On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our Senior Producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to point out me her new tattoo: a basic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak received an identical cursor, whereas Theresa Loconsolo received a smiling moon.
I guessed that sooner or later throughout all of the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and Becca wandered off to some fashionable San Francisco tattoo store to cement their friendship with appropriately tech-themed ink (and perhaps Theresa was there too?) That appeared like a extra logical rationalization than the truth, which is that they received these tattoos at Disrupt — sure, actually at Disrupt, on the Moscone Heart’s conference ground, whereas upstairs, there was most likely a chat occurring about product-market match or agentic AI.
Lots of of startups confirmed their stuff within the expo corridor as a part of the Battlefield 200 — there’s robo cooks, spacecraft insurance coverage suppliers, a shortcut for recycling plastic — after which amid the chaos, Tattd turned their sales space right into a mini tattoo store.
Tattd is a platform that helps tattoo seekers discover artists whose portfolios match the sort of tattoo they’re in search of.
The startup makes use of generative AI to create a mockup of a design, however these artificial designs aren’t truly getting inked on anybody’s physique. Relatively, Tattd places the AI-generated design via a reverse picture search to search out an artist whose work resembles the mockup, in order that the consumer and artist can work collectively to create an unique design, as one usually would after they get linked with a tattoo artist.
“In case you go to ChatGPT and say one thing like, ‘I need to see a butterfly in a Japanese conventional model with heavier strains,’ they don’t know what meaning,” founder Laura Schaak informed TechCrunch.
Simply ft away, TechCrunch Deputy Managing Editor Karyne Levy was getting an escape key tattooed on her higher arm.
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October 13-15, 2026
Earlier than founding Tattd, Schaak led operations for 2 startups: WearAway, a vogue rental firm acquired by Grin, and Lemonsqueeze, a market growth platform acquired by Knotel. However Schaak has all the time had an eye fixed for the humanities. She studied artwork historical past at New York College, and her physique is adorned with a collage of tattoos — at Disrupt, she received a California postage stamp by her elbow.
“There may be quite a lot of people who have tried to enter the tattoo business with out tattoos, they usually have all failed,” Schaak stated. Whilst you can’t choose a founder by their look, she says that their lack of tattoos mirrored their lack of curiosity, funding, or expertise within the business.
“I’m so deeply obsessed with this business, I’m closely tattooed, and I’m right here to assist artists to construct companies in a approach that each the consumer and the artist are taken care of,” she stated. There are 9 hundred artists on Tattd, and the platform companions with a 3rd social gathering to assist them discover healthcare and monetary advisors.
Schaak stated that round thirty individuals received tattoos all through the three days of TechCrunch Disrupt.
There was a TechCrunch emblem on the flash sheet, however (un)thankfully, nobody inked their love for our model on their physique.
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