Betaworks and Lupa Systems are backing four early-stage startups through their Betalab program, targeting the internet's deepest structural problems with technical solutions rather than policy proposals.
When Betaworks announced its partnership with James Murdoch's Lupa Systems to create Betalab, the pitch was ambitious but deliberately vague. The program would fund and mentor early-stage startups trying to "Fix the Internet," a phrase broad enough to mean almost anything. Now we are starting to see what that actually looks like in practice.
Betaworks has unveiled the first four startups selected for the program, and the range of problems they are tackling tells you something about how Betalab defines the challenge. These are not incremental consumer apps or social media tweaks. They go after infrastructure-level issues: data privacy, algorithmic manipulation, machine learning blind spots, and the fundamental question of how sensitive information moves between organizations without being exposed.
The four companies represent distinctly different approaches. Savepoint is a mobile games company that uses game mechanics to improve players' lives, applying behavioral design in a direction that serves users rather than extracting from them. International Persuasion Machines operates in the cybersecurity space, building tools to assess and combat algorithmic manipulation and other forms of platform abuse, a problem that has grown more urgent as disinformation campaigns become more sophisticated. Synthetaic focuses on the data side of machine learning, working to eliminate edge cases by generating high-quality training data, which addresses one of the most persistent bottlenecks in AI development. Nth Party takes on encrypted data exchange, allowing customers to share and analyze data sets without ever decrypting them, potentially solving a problem that has stalled collaboration in healthcare, finance, and government for years.
Danika Laszuk, the general manager of the Betalab program, explained that this is the firm's first virtual startup program. The cohort was kept smaller than a standard Betaworks Camp batch intentionally, which suggests a more hands-on, concentrated approach to mentoring. But Betalab has kept its applications open and is planning to welcome a new cohort of startups in the new year, indicating this is a rolling experiment rather than a one-off initiative.
The framing matters here. The internet has eroded privacy, supercharged the spread of misinformation, and created incentive structures that reward outrage over substance. Laszuk acknowledged these realities directly, but insisted the team is approaching them with what she called "the optimism of technologists." She believes there are "a lot of people with great ideas and the wherewithal to build them and fix things in the world."
That optimism is grounded in a specific philosophy about how products should be built. Laszuk made clear that Betalab's approach focuses on properly aligning incentives from the start. "We are biased towards the product being the thing that technologists are building," she said. "We're not excited about businesses collecting data to figure out what to do with it later." That distinction is sharp and deliberate. It rejects the surveillance-capitalism model that dominated the last decade of consumer internet development, where companies hoovered up user data first and invented business models second.
According to Laszuk, the goal is to support "the internet as it exists today and get all the benefit of the internet," while also providing "a way to safeguard our privacy, to try to incentivize civil discourse as opposed to clickbait and incendiary behavior." This is a difficult balance to strike, and whether these four startups can actually pull it off remains an open question. But the framing itself signals a shift in how incubators are thinking about what makes a startup worth backing.
The real test for Betalab will come when these companies move beyond the program and face market pressures that do not care about aligning incentives. Building products that treat users well is harder when growth demands aggressive data collection and engagement optimization. Whether Betalab's founders can hold the line on their principles while scaling will determine whether "Fix the Internet" becomes something more than a compelling pitch.
