Handshake just made a calculated move that reframes how software engineers plug into the AI economy. On February 16, 2026, San Francisco based Handshake, legally Stryder Corp., announced it acquired Taro, the YC S22 community built in Redwood City by Rahul Pandey and Alex Chiou. No purchase price disclosed. No glossy media tour. Just synchronized posts from Garrett Lord, Rahul Pandey, Alex Chiou, and the Handshake account. Clean. Direct. Intentional. In a market addicted to noise, this is the kind of startup news that travels through operator circles first.
Handshake was founded in 2014 after beginning at Michigan Technological University with a mission to democratize access to opportunity. Garrett Lord built it alongside Ben Christensen and Scott Ringwelski into a network now spanning 20M+ students and early career professionals, 1,600+ universities, and 1M+ employers, including every Fortune 500. Revenue moved from $36M in 2020 to an estimated $280M annualized by August 2025, with $80M attributed to Handshake AI. Then came the October 2025 refounding and a 15% workforce reduction to sharpen focus on AI infrastructure. That context matters. This acquisition is not opportunistic. It is directional.
Taro launched in 2022 after Rahul Pandey and Alex Chiou left Meta and built a community for engineers who wanted career leverage, not just coding drills. Rahul Pandey, Stanford trained, former Pinterest and Meta engineering leader, Stanford instructor, and educator with 100,000+ YouTube subscribers, positioned Taro as a career operating system for software engineers. Alex Chiou, UCLA computer science, ex PayPal, Course Hero, Robinhood, and Meta tech lead, brought product and platform depth. By late 2022, Taro had 17,000 users and 650+ premium members. By October 2025, 100,000 engineers were engaged. At acquisition, Handshake cites 175,000+.
This is where the strategy sharpens. Alongside the acquisition, Handshake launched its Software Engineer Talent Network inside Handshake AI. The thesis is simple and hard to argue with: as AI generates more code, engineers become the evaluators of correctness, architecture, and scale. Taro’s engineers now gain access to paid AI training work, including roles advertised at $100 per hour for evaluating large language model outputs. Rahul Pandey transitions into General Manager of Coding at Handshake, according to company channels, aligning the community with direct AI demand.
Look at the sequence. January 2026, Handshake acquires Cleanlab to reinforce data quality and evaluation rigor. February 2026, it acquires Taro to deepen practitioner supply in code. Francisco Guzman, Head of Research at Handshake AI, publicly welcomes the founders. Matt Greenberg, CTO, underscores the importance of coding data. This is vertical consolidation in the AI training market, built not on compute clusters but on curated human expertise. That nuance is the real startup news.
For Taro, the education layer remains intact. Courses and interview guides continue. But now the community sits upstream of frontier AI model development. For Handshake, the supply side advantage expands from PhDs and advanced degree holders into production engineers who ship code for a living. In a talent market shifting from hiring pipelines to intelligence pipelines, this deal lands squarely inside the evolving Startup Ecosystem, where community, data, and AI infrastructure are starting to converge.
If you are tracking where software engineering careers intersect with AI monetization, this acquisition is not background noise. It is signal. The only question is how quickly the rest of the market adjusts.
