The biggest startup opportunity in 2026 might not be about artificial intelligence — it’s about real human connection. A growing wave of founders is betting that the best use of technology is to get people physically into the same room, and early data suggests they’re onto something powerful.
Welcome to the era of together tech: a new category of products and startups designed not to maximize your screen time, but to eliminate it in favor of face-to-face interaction.
What Is Together Tech?
Definition: Together tech refers to technology products and platforms whose primary design goal is to facilitate in-person social experiences. Rather than delivering value through continued digital engagement, together tech devices and apps succeed when users put them down and connect with the people around them.
The term was popularized by Brynn Putnam, founder of Board — a New York-based startup that has explicitly branded itself around this philosophy. Putnam, who previously sold connected fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, describes the category as the natural next step in a consumer technology arc that has, for two decades, been pointed firmly inward.
Together tech is not just a design philosophy — it is becoming a distinct market segment, one that investors, founders, and cultural commentators are increasingly paying close attention to.
Why Together Tech Is Rising Now
The Context: AI Saturation and Screen Fatigue
To understand why together tech is gaining momentum, you have to look at what’s happening around it. As of mid-2026, AI fundraising continues to shatter records. Alphabet recently announced an $85 billion raise for its AI business. Anthropic filed confidentially for its IPO. The money flowing into AI systems and digital platforms is unprecedented.
And yet, something is shifting in consumer sentiment. DuckDuckGo’s no-AI search option is seeing a boom in traffic. The cyberdeck community — hobbyists building whimsical, lo-fi DIY computers specifically designed to encourage users to go outside — has gone viral on TikTok. Founders who spent the last decade building attention-capture machines are now raising money to build the opposite.
This is not a coincidence. It is a cultural response to technological overload, and together tech is the startup category forming around that response.
The Loneliness Economy
Epidemiologists and sociologists have long documented rising rates of social isolation across the developed world. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has described loneliness as a public health crisis. Decades of research link in-person social interaction to better mental health, longer life expectancy, and stronger community resilience.
Together tech founders are, in effect, building a business case around the documented human need for physical co-presence — and they are doing so at a moment when consumers are increasingly aware of how much digital products have eroded it.
The Startups Leading the Together Tech Wave
Board: The Flagship Together Tech Company
Board is the clearest and most commercially validated example of together tech in 2026. The company’s flagship product is a 24-inch touchscreen in a wood-finish frame that uses proprietary technology to recognize physical game pieces, blending the tactile satisfaction of analog board games with the dynamism of digital interactivity.
The numbers are striking. Board is now present in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, and restaurants across all 50 U.S. states, with 85% of customers averaging 30 or more play sessions per month — an engagement rate that most consumer apps would envy, except Board’s success is measured in time away from a screen, not on one.
In June 2026, Board closed a $20 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, with General Partner Michael Mignano joining the board of directors. Notable angel investors include Biz Stone, Tim Ferriss, and Scott Belsky. The round builds on a previous $15 million raise led by Lerer Hippeau.
Alongside the funding, Board unveiled Board Studio, an AI-powered creation platform that will let anyone design original games using natural language prompts — taking an idea from concept to playable prototype in under an hour.
What makes Board a compelling together tech case study:
- Its core value proposition is face-to-face play, not digital engagement
- It serves multiple venue types: homes, schools, hospitals, restaurants
- It uses AI as a creation tool rather than as the end product
- Its retention metrics (30+ sessions/month for 85% of users) suggest genuine behavioral adoption
- It is led by a founder with a proven $500M hardware exit
Cyberdeck Builders: The DIY Together Tech Movement
Not all together tech is venture-backed. The cyberdeck community represents a grassroots version of the same impulse: hobbyists building intentionally limited, often Internet-free personal computers that prioritize physical interaction and outdoor use. Cyberdeck builds have gone viral on TikTok throughout 2026, reflecting a broader consumer appetite for technology that operates on human terms rather than platform terms.
The cyberdeck trend matters because it signals cultural demand, not just product-market fit for a single company. When people are spending their weekends building devices specifically designed to resist the attention economy, something significant is happening in the relationship between consumers and their technology.
Together Tech vs. Traditional Consumer Tech: A Comparison
| Dimension | Traditional Consumer Tech | Together Tech |
|---|---|---|
| Core goal | Maximize digital engagement | Enable in-person interaction |
| Success metric | Daily active users, session length | Play sessions, co-presence, social outcomes |
| AI usage | AI as core product | AI as creation/facilitation tool |
| Attention model | Capture and retain attention | Release attention to the physical world |
| Business model | Subscription, ads, data | Hardware sales, platform fees |
| Cultural framing | Productivity, connectivity | Belonging, play, shared experience |
| Investment narrative | Scale through digital distribution | Scale through physical venue penetration |
| Example | TikTok, Instagram, streaming apps | Board, cyberdeck community, offline-first apps |
This contrast is not simply philosophical. It represents a different theory of value creation — one that together tech founders argue is more durable because it is aligned with documented human needs rather than engineered behavioral loops.
What Makes Together Tech Different From Anti-AI Backlash?
Q: Isn’t together tech just a reaction against AI, similar to “AI-free” products?
A: No — and the distinction matters for investors and founders alike.
Anti-AI backlash products — such as browsers or search engines that explicitly remove AI features — are defined by what they are against. Their value proposition is negation: no AI, no tracking, no personalization. That is a meaningful niche, but it is inherently reactive and fragile. When the cultural moment shifts, the negation loses its charge.
Together tech is defined by what it is for. Board uses AI as a tool to help people create games — the AI is in service of the together tech goal, not its enemy. The cyberdeck community isn’t anti-technology; it’s pro-intentionality. The together tech movement is building affirmative products that deliver a specific human outcome: people physically sharing space.
This is why together tech, as highlighted by TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, feels less like backlash and more like a genuine category — one that can coexist with AI-heavy products rather than being defined against them.
Why Investors Are Paying Attention to Together Tech
For the better part of a decade, consumer hardware was the least fashionable sector in venture capital. The combination of high capital requirements, supply chain complexity, and the difficulty of achieving software-like margins kept most institutional investors focused on pure software and, more recently, AI.
That calculus is shifting. Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau — one of Board’s backers — recently described his excitement about consumer as higher than it has been in years, pointing to the quality of founders now entering the space and to new capabilities made possible by AI that weren’t available even 12 months ago.
Union Square Ventures’ decision to lead Board’s Series A — with Michael Mignano’s first investment since joining the firm — signals that together tech is being taken seriously at the institutional level, not just as a feel-good story but as a genuine investment thesis.
Several factors are driving this renewed interest:
- AI as an enabler, not just a threat. Together tech companies like Board are using AI for content generation and platform creation, reducing the content costs that previously made interactive hardware unscalable.
- Venue diversification reduces consumer risk. Board’s presence in schools, hospitals, and restaurants gives it institutional revenue that pure consumer hardware companies rarely achieve.
- Cultural tailwinds. Growing public discourse around loneliness, screen addiction, and the mental health impacts of social media creates a receptive environment for products explicitly designed to address those concerns.
- Proven founders. Brynn Putnam’s Mirror exit provides the kind of hardware credibility that VCs typically demand before backing capital-intensive consumer products.
What Together Tech Means for the Future of Startups
The together tech wave is not simply a market trend — it is a signal about where consumer values are heading. As AI continues to automate more cognitive tasks and digital platforms become more pervasive, the experiences that cannot be replicated digitally — shared physical presence, tactile play, eye contact, laughter in a room — become more scarce and therefore more valuable.
Startups that build around this scarcity are, in effect, betting on a fundamental and durable aspect of human nature: the need to be with other people. That is a different kind of moat than algorithmic recommendation or network effects. It is a moat built on human biology.
For founders, together tech represents a design challenge as much as a market opportunity. Products in this category must be good enough at the in-person experience to justify their existence — they cannot rely on habit loops or notification systems to drive retention. Board’s 85% monthly retention rate suggests that when together tech works, it really works.
For the startup ecosystem more broadly, the together tech movement is a reminder that the next major consumer category does not always emerge from the leading edge of technical capability. Sometimes it emerges from a recognition of what technology has taken away — and a commitment to giving it back.
Key Takeaways: What You Need to Know About Together Tech
- Together tech is a startup category designed to use technology specifically to enable in-person social experiences rather than digital engagement.
- The category is gaining momentum in 2026 as a cultural and market response to AI saturation and rising screen fatigue.
- Board, founded by Brynn Putnam and backed by Union Square Ventures, is the most commercially advanced together tech company, with tens of thousands of devices deployed across homes, schools, hospitals, and restaurants.
- Together tech is meaningfully different from anti-AI backlash products because it is affirmative — defined by what it creates (human connection) rather than what it rejects.
- AI is not an enemy of together tech; in companies like Board, it is a tool for lowering content creation barriers and expanding the platform.
- Investor interest is returning to consumer hardware through the lens of together tech, driven by proven founders, venue diversification, and AI-enabled cost reduction.
- The cyberdeck community represents a grassroots, non-VC version of the same cultural impulse.
- The durable competitive advantage in together tech is alignment with irreducible human needs: physical co-presence, play, and face-to-face belonging.
The Bottom Line
The most intriguing startup bet of 2026 is not the next large language model or the next AI agent framework. It is the quietly radical idea that technology should bring people into rooms together rather than pulling them apart. Together tech is early, but it is not a fad. It is a design philosophy, an investment category, and a cultural corrective — all at once.
Brynn Putnam built a company worth half a billion dollars by helping people work out alone in front of a mirror. Now she is betting that the next chapter belongs to products that make people look up from their mirrors and look at each other instead. If the early numbers from Board are any guide, she may be right again.