## Alcohol Compliance Checks Reveal Business Failures

In a recent enforcement action, **three businesses in Minnehaha County** failed alcohol compliance checks conducted by the **Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office**. This initiative targeted establishments holding alcohol sales licenses to ensure regulatory adherence.

![Alcohol Compliance Check](https://www.keloland.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/103/2018/01/alcohol-generic.tmb-625x350-cr_51857256_ver1.0.jpg?w=625&h=350&crop=1)

According to an official post on the **Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page**, out of **50 businesses inspected**, **47 passed** the compliance checks, while **three failed**. The non-compliant businesses identified are:

- **Garretson Food Center**
- **The Gulch Bar and Grill** in Garretson
- **Chaser’s Food and Spirits** in Sioux Falls

Failing these checks can lead to **serious consequences**, including **fines**, **license suspension or revocation**, and **misdemeanor charges** for the employees responsible. These penalties underscore the importance of strict adherence to alcohol sales regulations for business sustainability.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — Three businesses in Minnehaha County failed alcohol compliance checks done by the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office. According to the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office Facebook, of the 50 businesses checked, 47 passed and three failed. The 3 that failed the compliance check were the Garretson Food Center, The Gulch Bar and […]

Shocking Compliance Failures: 3 Minnehaha Businesses Face Liquor License Penalties

## From Rejection to Raising Millions: The Rise of Solo VCs

After experiencing a small startup exit and being turned down by every VC firm he applied to, **Tim Chen** began angel investing and eventually stumbled into raising his own fund.

Now, as the solo investor behind **Essence VC**, he just closed his fourth fund at **$41 million** "without even trying." Chen's secret weapon? Being technical enough to debate PhD founders on implementation details while understanding the market dynamics that turn scrappy startups into category leaders.

In a recent episode of TechCrunch's **Equity** podcast, Julie Bort sat down with Tim Chen to explore the rise of solo VCs and who's rewriting the traditional venture playbook.

### Key Insights from the Discussion

- **Why the YC playbook of 'revenue at all costs' doesn't work for infrastructure startups**, and what Chen tells technical founders to focus on instead.
- The strategic pivot Chen pushed one portfolio company to make that completely changed their trajectory.
- What being a "small exit founder" taught Chen about venture capital, and why he thinks the industry has it backwards.

Listen to the full episode on platforms like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Spotify, and follow Equity on X and Threads for more updates.

Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort sat down with Tim Chen to explore the rise of solo VCs and who's rewriting the traditional venture playbook. 

The Solo VC Secret: Why Startups Are Ditching the 'Revenue at All Costs' Playbook

## OnlyFans Expands into Business Education

In its **first foray into business content**, the platform has tapped **Rachael McCrary**, founder of the lingerie company Spice Rack and a former SuicideGirl, to lead courses aimed at teaching creators how to **monetize their ideas**. This initiative marks a significant pivot for OnlyFans, traditionally known for adult content, as it ventures into educational territory to empower its user base.

![The Founder and CEO of Spice Rack Rachael McCrary.](https://media.wired.com/photos/68ffbdcf7d0e121743f1850e/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/OnlyFans-Pivots-Business-School-Culture-Rachael_1387_2048px.jpg)

*The Founder and CEO of Spice Rack, Rachael McCrary. Photograph: Charlie Chipnman; Courtesy of Rachael McCrary; Spice Rack*

Rachael McCrary brings a unique background as an entrepreneur and former nude model, offering insights into building a business from the ground up. Her experience with Spice Rack, which focuses on lingerie, positions her to guide creators on leveraging their personal brands and ideas for financial success. This move by OnlyFans could open new revenue streams for creators and diversify the platform's offerings beyond its current scope.

In its first foray into business content, the platform has asked lingerie entrepreneur and ex-SuicideGirl Rachael McCrary to teach creators how to monetize their ideas.

OnlyFans Launches Business School: Learn How to Monetize Your Ideas from a Lingerie Entrepreneur

After two intense days of live demos and pitches, the five finalists for this year's **Startup Battlefield** have been revealed. Selected from thousands of applicants, these top contenders will compete for the grand prize of **$100,000 in equity-free funding** and the prestigious Startup Battlefield Cup.

## Charter Space: Fintech for the Final Frontier
Charter Space is developing a dev tool for aerospace engineers, but its core mission is to revolutionize **spacecraft insurance** through fintech. By capturing manufacturing and test data directly, the software feeds an underwriting interface that connects with major insurance carriers. The goal is to enable faster, cheaper, and more reliable risk evaluation, eventually powering new forms of credit and **nondilutive funding** for space companies.

## Glīd: Streamlining Freight from Road to Rail
Glīd (pronounced “Glide”) is tackling the complex process of moving containers from ships to freight trains. The company has created hardware and software solutions to speed up and reduce costs. Its first product, **GliderM**, is a hybrid-electric vehicle that can directly move 20-foot containers to rail without forklifts or hostler trucks.

## MacroCycle: A Shortcut to Affordable Recycled Plastic
MacroCycle has developed an innovative method to make **recycled plastic as cheap as virgin material**. Unlike traditional chemical recycling, their process doesn't break down polymers. Instead, it forms polymer chains into rings called macrocycles, which remain after contaminants are washed away, offering a sustainable alternative.

## Nephrogen: AI and Gene Therapy to Reverse Kidney Disease
Nephrogen is a biotech startup using **AI and advanced screening** to create a specialized delivery system for gene-editing medicines targeting kidney cells. Founder Demetri Maxim, who lives with polycystic kidney disease, claims their delivery mechanism is **100 times more efficient** than FDA-approved methods and plans to participate in clinical studies.

## Unlisted Homes: Zillow for Off-Market Properties
Unlisted Homes connects homeowners with buyers before properties hit the market. Using public records of 21 million homes, the platform creates detailed profiles similar to traditional real estate sites. Instead of facilitating transactions, Unlisted sells **sponsorships by ZIP code** to real estate agents, listing them as local experts.

After two days full of live demos and pitches, it's time to announce the five finalists at this year's Startup Battlefield.

Meet the 5 Game-Changing Startups Competing for $100K at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

## The Power of Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

Being at the right place at the right time led Yale University’s **Nathaneo Johnson** and **Sean Hargrow** to hit the jackpot with their startup, **Series**.

## Balancing Entrepreneurship and Academics

The founders are the masterminds behind **Series**, an **AI social platform** capturing the attention of **Generation Z**. While many may wonder how Johnson, a computer science and economics major, and Hargrow, a neuroscience major, balance entrepreneurship with academics, the duo clarified that **dropping out of Yale University was never an option**. Instead, they’ve learned to set boundaries as they navigate building their platform and establishing themselves in the **venture capital** landscape.

During the **AFROTECH™ U Summit** at **AFROTECH™ Conference 2025** in Houston, Hargrow said, “You really can’t do the outstanding job of being a good founder and being profitable and raise a round, and do all these things that we want and are aspiring to do if you hedge. And that hedging is when you’re trying to get your homework in by 12, but you also want to raise a million dollars before you graduate school. You got to pick one or the other.”

He continued, “So, what we were able to do is very much so pick what we wanted to do, but remember our kind of bounds as young Black men. To get into those rooms, the only thing that was really getting us into those rooms was… Yale. So I couldn’t just drop out like a lot of other minorities and white children might have the privilege to do, because they have a pipeline of succession behind them or maybe their parents did it. But for us, totally thrown into this unknowing, unbeknownst to what entrepreneurship was, we realized, let’s just play it safe and not hedge our bets. Let’s go all in on one dream.”

## Achieving Historic Funding

That dream so far encompasses a **historic $3.1 million in pre-seed funding round** led by Andreessen Horowitz Partner Anne Lee Skates (now with Parable VC), which set a new precedent for Ivy league students, as AFROTECH™ previously reported.

## Key Fundraising Insights

Johnson revealed a learning lesson for conference attendees to consider as it relates to their fundraising process. He emphasized the need to **understand how the game works**, such as the valuation price of what investors will pay for an idea, and not be discouraged by metrics such as needing 100,000 users or $60,000 in reoccurring revenue to be attractive to investors.

Not discounting themselves and remaining true to the Series vision led to a **significant investment halfway through a late dinner**.

“You just need to talk to the right person,” Johnson said. “That’s why we built Series. We built Series to help people connect with those who could provide that mutualistic value. And if we had picked Series, which essentially, in my opinion, was an idea, we had a few thousand users. We had an MVP built, but I know there’s millions of products to have an MVP built and a few thousand users. We just ended up talking to the right person at the right time. We understood the value add of what our product can do for a certain community. And that obvious belief in what that product can do is what pushed her over to, in a dinner, say, ‘Oh, you guys are raising $1.5 million, let me just close that extra million dollars.’ Craziest moment that we’ve had so far in our lives.”

He affirmed, “There’s probably a person in this world who’s someone out of the 8 billion people around us that would probably want to have a dinner with any of you guys, and give you guys a million dollars. Someone who’s into philanthropic efforts, someone who’s into investing early, who believes in the sort of mission and impact of what you’re building, and the person is waiting for you to meet them. So it’s more about how do you target your outreach, how do you approach your investment, and most importantly, who are you talking to to ensure that what you’re building early gets funded early.”

Being at the right place at the right time led Yale University’s Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow to hit the jackpot.

How Two Yale Students Landed a $1M Investment Over Dinner with Their AI Social Platform

## The Problem with Traditional Lending

Jannae Gammage was working as a technology consultant with the Small Business Administration, helping companies access capital through traditional lenders like banks and credit unions. She couldn't stop thinking about a fundamental problem: the ways lenders and businesses connected were woefully outdated, especially on the technological front.

"I was inside the mess, watching good businesses die, while trying to navigate legacy workflows," she told TechCrunch. "My literal job was to find technology to solve this, and it didn't exist. I couldn't find anything."

## The Birth of Cyphr

So she called up an old friend, Alaia Martin, and the two got to work. In 2022, the duo started working on **Cyphr**, a Kansas City-based company focused on making the lending process easier for lenders and small businesses. Cyphr is a **Top 20 finalist** in Startup Battlefield, part of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.

## How Cyphr's Technology Works

The product analyzes **alternative data sources** and **financial patterns** of small businesses to help lenders make decisions about small business creditworthiness. Cyphr went through a few iterations since its launch, but the recent advancements in **artificial intelligence** paved the way for what the product is today. It officially launched in the market in April 2024.

"When we started out, the problem we were trying to solve was, 'How can we make underwriting smarter, faster, so that these entrepreneurs get access to capital?'" Gammage, CEO, said. "We wanted a world where money moved freely like it did in other verticals. We came in with a **borrower-centric experience**, whereas a lot of companies were focused on 'how do we make this work for lenders.'"

They started building an **LLM**, using training data based on overlooked business owners and their company's financials, to help lenders make decisions about which companies to partner with.

"We were doing it manually," Martin, the company's COO, said about building LLMs before AI's latest upgrade. "Even though we're an AI native company, we started doing this without really any help."

Their current model is on top of an **OpenAI model**, which they've fine-tuned for themselves.

## The AI Advantage in Lending

The latest updates in AI, however, did more than boost their product — it also made lenders more willing to work with them, Gammage said. The financial industry was already shifting because of COVID, knowing they needed to digitize and modernize in some ways. "Now you add in this AI, where they're using it on a daily basis, it feels comfortable," she said.

"If we had [gone to market] in 2022, it definitely would have been a lot harder to get buy-in, just because of the fear around technology and AI and the status quo," Gammage said.

## Fundraising Journey

The company has raised **a million dollars** to date. Gammage said the process was easy and hard at the same time.

"The things I thought would be hard were not hard. The things I thought would be pretty straightforward were not at all," she said. One sore point was how capital flowed: They would watch peers raise millions at once, whereas for them, the money came in tranches as they partook in accelerators and various pitch competitions.

"It's very hard to have catalytic moments when you're receiving your cash injections that way," she said.

Martin, meanwhile, was worried about what it would be like fundraising in San Francisco as two Black women with non-technical backgrounds from the Midwest. "We are not what you think of when you think of a tech founder," she said. But she said they didn't have much of a problem. "We were really well received in Silicon Valley."

"I'm so grateful we were able to raise because I know it's less than 1% of us that can say that," Gammage added.

## Future Plans and Ambitions

The company has big plans: It's currently building a platform to help companies find opportunities when the **World Cup** comes to town next year. Gammage and Martin have also thought about new locations for the company, though nothing is set in stone.

"We are excited about the future of the company," Gammage said, adding that winning Disrupt's Battlefield will hopefully help accomplish these goals. "Even momentum requires money."

![TechCrunch Disrupt 2025](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/TC25_Disrupt_General_Article_No-Anniversary_Headers_1920x1080.png?w=680)

Cyphr's product analyzes alternative data sources and financial patterns of small businesses to help lenders make decisions about small business creditworthiness. 

Shocking Compliance Failures: 3 Minnehaha Businesses Face Liquor License Penalties

Summary:

Alcohol Compliance Checks Reveal Business Failures

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Other Latest News

The Solo VC Secret: Why Startups Are Ditching the 'Revenue at All Costs' Playbook

OnlyFans Launches Business School: Learn How to Monetize Your Ideas from a Lingerie Entrepreneur

Meet the 5 Game-Changing Startups Competing for $100K at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

How Two Yale Students Landed a $1M Investment Over Dinner with Their AI Social Platform

How Cyphr's AI Is Revolutionizing Small Business Lending for the Digital Age

Other Latest News

The Solo VC Secret: Why Startups Are Ditching the 'Revenue at All Costs' Playbook

OnlyFans Launches Business School: Learn How to Monetize Your Ideas from a Lingerie Entrepreneur

Meet the 5 Game-Changing Startups Competing for $100K at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

How Two Yale Students Landed a $1M Investment Over Dinner with Their AI Social Platform

How Cyphr's AI Is Revolutionizing Small Business Lending for the Digital Age