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Interviewing great AI founders. Presented by @fondocom

San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2024
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BREAKING 🚨 Foozi raises R$5.6M pre-seed led by Quartzo Capital, with angel investors, to expand in São Paulo and the Northeast, grow its team and improve the AI that runs restaurants' purchasing startups.com.br/negocios/foo…
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TRENDING 📈 @advaith_sridhar announces five Grand Challenges in material science, with $1M in prize money for anyone who solves them: "AI can solve Millennium Prize problems in math. Can it do the same in material science?"
Today, we announce five Grand Challenges in Material Science. We’re also committing $1M in prize money to anyone who can solve these challenges. AI can solve Millennium Prize problems in math. Can it do the same in material science? To find out, we reached out to 10 leading professors to identify the hardest open problems in the field.
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BREAKING 🚨 Juritas raises €1.4M pre-seed led by Passion Capital, with Blackwood, Araya Ventures, Baseline and Angel Invest, to grow its Stockholm engineering team and build out its AI contract intelligence platform siliconrepublic.com/start-up…
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TRENDING 📈 @aditabrm says OCR hasn't kept up as models get smarter, faster and cheaper, and launches @reductoai's r-1 mini: "truly premium parsing without the premium pricing." At $1 per 1,000 pages, it beats options costing up to 25x more.
Models are becoming smarter, faster, and cheaper, but the OCR industry hasn’t kept up. We’re launching r-1 mini: the first model to offer truly premium parsing without the premium pricing. At $1/1000 pages, r-1 mini beats options that cost up to 25x as much.
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BREAKING 🚨 Venomics AI raises $2.7M pre-seed co-led by Speciale Invest and South Park Commons, with Operators Studio, to grow its Venom Atlas of venom-derived molecular data and strengthen its AI and lab screening for drug discovery entrackr.com/snippets/bio-te…
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TRENDING 📈 @MaximLevoshin says: at 43, a solo founder and father of four, building AI education for kids who "will never go to school." Looking to connect with other builders.
I'm 43 Solo founder & father of 4 Building Al education for my kids (they will never go to school) Looking to connect to other builders here
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BREAKING 🚨 Avanlee Care raises $3.5M seed round led by BEA Venture Fund, with Esther Dyson, Chrysalis Ventures and FairBridge VC, to expand its caregiver engagement platform with Medicare Advantage plans and healthcare organizations fiercehealthcare.com/health-…
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TRENDING 📈 @AravSrinivas launches Perplexity Teammates, "personal agents for work" that move you from writing prompts in a session to giving high-level goals. Rolling out to Max users on the web today; native apps coming soon.
Today, we're launching Perplexity Teammates. They are personal agents for work. And change the paradigm from writing prompts in a session to giving high-level goals. Rolling out to Max users on the web today. Native apps (mobile, desktop) coming soon.
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BREAKING 🚨 firmly raises $15M Series A led by Squarepoint Capital, with JPMorgan Payments, Mastercard, Samsung NEXT and ARK Invest, to grow firmly Connect with merchants and across AI agents, marketplaces and shoppable ads globenewswire.com/news-relea…
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TRENDING 📈 @swangentr launches Arlo, @dubinvest's first AI assistant, with investment advice and analysis personalized to each dub account. The goal: "bring sophisticated investment advice to everyday Americans, not just the wealthy"
Today we're launching Arlo, and it's the most important product feature @dubinvest has ever built… Just last month, dub surpassed 2 Million downloads and billions in trading volume. But it almost feels like day 1 again with Arlo. The possibilites are boundless. Arlo is our very first AI assistant that delivers investment advice and analysis, all personalized to your dub account. We didn’t want Arlo to be some basic LLM wrapper… Our quant researchers and AI engineers built everything supporting the model in-house: our own BARRA like factor risk model, dozens of proprietary quant tools, a custom agent harness, and fine-tuning against our own evals - human-labeled answers plus LLM judges. All with one goal: bring sophisticated investment advice to everyday Americans, not just the wealthy Right now, > Most financial advisors won’t take you unless you have $250K liquid to invest > Median American family is worth $215K, house included > The wealth gap is accelerating: the richest 10% of Americans own 87% of all US stocks, the bottom half owns 1%. That changes NOW Here's what Arlo does:
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BREAKING 🚨 Humble Robotics raises $51M Series A led by Obvious Ventures, with Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners, to fund customer pilots, testing and early manufacturing of its autonomous, electric freight haulers businessinsider.com/humble-r…
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TRENDING 📈 @Jason tells founders: "Ignore politics and the markets; focus on your product, your customers and, most of all, building and supporting your team. Block out the noise and focus."
FOUNDERS: Ignore politics and the markets; focus on your product, your customers and, most of all, building and supporting your team. Block out the noise and focus. /eom
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BREAKING 🚨 T-Therapeutics raises $133M Series B co-led by Advent Life Sciences and British Business Bank, with JJDC, Samsara BioCapital, M-Ventures and Lilly, to take its lead TCR bispecific programmes in cancer and autoimmune disease into the clinic t-therapeutics.com/t-therape…
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TRENDING 📈 @VNallatamby launches Quest, "the personal agent that studies you like a profiler." It builds 100+ wiki files on you, uses its own Android phone to control messaging apps, and makes iOS mini-apps around each of your quests.
Introducing Quest, the personal agent that studies you like a profiler. Quest is for believers-only. It requires radical transparency: full access to your life so your agent can craft your memory. If you give it a shot, you’ll unlock a personal advisor, always in your corner, helping you and encouraging you to start your quests. Quest is built different: 1. Memory from day one: 100+ wiki files created on you, all your relationships mapped. 2. Phone-Use: Quest has its own Android phone, and can control messaging apps like WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok. 3. Fluid UI: Quest builds tailor-made iOS mini-apps around each of your quests. 4. Mothership of AI Assistants: Quest can manage your Instinct and Muse on your behalf. 5. Self-Improving Proactivity Harness: Quest reacts to anything, not just your email, and its proactivity evolves from your feedback and its own mistakes.
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BREAKING 🚨 Harbinger raises $240M Series D co-led by Tiger Global, Capricorn's Technology Impact Fund and Ridgeline, with Fidelity, FedEx and THOR Industries, to expand into energy storage, power generation, autonomy software and defense bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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TRENDING 📈 @elliotarledge reverse-engineered Wispr Flow and used DeepSeek to fine-tune LFM3-1.7B. The result: "on par with the wispr flow models you pay for, and it's free, open source and runs entirely on your mac."
i reverse engineered wispr flow, then used deepseek to fine-tune LFM3-1.7B. the result is on par with the wispr flow models you pay for, and it's free, open source and runs entirely on your mac. key-up latency is 65 ms on my m4 max vs ~520 ms for wispr flow on the same clips. a 6 minute yap session pacing around my office still lands in about a quarter second. > rust backend with a native metal engine: each decode step runs as one fused megakernel > a dflash2 speculative drafter is built into the engine, trained on my local 4 x rtx pro 6000 server > parakeet transcribes, LFM3-1.7B refines. both stream while you talk, so key-up only waits on the last chunk > never leaves your macbook, so slow internet or bad ping is no longer an issue > import your own dictionary of terms for your workflow > i picked every default myself. it feels amazing out of the box > adapts to the app you're in: discord is lowercase casual, slack and email are formal, claude code gets clear prompts > training data: 77k transcripts of public audio and synthetic dictations, each rewritten by deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 following a written spec of what "what you meant" means, in 4 writing modes. none of my own dictations went into it > blind judge (claude opus) on an hour of lectures: phonon's text preferred 90 times, wispr's 23 > built with claude opus 5.5 [xhigh] brew install --cask infatoshi/tap/phonon
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