Future Moats Rely on Individual Cognitive Micro‑systems
New tech, new moats. For the past 2 decades, the best moats were built on external forces: network effects & economies of scale. Cognition is different. It doesn't depend on one massive external system; it's about millions of microsystems—one per user. https://t.co/Qlr7qxQxbX
Ember Raises $4.3M to Slash Claim Denials
Congrats to @EmberCopilotAI on their $4.3M seed! Ember wants to solve America’s healthcare denial crisis. They prevent denials before they happen—documenting visits, reviewing charts, and ensuring claims comply with payer requirements. Health systems using Ember are already seeing results: 57% fewer denials,...
VCs: From Actuarial Skeptics to Post‑IPO Mystics
At Seed, pessimistic VCs are actuaries calculating your startup's probability of death. At IPO, they are mystics claiming they always saw the vision.
Navigating Product Strategy in the AI Era
London: We're doing a Fin x Attio x Granola meet up next week! I'll be joined on stage by Nicolas Sharp (CEO, Attio) and Vas Zhovner (CTO, Granola) and we'll be discussing Product Strategy in the AI Era. Details Wednesday,...
Revenue Fuels Growth; VC Praise Is Just Hype
VC praise is opium. Customer revenue is oxygen. Asking a VC if your idea is working is like asking a spectator if the punch hurts. Get in the ring pal.
Final Day: Apply to USC‑Techstars Accelerator for $220K
Calling all Trojan & USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy entrepreneurs. Get your applications in for the USC + Techstars programs. Gabriel Schlumberger leads the programs. See deets 👇
VCs Remember Missed Momentum, Forget High Valuations
If you make the VCs pay a crazy high price, but you crush the numbers the next 90 days, no one remembers If you make the VCs pay a crazy high price, and you miss the next few months, no one...
YC Demo Day Cuts Dilution, Boosts Investor Returns
YC Demo Day median dilution for small seed is 11% (top 25% is 7%), not 18% for non-YC YC Demo Day median dilution for big seed is 13%, not 21% to 23% for non-YC You do it all faster: YC funds you...
New AI Platform Scales Lending to Small Businesses
So excited to share that @KindredVentures is leading the @kaaj_ai seed round! Small business is the coral reef of the US economy. They are the employer of choice, the craftsman, the niche producer. Lending to SMBs has never been an...
Meta Wins FTC Fight; SUNO and Kraken Secure Massive Deals
META beats the FTC, SUNO and Kraken raise monster deals. https://t.co/M2JY0mIwRf
Intelligent Cloud File Browser Redefines Navigation for Generative Age
Excited to finally share more about one of our portfolio companies: @polydotapp (https://t.co/vEmFKklF6u) — an intelligent cloud file browser redefining how we navigate computing in the generative age.
100th PocketQube Launch Highlights Low‑Cost Space Access
Big milestone for tiny satellites. @albaorbital is about to launch the 100th PocketQube satellite into orbit on SpaceX. These satellites allow regular low-cost iterations, giving startups, universities, and government a regular path to space. https://t.co/4eTRL84mmt https://t.co/2GGUfHtjKv
Solve a Real Pain Point, Not Chase Disruption
Forget being disruptive and reinventing the wheel. Find a painful problem that slows businesses down. Then solve it better than anyone else.
2025 Day‑One IPOs: A Pure Crapshoot
Day 1 IPO “pops” in 2025: TL;DR: it’s a crapshoot https://t.co/rz9g4aNIjw
Align Story, Trust, and Media for Founder Brand Growth
Every great founder brand lives at the intersection of three forces: 1. Storytelling creates understanding. 2. Founder branding creates trust. 3. New media creates distribution. When those three align, everything compounds. Every launch, every post, every interview reinforces the same...
Feroot Secures $14M to Power AI Privacy Detection
Congrats to @FerootSecurity on their $14M Series A! Feroot's AI agents scan sites in seconds to catch privacy violations before audits do. Their research has exposed data leaks across healthcare, banking, e-commerce, and government sites, and even influenced federal legislation. https://t.co/IFScs4Zvib
How Founders Should Navigate Private Equity Inquiries
When we bring on a new client, we often find they've been receiving calls/emails from private equity firms for some time. As part of those calls, PE firms tend to ask a lot of questions and founders aren't always sure...
Trava Prevents Importers From Overpaying Duties
Trava (@travaHQ) helps importers stop overpaying on duties. Tariffs shift constantly, and costly errors slip through the cracks. Trava finds them before they erode margin. Congrats on the launch, @pushkarlanka! https://t.co/YRu5F6wA2l https://t.co/D9eS7dKEHK
AI Elevates Accounting, Not Replaces It
"AI is not going to kill your job in accounting just like calculator didn't. You will do higher level work!" Agree or disagree with @henrysward CEO of @cartainc?? Do you use Carta. Building an AI first company? Don't miss this episode of...
AI Now Dominates Tech: 2025 Macro Trends Unveiled
Twice a year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in November 2025, ‘AI eats the world’. https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations
Twitter Turns DMs Into $5M LP Deals
Last 24 hours became friends with $10BN+ founder through sending a DM. 24 hours later: He is co-investing in 20VC with 2 companies. Asked to write a $5M LP check. The power of Twitter.
Successful Exits Begin Long Before the Sale
A life changing exit doesn’t start at the finish line. It starts long before you’re ready to sell. Seun Oshinaike (@SeunOshinaike) knew that. He sold Street Tag on @acquiredotcom to a strategic buyer, taking the company even farther. Full interview: https://t.co/TLnv3EpAHp https://t.co/jAzRoJCjoJ
Spatial AI Releases Massive Egocentric Dataset for Robot Learning
Spatial AI (https://t.co/qQyv8FngL6) is building large real-world datasets to teach robots how to navigate the world and complete tasks. Their first open source dataset, SEA (Spatial Everyday Activities), is the largest curated egocentric dataset of people carrying out real tasks, with...
IPO Peaks Fade: Patience Beats Day‑One Hype
What happened in 2025 IPOs if you bought near the peak: Figma (FIG): -74% 📉 Circle (CRCL): -73% 📉 CoreWeave (CRWV): -58% 📉 Klarna (KLNA): -38% 📉 Omada (OMDA): -31% 📉 Chime (CHYM): -30% 📉 Hinge Health (HNGE): -27% 📉 eToro (ETOR): -21% 📉 Average decline from peak: -44% The...
New Opportunities Unlocked: Gates Now Open
THE GATES HAVE BEEN OPENED https://lnkd.in/gQVHdHtu
Big AI Firms Threaten Startups, Driving Shift to Chinese Open-Source
Are the largest AI model-makers a threat to smaller startups? On TWiST, I note that the competition for AI startups doesn’t just come from rivals in their space, but the companies that designed the LLMs upon which they’re building their...
Federal AI Law Needed to Stop State Patchwork Killing Startups
The President is right. A 50-state patchwork is a startup killer. Federal AI legislation is essential. There’s no bigger issue for Little Tech — the builders who create the future, for America.
AI Threatens White‑collar Jobs; Self‑reliance Is Essential
Even if we believe AI job displacement is real… what can we actually DO? Alex Wilhelm and I discuss the very real possibility — as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggests — that AI-related advances in productivity are leading us straight...
Frugal Founders in Booming Markets Ignore Abundant Funding
Startup founders building in rapidly expanding markets who optimize their burn rate, while competitors are raising $100M, remind me of people who count calories at an all you can eat buffet.
Treating SAFEs as Credit Cards Erodes Real Equity
Startup founders who treat SAFEs and convertible notes like credit cards until the Series A closes... and then realize they have been playing Monopoly with real equity.
AI Agent Handles 77 Conversations, Amplifying Small Team Power
Our general AI Agent (“Digital Jason”) handled 77 conversations and 203 messages yesterday. Most were pretty good, I am sure. But the real point is I couldn’t have done it. Nor could our tiny team. This is some of the...
Jiga Secures $12M Series A to Accelerate AI-Driven Parts Manufacturing
Congrats to @Jiga3d on their $12M Series A! They're building the custom parts manufacturing platform for AI-era speed. Engineers upload drawings and get routed to vetted suppliers with direct communication, while Jiga automates the administrative grunt work and keeps humans in...
Goldbridge's Ramp Boosts Property Values 20% in Three Months
Goldbridge (@trygoldbridge) is building Ramp for Real Estate. It's an all-in-one financial platform for real estate owners that can increase their property values by 20 percent in less than three months. Congrats on the launch, @alvinsalehi_ & Greg! https://t.co/esEgdymet5 https://t.co/rv1JcBxDkv
Explore Top B2B AI VCs with SaaStr Research
Want to learn more about top VCs in B2B + AI? Browse our new SaaStr AI Research VCs -> https://t.co/3JyImX3jMX We'll even help pick the best ones for you (and much more to come) https://t.co/rG7K5x5YYU
Infracost Raises $15M to Embed Cloud Cost Checkout
Congrats to @infracost on their $15M Series A! They’ve built the checkout screen for cloud—right inside GitHub/GitLab so engineers can see the cost of infra changes before deploy and how to optimize them. Already used by 3,500+ companies, including 10% of the...
Poolside AI Acquires Fern Labs, Forming Full‑stack Frontier AI Powerhouse
news! @poolsideai has acquired @fern_labs, in which @airstreet was the first and sole investor - and a first investor into poolside as well. i met @ashedwardst in late 2024 before fern had a name or team. his technical depth, product taste...
JPMorgan Accelerates Stealth Startup's Bold Market Entry
This is how America wins🇺🇸 A public shout @jpmorgan + our partners Doug Petno (co CEO commercial + inv bank) + John China (co head innovation banking) Lux stealth seeded serial founder w/big audacious plan + tech to match in non-obvious market JPM...
Cellbyte Secures $2.75M Seed to Accelerate Global Drug Launches
Congrats to Cellbyte on their $2.75M seed! Cellbyte helps pharmaceutical companies launch new drugs worldwide. Their platform streamlines pricing, market access, and regulatory workflows for drug launches by automating data extraction and insight generation, enabling faster, more efficient decision-making across global...
Sphere Secures $21M Series A for AI Tax Automation
Congrats to @nrudder_ and @get_sphere on their $21M Series A! Sphere helps companies stay in compliance as they scale across borders. Their AI native tax engine collects, codifies, and monitors tax law globally, and their 100+ local rails into tax authorities...
AI-Powered Marketplace Unlocks Previously Untapped Offline Market
.@arthur_leopold and Jonathan are a force. Ambitious, focused, hungry, hard working, insightful, and obsessed with their customers. Classic right founders + right timing, leveraging AI to crack open an offline, friction-ful market that has eluded automation. We've learned many times...
Investors Back Cloudflare Rivals to Prevent Single
resilience investors won’t be mincing their words either when they start funding a bunch of cloudflare competitors can’t have the internet crash bc of this single point of failure ey
2025 IPO Pricing: Unpredictable, No Clear Pattern
Why the Hell Is It So Hard to Price an IPO in 2025? In 2025, day one IPO performance feels like a total crapshoot. Figma went parabolic (but now sits at the failed Adobe acquisition price), CoreWeave was flat out...
Rapid Growth, Not Just Features, Defines an AI Native
How to know if you are an “AI Native” start-up: 🚀 You are growing much, much faster than last year Otherwise, you just have AI Features
Curate People: Hire the Best, Not Just Anyone
New podcast on recruiting (full episode). Links below. Curate People 0:00 The Best Only Want to Work With the Best 3:49 You'll Never Be Able to Hire Anybody Better Than You 6:45 Break Every Rule to Get the Best People 10:19 It Just Takes a...
AI Startups Outpace SaaS Growth Tenfold, Investors Must Choose
Why are AI companies growing SO MUCH FASTER than their SaaS counterparts? On average, AI companies are growing at about 10 times the speed as startups pursuing software-as-a-service business models. Investors now face a choice… “Bet on the past” by...
Negative Sentiment Threatens AI More Than Any Bubble
How negative sentiment could be a more pressing concern for AI than any bubble… In this TWiST highlight, I consider the recent backlash against AI apps and related technologies. Pushback and cynical takes around AI are coming from a number...
Bezos Co‑Leads Secret ‘Physical AI’ Startup Project Prometheus
What is Project Prometheus and why is Jeff Bezos going to (co-)run it? On TWiST, Alex Wilhelm and I do a little digging on $AMZN founder Jeff Bezos’ latest project, the secretive AI startup Project Prometheus. We know they’re doing...
Get Instant Funding Verdict by Uploading Deck
Wondering if you can get funded ... or not? Wonder no more Upload your deck to SaaStr AI VC and we'll tell you -> https://t.co/S5UFYzoN7a https://t.co/VLRaBqjNa3
Acquisitions Close Quickly, but Relationships Take Years
If you want to potentially get acquired — start now. It often really, quietly takes years. What do I mean? Well for sure, acquisitions themselves technically often happen very quickly. The acquiring CEO reaches out, they meet up...
