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For Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, there is no middle ground. Either he builds a company as valuable as Google, he says, or he fails and ends up on the streets. He started coding at 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed a couple of summer programs in San Francisco, and cold-DM’ed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one gave him an angel check for his first company at age 17.
That company, now the YC-backed Nozomio, is an API index for AI agents — a tool that helps AI agents find and use software services — and has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. “I either win or lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win.”
Young founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are throwing more capital at them, yet the expectation to hit that “north star” milestone — the one big number investors are chasing — hasn’t relaxed, and every misstep along the way is now publicly dissected on social media.
While Silicon Valley VCs have always famously loved backing young college dropout founders, they preferred to see them paired with technical founders, or at least to have some experience — ideally with a FAANG company (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — on their résumés. In many ways, that is still very true. But AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines of success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without stepping foot inside a Big Tech company.
Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is an example of that. She dropped out of high school to launch an AI startup, then attended Georgia Tech before dropping out of that, too, to launch Slashy, a YC-backed startup that bills itself as the “Cursor for emails” and helps consumers manage their email inboxes. After more than a year running that company, she recently announced she’s now building yet a new startup currently in stealth.
When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalled, investors whom she would pitch often asked why she was looking to build a company. “It’s gotten more normal now,” she said, “post-18.”
It seems more than ever, investors look to founders like Awasthi, whose experiences can be traced through “GitHub activity, open-source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with all the latest tools in AI,” Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage firm Vermilion, told TechCrunch. “A lot of young developers learn how to build software through contributing to open-source projects or toying around with the latest AI tooling,” she explained. “They have more time to do that while in college or younger than someone with a full-time job and a mortgage.”
Smith said a “meaningful” share of her portfolio consists of companies founded by those under 30, with a handful even younger than 21, she said, adding that she’s “clearly not skeptical of youth.”
“What they lack in experience, they make up for in excitement to experiment and lack of fear,” she continued.
But she admits the market has become more merciless. “It doesn’t give you room to learn slowly anymore,” she said. There are more funding opportunities than ever, regardless of age — accelerators, incubators, pre-seed funds. But that money comes with strings attached: Founders like Rakhmetzhanov and Awasthi, flush with millions in cash, are expected to deliver growth in months, not years.
“The forgiveness that used to exist at an early stage and the assumption you’d iterate your way to product-market fit doesn’t exist right now,” Smith continued. “Everyone is looking for the next Cursor, even though that growth trajectory is an outlier, not the norm.”
For many founders — especially those building in public — the relentless strain to succeed can lead to murky ethical territory, or even predatory deal terms, since younger founders are often too new to the game to know what’s standard, yet ambitious enough to chase growth at all
Discord has acknowledged that a bug in its AI moderation system mistakenly banned more than 8,000 users over the past two months, after harmless images—including spreadsheets, chessboards, game textures, as well as white and gray transparent backgrounds—were incorrectly flagged as harmful content.
The company confirmed that the issue had been affecting accounts since May, with an additional 200 users banned over the weekend before its team identified and fixed the problem. All affected accounts are currently in the process of being restored.
The incident highlights one of the growing challenges surrounding AI-assisted moderation as many platforms increasingly rely on automated systems to identify illegal or abusive material at scale.
In a detailed thread on X, Discord explained that its automated safety system works by matching uploaded content against databases of known harmful material. While the technology is designed to catch illegal content, the company acknowledged that it can sometimes generate false positives. A human moderator reviews the content, but a bug caused the system to immediately ban affected accounts.
“We’re working on better safeguards so this can’t happen again,” the company wrote.
Our systems flag content by matching it against known harmful material. This kind of similarity matching can produce false positives, which is why a member of our Trust & Safety team always reviews flagged content before any action is taken. The intended behavior is to…— Discord Support (@discord_support) July 7, 2026
Across X and Reddit, users have claimed they had been permanently suspended simply for uploading images containing square grid patterns. Several users speculated that Discord’s AI moderation tools have become increasingly sensitive to grid-like patterns because they have previously been used in attempts to obscure or disguise NSFW and child exploitation content from automated detection systems.
Affected users have been expressing frustration on social media, with some arguing that permanent account bans based solely on automated detection can have serious consequences, particularly for users who rely on Discord for work, gaming communities, or long-distance social connections.
“Losing a Discord account to something as unfair as this can be extremely devastating and affect users severely, and every day millions of users are affected by false AI bans. This needs to be stopped,” one X user wrote.
My account was wrongfully banned from your platform due to a bug in your AI automod detecting my GAME TEXTURES as CSAM. I need my account back as I’m a game director and use Discord for all my communication. I have requested a review of my suspension.@discord @discord_support pic.twitter.com/QfAkCIJo6S— JDBRYANT 🎂 TODAY (@jdbryantdev) July 4, 2026
Discord isn’t alone in facing moderation troubles due to automated systems. Last year, users of Instagram and Facebook Groups reported widespread unexplained account suspensions that many believed were caused by AI moderation systems. Although users pointed to automation as the likely culprit, Meta never publicly confirmed whether AI errors were responsible. Now, Meta’s Oversight Board is pushing for increased transparency.
Tumblr last year also faced complaints from users who said their accounts had been mass-suspended without clear explanations. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.
You can contact or verify outreach from Lauren by emailing laurenf.techcrunch@gmail.com or via encrypted message at laurenforris22.25 on Signal.
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U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is about to announce a ban on social media usage for children under the age of 16, according to multiple reports.
While the government had previously revealed that it was studying options around a ban, both the Guardian and the Financial Times said that Starmer is now ready to unveil the policy in a speech on Monday.
Government sources told the Guardian that the U.K. ban will cover a similar range of social platforms as Australia, where TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, X, Threads, Snapchat, Twitch, and Kick are all banned for users under 16.
Other products, such as gaming apps, would not be banned outright, but for their younger users, they’d need to remove features like the ability to chat with strangers. The policy would also prohibit users under 18 from accessing romantic and sexual chatbots and seek to prevent late-night scrolling.
The government can use its existing regulatory powers to enforce some aspects of a ban, but new legislation may also be required, the Guardian said.
The U.K. is one of a number of countries following Australia’s lead by considering bans on social media use by children. The U.K. already passed an age verification law that was similarly touted as protecting the safety of children online.
These bans come amidst growing discussion around the effect of social media usage on teens and children — for example, the mother of murdered teen Brianna Ghey has called for a teen social media ban in the U.K. and said her daughter’s eating order and self-harming behavior were “significantly exacerbated by the harmful content she was consuming online.”
At the same time, these bans have been criticized for potentially violating user privacy and isolating children, while offering unproven benefits to their mental health.
Age verification laws — which, unlike outright bans, have taken effect in multiple U.S. states — have also been criticized as threats to online privacy and anonymity. And the verification methods aren’t exactly foolproof. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.
You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.
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