Network lands $1.6 million seed round for biggest expansion yet

Network announced Monday a $1.6 million seed round from Powerhouse Capital, Axel Springer SE, LadBible, and angel investors from OpenAI and DeepMind, and tied the cash to its largest expansion yet. The backing shows how a live, personality-led format has become a prize in media, where proximity to executives now carries commercial value of its own.

The model is TBPN, the weekday live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. TBPN streamed from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific on X and YouTube, then posted full episodes to podcast platforms, turning a daily broadcast into a persistent audio and video product. The New York Times called TBPN “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” and the show drew Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, Satya Nadella and Alex Karp onto its set.

OpenAI bought TBPN in April 2026 in a deal some accounts put at about $200 million and others place in the low hundreds of millions. After the sale, John Coogan said on X that the show would keep going live at 11 a.m. Pacific every weekday and called the acquisition a “full circle moment.”

TBPN had been operating for about 18 months before the sale and had already become a fixture at industry events, including a live appearance from Meta Connect 2025 at 1 Hacker Way on September 17, 2025. That kind of visibility is what makes the format attractive to investors and guests alike: it offers a direct line to the people shaping the AI and media business, with no delay between interview, clip and distribution.

Network’s investor list shows how far that logic has spread. Axel Springer SE owns Business Insider and Politico, LadBible reaches a mass social audience, and the OpenAI and DeepMind angels link the round to the AI firms whose leaders are now both subjects and financiers of the media ecosystem around them. In a market where status is built in public, live access has become the asset.