What's happening: Ease Health lands $41M Series A to boost AI‑driven health‑tech platform
Ease Health, a New York‑based AI‑native CRM, EHR, and RCM platform, closed a $41 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The funding will expand product and engineering teams and accelerate AI automation across its suite, underscoring investor confidence in integrated health‑tech solutions.
Also developing:

Vercel has launched the open‑source agent‑skills package, a plug‑in style manager that turns curated React, Next.js, and web‑design best‑practice playbooks into reusable capabilities for AI coding agents. The initial release bundles three core skills—react‑best‑practices, web‑design‑guidelines, and vercel‑deploy‑claimable—each containing dozens of rule‑based checks and scripts that agents can invoke during code review or deployment. Installation mirrors npm syntax via npx, and compatible agents automatically discover the skills from their local directories. The framework aims to standardize prompt‑free, rule‑driven AI assistance across the front‑end development workflow.
📰 Top AI+B2B News - Sun, Jan 18 https://t.co/MWFHfEuzpm Top Stories: 1. Musk Seeks Up to $134 Billion Damages From OpenAI, Microsoft 2. ClickHouse Lands $15 Billion Valuation in AI Database Race 3. Figma (FIG) Is Down 13.2% After AI Deal With OpenAI Top SaaStr...
Strange World Indeed, 2026 January edition: - The worst time in our history to be invested in public software stocks - The best time in our history to be invested in private hot (AI fueled) startup stocks

Accertify announced Greg Dukat as its new chief executive officer, adding a seasoned technology leader to its ranks. Dukat, who previously led Revel Systems and other firms, will steer the company’s commercial strategy alongside President Mark Michelon. The announcement also...
"When you have 5, 10, 20+ AI GTM agents ... you need a hub. And for the most part, that hub is @salesforce today. It's a Renaissance for @salesforce." with @kylecnorton CRO @owner https://t.co/IaEh5Zt3Gh
The post argues that the single biggest differentiator for the top 1 % of sales reps is extreme time efficiency. These reps enter every deal with a pre‑mapped playbook, knowing exactly how to replicate a winning pitch across similar accounts. By...
10 years ago, VC was optimized around $1B+ outcomes, for the most part. 5 years ago, VC was optimized around $10B+ outcomes. Today, VC is optimized around $100B+ outcomes. It’s exciting and bold and startups in the Age of AI...

The episode explores how startups can coordinate fragmented AI usage across multiple teams while avoiding generic, one‑size‑fits‑all UX designs, and discusses practical ways to track funnel metrics before achieving product‑market fit. It also reviews Anthropic’s new Cowork tool, weighing its...
Esben Friis-Jensen scaled Userflow to $4.6M ARR with just 3 people inside a bloody "Red Ocean" market. Most founders spend their lives looking for a "Blue Ocean." They want a market with zero competitors, wide open space, and the freedom...
Astro, now under Cloudflare, released the first beta of Astro 6, introducing a redesigned development server built on Vite’s Environment API. The server runs web applications in the same JavaScript engine used in production, delivering true runtime parity across Node and...
"Why can or can't legacy systems of record just add AI?" Great reflections by Jamin Ball in his latest "Clouded Judgment" newsletter (link in comments). I'll just add that this is one of the best arguments for those legacy systems...
The article outlines how site reliability engineering (SRE) is evolving from reactive alerting toward AI‑driven preventative reliability. Early AI stages improved triage and auto‑remediation, but still required a failure to occur. By mining years of incident post‑mortems, logs, and topology...
11 top AI stories this week worth paying attention to in today's AI to ROI: Just the News 👇 🍎 Apple picks Google Gemini for Apple Intelligence & Siri This isn’t a win for “better answers.” It’s a pragmatic admission...
Good To Go (GTG) is a new command‑line tool that deterministically assesses whether a GitHub pull request is ready to merge. It aggregates CI statuses, classifies review comments, and tracks thread resolution, returning a single, unambiguous status. The tool outputs...

Pharma and biotech firms are accelerating SaaS adoption for drug discovery, clinical trials, and manufacturing, but fragmented identity and access management (IAM) threatens compliance and intellectual‑property protection. The life‑sciences software market hit $16.1 billion in 2024 and is growing 11‑13% annually,...

The 2026 roundup identifies the ten leading security awareness training platforms, highlighting AI‑driven phishing simulations, micro‑learning, gamification, and comprehensive compliance reporting. Solutions such as KnowBe4, Proofpoint, and Cofense demonstrate measurable risk reductions, with industry benchmarks showing up to an 80%...
AI brings down the cost of building software dramatically. And now everyone can write code for any use case they can think of. But nothing changes about the concept of core competencies in a company. Companies spend their finite resources...
The Ask HN thread debates whether software startups still have a defensible moat, noting that large firms rarely copy products instantly due to internal bureaucracy. Commenters argue that speed, focus, brand credibility, and user trust form real competitive advantages. Many startups...

Runpod, an AI‑app‑hosting platform founded by former Comcast developers, has reached a $120 million annual revenue run rate. The company bootstrapped to $1 million in revenue within nine months, leveraging Reddit outreach to acquire early users and attract a $20 million seed round...

Researchers at Dakota State University and Safety Insurance built Axlerod, a Gemini‑2.5‑Pro powered chatbot for independent auto‑insurance agents. In controlled tests the tool cut average search‑oriented task time from 7.55 seconds to 5.13 seconds, a 2.42‑second gain per query. Each...
How do we see vertical Software M&A and fund raising shaping up for 2026? A lot of founders we speak with are trying to figure out what 2026 might actually look like if they're thinking about raising capital or selling....
Claude Cowork gives you a peek into the future of knowledge work. Here's a demo of using Box as a cloud filesystem via MCP for Claude to leverage content as context to generate new slides locally. The future is having...

Retargeting ads on Meta, Google, and LinkedIn let B2B marketers re‑engage prospects who have interacted with their content, shortening sales cycles at low cost. The guide recommends starting with a simple 180‑day website‑visitor audience and allocating roughly 10‑15% of total...
We’re now in what I believe is the most important, and most misunderstood, phase of every tech revolution. It’s the moment when the deeper truths that will shape the next decade begin to emerge. In a new op-ed for the...

The post walks through setting up matched‑audience ads on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google, showing how they extend reach beyond retargeting. It details prerequisite tracking pixels, CSV formatting quirks, and enrichment tactics that boost match rates. Platform‑specific gotchas—such as Google’s spend...
So this year we’ve built an AI VP of Marketing for SaaStr. The v1 at least. We didn’t want to, we wanted to buying an AI agentic solution that does what we need in marketing. But we just couldn’t find...

The author, a former iContact CEO, argues that most SaaS firms stall because they neglect solid unit economics before scaling. He stresses mastering five core metrics—CAC, ARPA, churn, lifespan, and LTV—to set a clear acquisition budget. With those numbers in...

TS Imagine’s TradeSmart platform reported a 44% year‑over‑year rise in fixed‑income trading activity for 2025, led by a 76% jump in government‑bond volumes. Portfolio‑trading transactions exploded 607%, while RFQ responses grew 109% and Click‑to‑Trade usage increased 81%, signalling deeper buy‑side...

OpenAI rolled out a memory upgrade for ChatGPT Plus and Pro users, extending the model's recall to conversations from up to a year ago. The new feature indexes past chats, making them searchable and providing direct links via the Sources...
Private equity firms face complex fund structures and reporting demands, prompting a shift from spreadsheets to specialized software. FundCount offers an integrated platform that combines partnership accounting, portfolio accounting, and reporting, supporting multi‑currency and intricate ownership structures. The solution automates...
Zep AI, a 2023 YC W24 startup specializing in agent context engineering, announced multiple senior hires including Staff Engineer, Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, and Developer Relations Lead. Its platform stitches together chat history, business data, and user behavior to deliver...
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced that the company’s engineering headcount has stayed mostly flat over the past year as internal AI tools dramatically boost developer productivity. He said the firm now has about 15,000 engineers who are "more productive than...

Fincite’s CIOS platform has introduced over 70 new features in 2026, targeting the core pain points of wealth‑management advisers. The Strategic Asset Allocation tool uses algorithms to auto‑optimise client portfolios and visualise changes instantly. An ad‑hoc instrument creation module lets...
Enterprises are racing to meet soaring customer‑experience expectations, with over 80% of firms planning to compete primarily on CX, according to Gartner. Legacy CRM systems act as static records, preventing proactive issue resolution, while AI‑powered autonomous CRM platforms promise to...

Gusto, the payroll and HR platform serving over 400,000 small businesses, has launched a beta program with crypto infrastructure provider Zerohash to enable stablecoin payouts for international contractors. The new option lets eligible workers receive U.S. dollar‑denominated stablecoins with settlement...
Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson told a podcast that current AI coding assistants still fall short of the output produced by most junior developers. At 37 Signals, 95% of the code for their Kanban product Fizzy was written by...
Enterprises are racing to embed AI while still relying on legacy applications that run core operations. A recent MIT‑NANDA study shows only 5% of AI pilots transition to production with measurable value, largely because they sit on top of disconnected...
rater8 has introduced AI Insights, a conversational AI feature within its raVE platform, allowing healthcare providers to query patient feedback data using natural language and receive real‑time insights. The tool surfaces sentiment trends, operational risks, performance gaps, and marketing‑ready testimonials...
Before $20,000,000 in ARR Maybe even before $50,000,000 in ARR Do not hire anyone with "strategist" in the first few lines of their LinkedIn bio

Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open‑source standard that lets retailers, marketplaces and payment providers speak a common language for real‑time inventory, pricing and checkout within conversational interfaces. Salesforce rolled out the redesigned Slackbot, an out‑of‑the‑box AI agent...

Microsoft launched Elevate for Educators, a suite of free AI tools, professional development, and limited-time premium software for teachers and students. The program adds AI-powered features to Microsoft 365 Copilot, including the Teach assistant for lesson creation and the Learning...
Vincent Jong literally wrote the book on Product-Led Sales and spent months building a SaaS product in that category. However, he ultimately killed the entire project before onboarding a single customer. Most founders would have launched it anyway. They would...
During last month’s NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC’s @sdianahu sat down with @Thom_Wolf, co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face to discuss his unconventional journey from physics and law to building one of the most influential open-source AI platforms. They discussed why open...

Looper Insights, a leading CTV merchandising analytics platform, has added Content Type and Genre filtering to its Merchandising module. The new tools let users isolate placements by App, Movie, TV Show, as well as sub‑categories like App Bundles and Content...
“AI is the new boogeyman” - every single person after seeing Cowork. Respectfully, that is the dumbest thing I’ve heard. I let AI run my $6.6M ARR business for a week, and we grew faster than we did in MONTHS. And...
Many SaaS landing pages fail because of 1 reason: (and it's not a terrible design) They are built skipping the strategy and jumping straight to design. The result of that is beautiful pages that don't convert. After creating 1000+ of...
One of the things that surprised me about YC is how long we continue to advise founders. We thought we'd just help them get started and then hand them over to later stage investors, but in fact we're still talking...