The Good Tech Companies - In a World Obsessed With AI, The Miniswap Founders Are Betting on Taste

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/in-a-world-obsessed-with-ai-the-miniswap-founders-are-betting-on-taste. Miniswap, a Warhammer marketplace founded by Cambridge students, is betting on taste, curation, and community over AI automation. Learn how they raised $3.5M. Check more stories related to machine-learning at: https://hackernoon.com/c/machine-learning. You can also check exclusive content about #ai, #yc, #ycombinator-startups, #ai-for-tabletop-rpg-games, #marketplace, #ecommerce-marketplace, #agi, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @stevebeyatte. Learn more about this writer by checking @stevebeyatte's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Two Cambridge students founded Miniswap, a Warhammer miniatures marketplace, by making a contrarian bet: they are prioritizing human taste, craftsmanship, and curated communities for niche hobbies over the Silicon Valley obsession with AI and automation. The non-AI company recently raised $3.5 million.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. In a world obsessed with AI, the Minneswap founders are betting on taste. By Steve Bayett, how-to students from Cambridge are building the anti-algoridom marketplace. Silicon Valley has a new religion and its god is artificial intelligence. Waukinto any Y-combinator demo day and the conversation inevitably turns to AGI timelines, transformer architectures, and AI agents that will automate everything. Will Hannah and Zach Singh heard the sermon? They just chose not to convert. Lots of folks in our YC batch are building AI sales agents, AI customer service, AI coding assistants, says Hannah, co-founder of Minneswap, the Warhammer Marketplace that just raised $3.5 million,

but we kept asking, what gets lost when we automate everything? What happens to craftsmanship, community, and taste? Their answer is a meticulously crafted marketplace that represents something increasingly rare. A bet on curation over automation, on niche communities over scale at all costs, on the idiosyncratic over mass appeal. A friendship forged in post-lockdown Cambridge, to understand the miniswap origin story, you have to understand Cambridge in fall 2021. Students flooded back after lockdown, desperate for connection. Among them were Hannah and Singh, who were at the time, philosophy and computer science post-graduates and roommates. When I first met Zach, I asked him what he did during the pandemic, expecting something generic, Hannah recalls.

He said, I listened to Steely Dan. I thought, okay, this is my kind of person. Their friendship grew around intellectual debate, appreciation for history, and regular walks through the Granchester Meadows, the same Meadows where famed British mathematician, Alan Turing, conceived of the universal machine, to their favorite pub, the Blue Ball Inn. It was during those years that Singh, a long-time Warhammer player, introduced Hannah to the hobby. The pub where it started, after Cambridge, life pulled them apart. Singh stayed for his PhD in computer science. Hannah worked at a London CEO advisory firm, then returned to Canada for law school. The summer after Hannah's first year of law school, he flew to the UK to visit Singh.

They returned to the Blue Ball Inn for pints by the meadows where Turingons walked. I remember Zach suddenly looked at me and said, Will, I have an idea for for a start UP. I want to build a marketplace for Warhammer miniatures, and I think you're the right person to do this with. By their second pint, Hannah was in. Within a few months, he had dropped out of law school to go all in. Why not AI? Given Singh's technical expertise and investor enthusiasm for AI, why not build an AI company? We use AI as a tool, Singh clarifies. We use it to build out taxonomies. But we're not an AI company because AI isn't the point. The community is the point. The craft is the point. While Silicon Valley chases scale through automation, Singh and Hanna are

betting there's a massive, underserved market of people who want platforms built with care for communities that value expertise over virality. Taste is competitive advantage. AI is fundamentally about reversion to the mean, Hannah explains. But taste, taste is about picking a side, about judging what is cool or what is valuable in ways that don't reduce to data. This philosophy informs every decision at Minneswap, while other marketplaces optimize for entertainment, Singh and Hannah obsess over taxonomy, categorization, and information architecture for obsessives. Warhammer players spend hundreds of hours painting individual miniatures, Seishana. They care deeply about getting things exactly right, so we have to care just as much.

The partnership, their first YC application was rejected, but by their fall 2025 interview, they were days from launching their MVP. Hannah recalls that the last question from Pete Kuman, their YC partner, When are you launching, tomorrow, they said. The next 24 hours were chaos, shipping their MVP, onboarding Kuman as their first user, then soon after getting the call offering them a spot in YC. What convinced investors wasn't just the product, it was the partnership. Singh brings deep technical expertise and domain knowledge.

Hannah brings strategic thinking, operational, Acumen and communication skills honed advising CEOs. Taste is the hardest thing to build in a company, Hannah says. You can hire for technical skills, but alignment on a sense of what's worth building. Thadisharder to manufacture, it's taken us years of friendship and countless hours of conversation to get there. Beyond Warhammer, while starting with Warhammer, the founders see a much bigger opportunity. There are dozens of niche hobbies with fanatical communities who deserve better platforms, Hannah says. Model trains, custom fountain pens, mechanical keyboards. Anywhere you find obsessive hobbyists, we can build something valuable. The vision extends beyond marketplaces to commission

systems, knowledge-sharing platforms, and community features. We're not just building a marketplace. We're building infrastructure for niche creative communities to thrive. The contrarian bet, in a world where AI generated slop floods the internet, Miniswap represents something different. We are by no means anti-AI, Hannah clarifies. We use the best tools available, including LLMs, but we don't want the tool to guide the direction of the product. We refuse to sacrifice quality for expediency. It's a philosophy forged in the same meadows where Turing imagined the computing revolution.

A philosophy that values the idiosyncratic over the mainstream, the carefully crafted over the automated, the human over the algorithmic. In a world obsessed with AI, will Hannah and Zach Singh are better? on something more powerful, taste, community, and human craftsmanship. Their investors just bet $3.5 million. They're right. This story was published by Steve Byett under Hacker Noon's business blogging program. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.