I spent last week in Windham, New York, at Unreasonable Food , a strategic collaboration between Mars and Unreasonable Group that supports growth-stage entrepreneurs working toward a healthier food system. At one point I stood in a circle in a field, looking into the eyes of the person who runs procurement for Mars Snacking. Neither of us was allowed to talk. Neither of us was allowed to look away. Somewhere in there I stopped rehearsing my pitch and started noticing how long it had actually been since I’d looked anyone in the eye that long.

That discomfort is quietly becoming a business model. A small group of founders are betting real money that the scarcest resource in 2026 isn’t a smarter AI model. It’s a room full of people who showed up in person.

According to a June 2025 World Health Organization report , loneliness and social isolation are linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year worldwide, or roughly one in six people. That’s not a wellness-industry talking point. It’s a public health finding, and a handful of repeat founders are treating it like a market.

Brynn Putnam sold her connected-fitness company Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million . Tristan Walker sold Walker & Company Brands, his men’s grooming company, to Procter & Gamble . Both are building again, on companies that share nothing on paper and everything underneath: a bet that connection, not code, is the next scarce resource.

Why Are Repeat Founders Betting Against Screens?

Putnam’s new company, Board , makes a touchscreen table built for a group sitting around it, not one person alone with a device. She told TechCrunch the idea came from her own household, which grew from three people to seven in a blended family, and from a simple problem: no product let people of wildly different ages and abilities play together. “How can we use tech to create a shared experience?” is the question she said drove the pivot.

Walker’s Heirloom Craft is buying and scaling fine-craft trade schools, starting with a leatherworking school in San Francisco founded by an Hermès artisan-ambassador. He told TechCrunch he started the company out of worry that AI is “stealing knowledge work” and severing the chain from master to apprentice that used to transmit real skill. More than half the seats at Heirloom’s first location are filled not by career-changers, he said, but by young tech workers looking for a “phones-down creative outlet.”

What Happens When The Room Becomes The Product?

Andy Dunn’s Pie has moved from a friend-matching app to what he calls a social life operating system, anchored by digital hubs for recurring groups like run clubs. Audrey Gelman, whose earlier company The Wing folded during the pandemic, is trying again with the Six Bells Countryside Inn, a Hudson Valley guesthouse that runs a monthly murder-mystery dinner. The New York Times reported this summer that guests linger at the bar past midnight trading numbers with strangers, which is either a strange marketing win or exactly the point.

Does Togetherness Actually Scale Like Software?

Togetherness doesn’t yet scale, but founders are still raising millions off of it. Putnam has raised $35 million for Board. Dunn’s Pie has raised $24 million , and Gelman’s Six Bells roughly $3.8 million . The outlier is Adam Neumann, whose real-estate venture Flow markets itself around solving loneliness through shared living and has raised more than $450 million , mostly from Andreessen Horowitz, dwarfing everyone else combined. Getting strangers to show up for each other has never been as scalable as shipping an app. What’s notable is who’s placing the bet: founders who already guessed right once about where a market was headed.

What Does This Bet Look Like Inside Food?

Unreasonable Food is running the same experiment, with less press coverage. Now in its third year, Mars , in collaboration with Unreasonable Group , selected thirteen new ventures for this year’s cohort, working across gut health, natural ingredients, protein, food safety, and circularity. Daniel Epstein , who founded Unreasonable Group, says the whole model rests on one line: “We only innovate at the rate at which we build trust.” Gulen Bengi , Mars Snacking’s chief growth officer, put it more specifically: the cohort works by “bringing together deep consumer understanding with the power of nature, science, and technology.” Amanda Davies, Mars Snacking’s global vice president of R&D, sustainability, and commercial, left already talking about timelines, not takeaways, saying she was looking at “opportunities to get their ideas scaled” and “excited about the progress we can make” within the next ninety days.

The highest-leverage hour of my week wasn’t a pitch session. It was that circle in the field, and what it surfaced: how much of Kuli Kuli’s own growth, from a Peace Corps village in Niger to 11,000 retail shelves, has run on the same unscalable input, growers, retail buyers, and roughly 400 investor pitches, one relationship built in a room at a time. Twelve years of that same slow, in-person math got the company to where it is now.

That’s the part the AI conversation keeps skipping. The tools got radically better at answering questions. They didn’t get better at building the trust that makes a founder’s actual problems, the vendor who’ll take a risk, the retailer who’ll take a meeting, the cofounder who’ll stay through the bad year, solvable. Putnam, Walker, Dunn, and Gelman are making a version of the same wager the rest of us are making more quietly: that showing up in a room, phone down, isn’t nostalgia. It’s unfinished infrastructure.

The dollars behind that bet are still small next to anything AI-labeled, and founders chasing it should expect a slower, messier scaling curve than a software comp would predict. But the WHO didn’t publish a mortality statistic about a niche founder trend. It published one about a global health condition, and someone is going to build the infrastructure that addresses it. The founders worth watching this year are the ones treating a circle of strangers in a field as seriously as they’d treat a term sheet.