PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bill Gross, founder of Idealab and its successor, Idealab Studio, and the serial entrepreneur behind 175+ companies, today announced Idealab.ai, a new platform that applies AI to his idea generation and company-building methodology and experience to identify potential businesses rooted in real-world problems. Gross brings 50 years of entrepreneurship, including 30 years of building companies through Idealab entities.

At public launch, Idealab.ai will make more than 1.2 million business ideas searchable and freely available to people around the world. Visitors will be able to search, filter, view idea briefs, save ideas, and use its “Labs” functionality to take an idea to the next step. Later versions will include the ability to apply for funding and search for collaborators. At a moment when AI is widely framed as a threat to jobs and opportunity, Idealab.ai offers another possibility: using AI to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and help more people explore potential businesses that address real-world needs and could lead to new jobs.

The company’s long-term ambition is to help catalyze the creation of 1,000,000 new businesses and 100,000,000 new jobs by making business ideas rooted in real-world problems freely available and developing AI-powered tools to help people test ideas and build them into businesses. People bring judgment and make the decisions that shape what they build.

“My life has been about finding important problems and building companies to solve them,” said Bill Gross, founder and chairman of Idealab and founder and executive chairman of Idealab.ai. “AI now gives us the ability to extend that process to millions more ideas and potential entrepreneurs. We want to give those ideas away and help people build them — to use AI not just to increase productivity, but to create companies, livelihoods, jobs, solutions, and hope.”

Turning a lifetime of company-building into a system

Idealab.ai began with an insight Gross had while reading about the global copper shortage: almost every business article contains an ingredient of business creation: a problem to solve, a capability that enables solutions, or a change to the landscape creating a window of opportunity. That pattern extended beyond articles to research, patents, public company filings, and community discussions. Gross began asking whether the process he had refined for more than three decades to identify and develop promising businesses could be made explicit, automated, and applied continuously at machine scale. Over his career, he developed 31 methods for generating business ideas. When AI applied those methods, it outperformed what he had long considered his superpower, giving him a way to scale that experience.

The system analyzes a broad universe of sources and infers three ingredients of business creation:

  1. Opportunities: problems, friction, unmet needs, and latent demand.
  2. Enablers: technologies, scientific advances, materials, processes, and changing cost curves.
  3. Shifts: regulatory, behavioral, economic, cultural, and geopolitical changes that create new windows of opportunity.

As of today, Idealab.ai has analyzed more than 17 million sources and generated more than 1.2 million business ideas. Each idea can be researched, evaluated, and ranked against key indicators of business potential—from urgency of need and technology readiness to market viability and competitive whitespace—with human judgment remaining central to deciding which ideas are worth pursuing.

The result is a system that connects a meaningful need with an enabling technology or method and a shift that makes the timing right—then develops that combination into a potential business for a person or organization to explore.

Giving the ideas away—and helping people build them

Idealab.ai is making its public business ideas freely available because its system can generate far more potential businesses than any one company could pursue. Sharing them gives more people the chance to find an idea that matters to them and make it their own—so an idea can become a business, a livelihood, and a solution.

Finding an idea is only the beginning. AI does not build companies; people do. The initial experience is designed to help prospective founders discover ideas aligned with their interests, skills, geography, and available resources — or strengthen an idea they already have by finding related concepts and evidence.

Behind that experience, Idealab.ai is developing the Periodic Table of Business Functions™, a framework for the work required to build and operate a company — e.g., customer discovery, product development, finance, sales, operations, legal, etc. Rather than asking founders to navigate that framework directly, Idealab.ai ultimately intends to offer a conversational company-building environment that can recommend next steps, provide the relevant business functions, retain context, and bring in human judgment where it matters most.

For founders who want a deeper, forward-looking assessment of an idea before committing to it, Idealab.ai’s Advanced Search (Beta) also offers a paid report from Preseen. Preseen is the AI forecasting tool for decision makers.

Idealab.ai also plans to develop an entrepreneur community where founders can find complementary collaborators, exchange practical support, and continue moving forward.

Catalyzing a global movement for entrepreneurship

No single organization can create one million new businesses. Reaching that ambition will require a movement. Idealab.ai aims to help catalyze one by connecting promising ideas with people who dream of building them — and with organizations that can educate, support, fund, equip, and serve them.

The movement will bring together collaborators across several distinct roles:

  • Academic institutions and entrepreneurship programs: to pilot business-idea discovery in courses, hackathons, and student company creation, and explore pathways for research and patent commercialization.
  • Accelerators, incubators, startup studios, and entrepreneur networks: to distribute ideas, recruit founders, strengthen existing venture pipelines, and provide local knowledge and support.
  • Technology and infrastructure companies: to power selected business functions, platform capabilities, and founder tools.
  • Workforce, economic-mobility, and public-sector organizations: to explore how displaced workers and underserved communities can gain access to ideas, guidance, and startup capital.
  • Research institutions and enterprises: to test private applications of the system against proprietary intellectual property, capabilities, research, and market signals.
  • Media and data organizations: to surface, contextualize, and track promising ideas, founders, and company creation while preserving editorial independence.

At launch, Idealab.ai is working with collaborators across North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, alongside the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), which operates in 200 countries.

Collaborators include: RAISE US, Arizona State University, Imperial College London, Caltech, Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), Flat6Labs, Janngo, Endeavor, Mercury, and Cloudflare.

Idealab.ai and RAISE US intend to work together to expand access to entrepreneurship tools as part of RAISE US’s work with states and community business leaders.

Gina Raimondo, Co-Chair and CEO of RAISE US, 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and 75th Governor of Rhode Island, said, “RAISE US is committed to helping the American workforce adapt to an AI economy, including by supporting small business growth and job creation. We’re pleased to work with Idealab.ai to expand access to entrepreneurship resources as part of our work with states and community business leaders.”

As a featured launch partner, Arizona State University (ASU) has committed to providing all its students worldwide with access to Idealab.ai and launching a showcase highlighting the top 10 businesses built by students or faculty from ideas generated by the platform.

Dr. Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University, said, “As America’s most innovative university with a commitment to principled innovation, we don’t use AI to replace human intelligence—we use it to augment it, amplify it, and unlock true human potential at scale. Our partnership with Idealab.ai demonstrates this philosophy in action. By pairing Idealab.ai with the creativity and abilities of the 200,000 degree-seeking students that enroll annually, as well as the 1.5 million engaging in ASU learning around the world, we’re building a global engine for entrepreneurship, job creation, and real-world impact.”

Idealab.ai’s collaboration with Imperial College London anticipates a private instance of the idea engine to help Imperial explore business opportunities within its research, alongside student access to the Periodic Table of Business Functions™. Idealab.ai will also support Imperial Trusted AI’s student engagement programs and pitch competitions. Imperial plans to contribute its educational expertise to help develop a curriculum template introducing the idea engine to faculty and students and provide guidance as Idealab.ai navigates the European market.

Mary Ryan, Vice Provost, Research and Enterprise, Imperial, said, “One of the hardest things for new entrepreneurs is matching real problems to the right solutions. Idealab.ai is a shortcut to product-market fit and I am looking forward to the opportunity to put it in the hands of our students in classes and hackathons across Imperial.”

Fred Farina, Chief Innovation and Corporate Partnerships Officer at Caltech, said, “Caltech is expanding its entrepreneurial programs for students with classes, internships, business plan competitions and more, and we look forward to bringing even more ideas to students and graduates with this system.”

Rita Gunther McGrath, an Academic Director in Executive Education and professor of management at Columbia Business School, said, “Bill Gross is masterminding the next level of entrepreneurship, building the foundation for a world in which the creation of new value can be accessible to everyone.”

Idealab.ai is also working with Global Entrepreneurship Network, Endeavor, Janngo, and Flat6Labs to introduce the platform to entrepreneurs and companies across their networks.

Jeff Hoffman, Chairman, Global Entrepreneurship Network, said, “At the Global Entrepreneurship Network, we work to make it easier for anyone, anywhere, to start and scale a business. Making business ideas freely available through Idealab.ai gives more people in the communities we serve a starting point for their entrepreneurial journey.”

Linda Rottenberg, Co-founder and CEO, Endeavor, said, “Endeavor was built on a simple conviction: talent is everywhere, but capital and opportunity are not. The entrepreneurs in our network pay their success forward by mentoring, training, and investing in the founders who follow. We call that the Multiplier Effect. Idealab.ai brings that same force to the very start of the journey, putting a million ideas in front of the people who will build the next generation of category-defining companies, wherever they are.”

Fatoumata Bâ, Founder and Executive Chair, Janngo, said, “Janngo uses technology and capital to leapfrog development in Africa. Entrepreneurship is the engine that creates jobs at scale, especially for women and youth. Idealab.ai puts a real business idea, and the tools to build it, into the hands of many more people. That is exactly the kind of engine Africa needs.”

Ahmed Alfi, Founder, Flat6Labs, said, “Idealab.ai is one of those products that leaves you genuinely excited about the possibilities. It will help entrepreneurs and venture builders in our region explore, identify, and unlock massive opportunities. Most of all it will give hope that AI can create opportunities for new companies not just eliminate jobs.”

Idealab.ai is also announcing Cloudflare as the first partner for its Periodic Table of Business Functions™, a framework that maps the 118 core functions involved in building and operating a company. Through the partnership, Cloudflare will support businesses started through the Idealab.ai platform with $100,000 in credits, while integrating 12 Cloudflare-powered functions into the Periodic Table. The partnership will be highlighted at Cloudflare Connect on October 20.

Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, said, “Cloudflare helps businesses build on a more secure, reliable Internet. We want more entrepreneurs to have access to that foundation from the start. Idealab.ai’s ambition to make entrepreneurship more accessible aligns with our work to help new businesses build and grow online.”

In addition to Cloudflare, Mercury, the fintech company serving startups, is joining Idealab.ai to provide financial infrastructure founders need to receive investment and invoice clients.

An open invitation to build

Beginning today people can visit Idealab.ai to search through the business ideas, discover what fits, and make an idea their own. Universities, accelerators, entrepreneur networks, technology companies, workforce and public-sector organizations, media organizations, and enterprises can also register interest in becoming partners.

“Every business needs three things to succeed: an idea, funding, and execution,” said Gross. “Today, we’re launching the idea-generation platform and the ability to test business ideas in the platform’s Labs function, with more company building tools available soon via the Periodic Table of Business Functions™. And to start, our funding goal is to help connect founders around the world with $100 million in potential funding. People can register their interest now to receive updates as funding resources become available.”

This work is part of Idealab.ai’s broader effort to help more people move from discovering an idea to building a business.

“Leveraging AI, we are building a more hopeful pathway to entrepreneurship,” Gross added. “So many people—especially young people—are being told that AI is coming for their jobs and their future. We want to show them another possibility: that AI can help you discover an important idea, develop a plan to pursue it, and access tireless tools that help you build. The number of people who can pursue the dream of building a business that matters is about to grow.”

About Idealab.ai

Idealab.ai applies AI to Bill Gross’s lifetime of company-building experience to identify potential businesses rooted in real-world problems and help more people explore and build them. The platform builds on more than 50 years of Gross’s experience as an entrepreneur and 30 years of company creation at Idealab and Idealab Studio, which have launched more than 175 companies. Idealab.ai applies the methods Gross developed over his career to problems, emerging technologies, discoveries, and shifts in the world around us, connecting those signals at scale into potential business ideas. Those ideas are free to explore and use. Idealab.ai is also developing tools to help people test, build, and run businesses, as well as private applications for organizations that want to apply the system to their own research and intellectual property. Our mission is to turn the world’s problems into companies worth building and lower the barrier for the people who build them.

Learn more at Idealab.ai.

Media contact
Jen McClellan
media@idealab.ai

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