When the residents of Nashville want a good cut of meat for dinner or a barbecue, they stop by butcher shop Porter Road, where everything is sourced from a local farm and hand-cut by people who know their meats. The neighborhood favorite, which opened in 2011, was founded by trained chefs Chris Carter and James Peisker, who realized while shopping for their catering business that it was difficult to find quality meat, even when they visited farmer's markets. In 2018, they took the business online to recreate the local experience for home cooks nationwide. "Bringing Porter Road online truly happened out of necessity,

Traditional approaches to drug development for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) haven’t offered patients much. Alice Zhang is trying something new. Her company, Verge Genomics, uses artificial intelligence to identify promising compounds, refining the algorithms with high-quality data from patients and lab tests. She hopes this will be a more effective way to find treatments for intractable neurodegenerative diseases. Zhang’s unorthodox method was inspired when she heard a researcher give a talk detailing how hundreds of genes interact in cancer and wondered whether this “network” approach could apply to neurodegenerative diseases. “Computational biology has provided so much insight about cancer,” she says. “The brain is about 10 years behind.”

The star of Netflix’s “GLOW,” which returns for Season 2, is not afraid of getting physical. Alison Brie at the Rumble gym in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “I’m not an athlete by nature,” Alison Brie said one afternoon in the Chelsea section of New York, though you wouldn’t guess that from her current role. The 35-year-old actress has been pushing her body to its limits as the star of “GLOW,” the silly-smart Netflix comedy about female wrestling, inspired by the schlocky 1980s franchise Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.

Weeks after he was born, Alex Vardakostas’ mother strapped him into a baby carrier and went back to work flipping burgers at A’s, the Southern California fast-food restaurant that she and her husband owned. When Vardakostas was a toddler, the town’s local newspaper, Dana Point News, ran a photograph of him peering through the restaurant’s walk-up window. As he grew older, he often played in the back of the kitchen among pallets of hamburger buns while his parents worked. At 8, he started filling drink orders, standing on top of a milk crate to reach the soda machine. Sometimes he ran food

Creator’s transparent burger robot doesn’t grind your brisket and chuck steak into a gourmet patty until you order it. That’s just one way this startup, formerly known as Momentum Machines, wants to serve the world’s freshest cheeseburger for just $6. On June 27th, after eight years in development, Creator unveils its first robot restaurant before opening to the public in September. We got a sneak peek…err…taste. When I ask how a startup launching one eatery at a time could become a $10 billion company, Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas looks me dead in the eye and says, “the market is much bigger than that.”

On June 27, the world’s first robot-crafted burger will roll off a conveyor belt in San Francisco and into the hands of the public. You could call it the freshest burger on Earth. The product, from Bay Area-based Creator, a culinary robotics company, is assembled and cooked in a machine that contains 20 computers, 350 sensors, and 50 actuator mechanisms. It does everything from slicing and toasting the brioche bun to adding toppings (to order) and seasoning and cooking the patties, all in five minutes. The meat is ground to order—why it’s touted as so fresh—and sourced from premium ingredients. It emerges from the machine piled with tomatoes and lettuce, sprinkled with seasonings, and drizzled with sauces, at which point it’s transferred by human hands to the customer. The price: $6.

Match Group has announced that it has bought a majority stake in the dating app Hinge. The company acquired a 51% ownership of Hinge, with the option to acquire the remaining 49% within the next 12 months. With its Hinge acquisition, Match Group continues its dating app domination. Matter of fact, Match Group probably owns most of the dating apps you probably use on a regular basis. Match Group’s current portfolio of dating apps now includes Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Match, and Plenty of Fish–along with almost 40 other brands. The only major dating app Match Group doesn’t own is Bumble–and it’s likely to stay that way after the conglomerate sued the anti-Tinder dating app over alleged patent and trademark violations.

Peek, a U.S. startup aiming to digitize the travel activities industry, has pulled a $23 million Series B round of financing and uncorked a partnership with Google that will help increase its visibility. Founded in 2012 by Ruzwana Bashir (CEO) and Oskar Bruening (CTO), the San Francisco-based startup describes itself as “OpenTable for the activities market” in that it aims to make booking activities as seamless and straightforward as a restaurant or even a flight.

#4 Virta Health Corp. Developing an online treatment plan for Type 2 diabetes. Virtual coaches help provide personalized diet plans. Physicians oversee the plans remotely. Based in San Francisco, founded in 2014 by Sami Inkinen, Stephen Phinney, Jeff Volek. Virta has raised $75 million to date and has 101 employees.

Acorns, the financial management service for micro-investments, is adding a rewards debit card to its arsenal of tools aimed at getting Americans to create balanced stock portfolios for economic health. The company has already racked up 10,000 pre-orders for its new (gorgeous) payment card that offers perks like investments into Acorns accounts when users purchase with the card at certain online and brick and mortar retailers. The debit card comes with Acorns micro-investment and its retirement account built into the card’s services. According to the company, it’s the next step in its mission to build an easy,

Here are 5 lessons I have learned (sometimes expensively) during my first 5 years investing… Many of these lessons are also directly applicable to my personal life, development and pursuit of happiness & fulfillment as a person. 1) Fewer strong, genuine, honest relationships are better than a million loosely held “connections.”

Porter Road, an online animal butcher shop, has secured $3.7 million in seed funding. The investors included Max Ventures, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Tribeca Venture Partners, Collaborative Fund and Great Oaks VC. Porter Road – the first online, whole animal butcher shop catering to today’s consumer appetite for sustainability and transparency in the meat and poultry food system – today announced that it has raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors including Max Ventures, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Tribeca Venture Partners, Collaborative Fund, Great Oaks VC, among others.