How Two Students From Cambridge Are Building the Anti-Algorithm Marketplace
Silicon Valley has a new religion, and its god is artificial intelligence. Walk into any Y Combinator demo day and the conversation inevitably turns to AGI timelines, transformer architectures, and AI agents that will automate everything.
Will Hanna and Zak 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 Hanna, co-founder of Miniswap, 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 Hanna and Singh, who were at the time, philosophy and computer science postgraduates and roomates. "When I first met Zak, I asked him what he did during the pandemic, expecting something generic," Hanna 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 Grantchester Meadows—the same meadows where famed British Mathematician, Alan Turing, conceived of the universal machine—to their favourite pub, the Blue Ball Inn. It was during those years that Singh, a longtime Warhammer player, introduced Hanna to the hobby.
The Pub Where It Started
After Cambridge, life pulled them apart. Singh stayed for his PhD in computer science. Hanna worked at a London CEO advisory firm, then returned to Canada for law school.
The summer after Hanna'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 Turing once walked.
"I remember Zak suddenly looked at me and said: 'Will, I have an idea for a startup. 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, Hanna 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 as Competitive Advantage
"AI is fundamentally about reversion to the mean," Hanna 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 Miniswap. While other marketplaces optimize for entertainment, Singh and Hanna obsess over taxonomy, categorization, and "information architecture for obsessives."
"Warhammer players spend hundreds of hours painting individual miniatures," says Hanna. "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. Hanna recalls that the last question from Pete Koomen, their YC partner: "When are you launching?"
"Tomorrow," they said.
The next 24 hours were chaos—shipping their MVP, onboarding Koomen 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. Hanna brings strategic thinking, operational acumen, and communication skills honed advising CEOs. "Taste is the hardest thing to build in a company," Hanna says. "You can hire for technical skills, but alignment on a sense of what's worth building? That's harder 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," Hanna 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," Hanna 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 Hanna and Zak Singh are betting 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 Beyatte under HackerNoon's Business Blogging Program.