On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our senior producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to indicate me her new tattoo: a basic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak acquired an identical cursor, whereas Theresa Loconsolo acquired a smiling moon.
I guessed that in some unspecified time in the future 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 clarification than the truth, which is that they acquired these tattoos at Disrupt — sure, actually at Disrupt, on the Moscone Middle’s conference flooring, whereas upstairs, there was in all probability a chat occurring about product-market match or agentic AI.
A whole lot 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. Reasonably, Tattd places the AI-generated design by means of a reverse picture search to seek out an artist whose work resembles the mock-up, 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.
“If you happen to go to ChatGPT and say one thing like, ‘I wish to see a butterfly in a Japanese conventional fashion with heavier traces,’ they don’t know what which means,” founder Laura Schaack advised TechCrunch.
Simply toes away, TechCrunch deputy managing editor Karyne Levy was getting an escape key tattooed on her higher arm.
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Earlier than founding Tattd, Schaack led operations for 2 startups: WearAway, a vogue rental firm acquired by Grin, and Lemonsqueeze, a market enlargement platform acquired by Knotel. However Schaack has all the time had a watch 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 acquired a California postage stamp by her elbow.
“There may be various people who have tried to enter the tattoo business with out tattoos, and so they have all failed,” Schaack stated. Whilst you can’t decide 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 captivated with this business, I’m closely tattooed, and I’m right here to help artists to construct companies in a means that each the consumer and the artist are taken care of,” she stated. There are 900 artists on Tattd, and the platform companions with a 3rd get together to assist them discover healthcare and monetary advisers.
Schaack stated that round 30 folks acquired tattoos all through the three days of TechCrunch Disrupt.
There was a TechCrunch brand on the flash sheet, however (un)luckily, nobody inked their love for our model on their physique.