A startup founder who served time in prison is looking to court an untapped market: ex-cons

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Richard Bronson, an entrepreneur who recently launched a startup called Commissary Club, has an unusual background for a founder. and a previous life he spent time in prison. Back in the 1980s, Bronson worked for the notorious Stratton Oakmont, the corruption-riddled brokerage firm that was run by Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, whose story became a 2013 film. The firm collapsed in the mid-90s under the weight of misconduct accusations. Bronson was a partner at Stratton, but left after a year to start his own firm in South Florida.

1:54He was quite successful in that venture, until he wasn't. Bronson told TechCrunch, I built a$100 million business, taking these small-cap companies public. Some of the success, however, came through breaking the law, securities laws, and ultimately, as I knew inevitably would happen, I had to pay the price. I lost everything, and most significantly, my freedom. And I was sent to federal prison for a couple of years. Bronson has been out of prison for a long time now, but he has never forgotten the struggles he had when he initially emerged from prison. Nobody would hire me, despite all of my education and work experience and everything else.

2:35I was, like, completely radioactive. Bronson's experience after prison helped inform his current startup, an employment-focused social media platform called Commissary Club, which takes its name from the store inside a prison where inmates buy snacks and toiletries. The site is specifically marketed to ex-cons and uses AI to help them navigate the often confusing process of finding employment and housing after they reenter the world. Bronson said, I could not help but notice how little assistance was available to people coming out of prison. If it was this bad for me, what about the guys I was in prison with who had very little education and very little job experience.

3:20What were their chances? Commissary Club also had a social component, which Bronson said he added because he knows how isolating the post-prison experience can be. It's almost like Facebook, he said, where people can not only find jobs and get the help with the jobs and the housing and access to benefits, but they find the other missing ingredient that's existentially important to them that is not satisfied elsewhere. They find community. Judging by the site, Commissary Club also appears primed to become a referral network, and it offers a way for users to find dates. For now, Bronson's startup is a team of two, just him and his co-founder, Roman Kissen, who Bronson called the technical mind or the brains behind the project.

4:05Kissen previously worked for eBay and IBM, and between 2022 and 2025, he served as the CTO of LexisNexis, according to his LinkedIn profile. The site is free at first, then switches to paid. Users get the first 10 applications for free, and then we bundle the next at$149 for 10 applications or$15 each, Bronson told TechCrunch. Some may balk at that for-profit model, and for people just out of prison, it may be a tough sell. Yet Bronson sees it as a win-win, a business that can help a community that few others are trying to help. People immediately assume, oh, is this a non-profit? And the answer is no, Bronson says.

4:47There's a strong mission component, certainly, he continued. And I have devoted my life when I came out of prison to helping my brothers and sisters with records. Part of it is because I just felt so remorseful for the stuff I had done. I still wake up every day regretting choices I made. But we're going after a huge, huge market that nobody, I mean, nobody does anything about. People talk about AI taking away employment and people losing jobs. I look at it differently. We're building AI that creates employment for people that society left behind. Bronson's Commissary Club was selected for TechCrunch's storied pitch competition startup Battlefield 200, taking place at TechCrunch Disrupt October 13th through the 15th in San Francisco.

5:34Zach Yadigari, the teen co-founder of calorie tracking app CalAI, has launched Persona, a new AI agent startup and already raised$10 million. Vine Ventures led the round with Z Fellows founder Corey Levy and Collective Global participating. In March, MyFitnessPal acquired CalAI for an undisclosed sum after it zoomed ahead of the older Calorie app in the App Store rankings. The deal was big enough to convince Yadagari and his co-founders to sell the company after it had pulled in over$30 million in annual revenue in under two years. Yadagari and his co-founders originally went to work for their new owner, continuing development on CalAI, but he left the bigger company in June, he tells TechCrunch, and then went right to work on his next idea.

6:24That idea is Persona, a personal AI assistant similar to Instinct or Meta's Muse, but with a hardware component that will soon be available, a$179 wearable band. That makes Persona somewhat more like B, the wearable AI device that Amazon acquired back in 2025, but Persona's device differs in a couple of ways. For one, Yadigari says, it will not be ambient AI, meaning it will not always be listening and recording. The band will have a button that activates the assistant, or it can be set up to activate with the flick of one's wrist. Yadigari also says that Persona is designed with user privacy in mind.

7:09Persona does not run its AI model or store user data on the device. Instead, the model runs in Persona's cloud and user data is sent there. The Assistant protects privacy by encrypting data in transit and at rest. Users can also delete their data. In this way, it is promising that user conversations stay private and cannot be sold to advertisers or data brokers. The team is also baking in safeguards to protect the Assistant against phishing and prompt injection attempts. These are two areas that can plague agents, say, AI labs like OpenAI. Plus, he promises that Persona's agent cannot see a user's credit card details, and the purchases will require the user's approval with payment handled through external providers, such as Stripe Link.

8:00Link is Stripe's secure wallet designed for use by agents. Although user data will not be sold to advertisers, the startup's current business model does rely on ads. Gattagari says the company will show advertising wares during shopping research, but he says that the agent will present unbiased recommendations because the agent will not know which of the items are advertised. For example, if someone is researching office chairs, he says, the agent knows their preferences and will show them chairs that match those preferences, some of them sponsored results. The bands are expected to be available in December, and an app is in the works.

8:41In the meantime, Persona has launched as a free beta product in which users work with the assistant via iMessage text messages. Yadigari says it has attracted a few thousand beta users. The band also already generated five figures in pre-order revenue. Like other consumer AI assistants, he says, Persona can order food or rides. It could take notes, book travel, answer questions and emails, among other tasks. Yadigari went on to say that all of the utility apps that you use on your phone day-to-day, whether those are apps for shopping, whether it's Uber, DoorDash, your email, those are all collapsing and will collapse into a single super app powered by an AI assistant.

9:23Eventually, he hopes to make Persona even more proactive. It can offer help and solve problems before you even know you have a problem. And overall, be more seamless within your life so that you don't need to stare at a rectangle in your hand all day. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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