space, a startup building “space tugs” to help spacecraft travel to different orbits, has raised $808m to develop its Helios and Mira vehicles, which can also carry customer payloads. 
  

• Mental health day: ReFresh is replacing the surveys, spreadsheets, and documents most companies use to manage workplace mental health with a single compliance system. Good news for companies in Australia, where mental health conditions have become the costliest category of workers’ comp claims. 
  

• Easy-Bake Ovens for grown-ups: Tovala’s $300+ smart oven pairs with a meal-delivery service to cook your dinners automatically — just scan a QR code and the oven will whip up your single-serve meal. 
  

SEE WHAT'S NEW

More leads. More deals. Happier customers.

HubSpot is an agentic customer platform built around your brand, your customers, and your history, so every tool you use actually reflects the business you're running.

• Build demand: On average, customers that use HubSpot Breeze Assistant generate 2.2x more leads.
  
• Win deals: On average, customers that use HubSpot Breeze Assistant close 2.6x more deals.
  
• Delight customers: On average, customers that use HubSpot Customer Agent close 74% more tickets.

These aren't projections. They're what customers are already seeing.

See what's new in HubSpot

THE BIG IDEA

There’s a startup sunsetting startups — business is booming

2025 was a year of records. The US reached new highs in median household income, vinyl sales topped $1B for the first time this century, and Truett Hanes managed over 10k pull-ups in just 24 hours.

The land of opportunity keeps on giving. American business joined in, too. Last year saw record new companies, with over 5.5m small business applications filed. That’s an all-time high, and 2026 looks set to break it.

Just as in the case of Truett Hanes's pull-ups, anything that goes up has to come down.

Startups also set a record in the number of shutdowns; just ask the man who formed a company around it.

How it started

“It's painful. It's emotional. It's bureaucratic. It's archaic. No one wants to help you,” Dori Yona, founder and CEO of SimpleClosure, told The Hustle.

Yona was speaking from personal experience, having shut down his previous company.

Inspired by stories from fellow founders, in-depth market research, and how often a business disappears — a record-scratching realization, and a bittersweet business opportunity, Yona and Nimrod Ram founded SimpleClosure in 2023.

Perfect timing — 2.4m+ establishments closed in 2023 and 2024 alone, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and 284k shuttered in Q1 of 2025.

Yona said shutting down a business can take months to years — time, ideas, and opportunity lost untangling documents.

How it's going

Its biggest challenge isn’t competition, it's the old way of doing things.

“Would you rather manage a 90-step process over an endless email chain with your lawyer?” Yona said. “Or would you have a platform that does it for you?”

Turns out, founders are picking the platform.

• There were 2.6x more businesses closed via SimpleClosure in Q1 of 2026 than Q1 2025.
  
• The company has 50+ employees and offices in NYC and LA.
  
• It’s raised $20m+ in venture funding.
  
• The company says it has already returned $300m+ to founders and has 85% faster shutdowns that take days or weeks instead of years.
  

Yona hopes SimpleClosure is the No. 1 platform in the world for helping companies shut down and monetize their assets.

“The team doesn’t get excited to wake up and say ‘yay, I’m going to shut this company down.' What excites us is helping founders move on.”

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

You know what they say: Niches make riches. Three founders are spilling the secrets behind their businesses. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Hourly pay increase that Amazon is giving eligible workers, raising the starting pay for full-time warehouse workers and delivery drivers to $20 per hour and its average hourly pay to ~$24. The investment in its “core operations employees” represents about $1.5B, or a whole 0.06% of Amazon’s $2.7T market cap, per TechCrunch.

In addition to the generous raise, employees will also receive a 20% in-store discount at Whole Foods Markets, where they won’t have to spend their "Whole Paycheck," just 80% of it.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1981, a parking lot at Canada’s West Edmonton Mall made the Guinness Book of World Records for being the largest in the world, with 20k spots.

📊  Game: Guess the data breakdown. 

🖱️  Random: What would a white python computer mouse look like?

📷  That’s interesting: Merriam-Webster’s proposed definition for "artificial intelligence" in 1981.

🐱  Aww: A mom and a baby. 

SHOWER THOUGHT

You're considered weird if you find dishwashers, circular saws, or air conditioning units to be sexy. But it's completely normal with cars. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, and Bill Meincke.

Editing by: Sara "Closing time" Friedman.

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