Malik and I are about halfway through our summer internships, and in between everything, we kept finding ourselves talking about what it would take to start our own fund one day. It’s one of those recurring conversations that never fully goes anywhere, but keeps coming back.

We’re also nearing the halfway point of the year, which means next issue we’ll revisit our 2026 predictions and see how they’re holding up.

Elsewhere, AI stayed active across the stack, deals kept moving in legacy industries, and we kept seeing more capital flow toward the physical world.

Let’s get into it.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Swsh —The New York-based fan engagement platform — raised a $4M Seed led by Game Changers Ventures, with participation from Stellation Capital, SignalFire, and Scooter Braun. Founder Alexandra Debow, just 24, originally launched Swsh as a college photo-sharing app before pivoting the company toward live event engagement. As we’ve said before, the future of fandom is increasingly experiential, and companies building tools around live entertainment stand to benefit as consumers continue prioritizing experiences .

• XDOF — This robotics training company raised $70M from Thrive Capital, a16z and others. It’s training through data, and investors are betting that high-quality training data will be one of the biggest bottlenecks in embodied AI. Robots need homework if they’re gonna stand a chance against the Greater Fools.

• Jarvie — All I can think of is J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man, but this AI is focused on a much bigger challenge: managing the group chat. Jarvie raised $8.3 million in seed funding from a16z, Base10 Partners, and Lightspeed to build AI assistants for group chats, because apparently, coordinating dinner plans with your friends has finally become too much work for humans alone.

• Kimba — AI powered scent therapy for sleep is what investors put $6.5M toward. I’ve dabbled in lavender, but never enough to make it part of a bedtime routine. Still, using AI to personalize scents based on your body’s sleep patterns is undeniably intriguing. Sleepmaxxing has entered the chat.

• TOMBOT— A company building robotic emotional support animals raised a $7 million seed Series A round with participation from Cadeceus Capital Partners. This feels like something that could only happen in 2026. Robotic emotional support animals sounds bizarre at first... but Tombot is building for people dealing with medical conditions, and other challenges where the soothing effects of having a dog could genuinely help, but caring for a real animal just isn’t practical. The flagship product, Jennie, is a robotic Labrador puppy designed to provide companionship without the upkeep of a live pet. I bet you feel like an asshole if you laughed when you first read the headline huh?

• HaloBraid — A robotics startup looking to speed up the process of braiding hair raised a $7M seed led by Alexis Ohanian’s (co-founder of reddit) firm 776 Ventures. Solving an issue that hasn’t gotten an update 100’s of years. They also have one of the coolest websites we’ve come across.

• Coval— A voice AI evaluation platform, raised a $28M Series A led by Norwest, with Base10 Partners, Twilio Ventures, and Y Combinator joining the round. We haven’t written about Voice AI platforms in a while, but we still love em, Coval is interesting because it’s some what behind the scenes. It’s the testing layer that helps enterprises figure out whether those agents actually work at scale.

• Menlo Ventures —Announced $3B in new capital across Fund XVII and Menlo Inflection IV. The focus is to back AI companies seed through the growth stage. Menlo, like many firms, has made the decision to re-organize around AI saying “When we’re in, we’re ALL IN, and we are ALL IN on AI”

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Partly: Austin-based AI company for the automotive repair supply chain raised a $50M Series B led by DST Global Partners. Anyone who’s had their mechanic say, “We’re just waiting on a part,” knows this industry desperately needs innovation.

• Plotsy: Ausin-based Plotys raised $1.5M from Pier 88 Investment Partners. Plotsy’s proprietary “Cineversion” process uses a human-powered AI workflow to turn books into cinematic, episodic video. Hollywood has spent decades turning books into movies, but Plotsy wants to do it faster, cheaper, and at internet scale.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Lots of acquisitions recently, let’s name a few

  • OpenAI to acquire Ona to help Codex operate continuously within enterprise cloud environments while maintaining security and organizational control.

  • American Express acquires The Fork for $700M as it deepens its global bookable venues footprint alongside Resy and Tock. Amex is now one acquisition away from just personally booking your Friday night dinner.

  • Fox acquires Roku for $22B (~$12B cash, $160/share), doubling down on streaming and adtech. The dream is simple: if you can’t beat Netflix, just buy the thing everyone uses to watch Netflix.

  • LongRange Capital is set to acquire Pizza Hut’s global business (excluding mainland China) from Yum! Brands for roughly $1.5B, while Yum China took the remaining China operations. Having worked in PE, I can confirm no beloved consumer brand is safe—nextup: operational improvements, menu optimization, and somehow fewer breadsticks in the value creation plan.

• New York-based startup Valence AI raised $5 million in funding. The voice AI coaching space is definitely starting to look like the water bottle aisle at a convenience store. Ton of options, they claim to go beyond the competition by being an “emotional intelligence infrastructure company”, not just coaching. They essentially can read and understand the emotional state from speech in real time. That sounds good in theory but we can’t be the only ones to think this is going to do numbers in the hands of scammers

• Fools Request for Startups: #1. Anti-Scamming Software product suite

• We talked a while back about “picks-and-shovels” plays: companies that benefit from a new category taking off without having to be the category winner themselves. Aseon Labs is a great example. As soon as I read about them, I was shocked that something like this didn’t already exist. They’re creating the pit stops for self-driving cars . A place where autonomous vehicles can get cleaned, charged, inspected, and sent back out into the world.

It makes too much sense.

As new categories keep getting created every week, we’re going to see more and more of these companies pop up alongside them.

• King of the pivot, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have created a prediction markets app called Arena. This could be a game changer for Meta, Kalshi and PolyMarket play on their own platforms, but Arena has access to all of Meta’s platforms. It can live on your Aunt’s Facebook, within Instagram, and Whatsapp. By November we can be predicting (betting) what time Uncle Steve is gonna show up to Thanksgiving in the Family Whatsapp group.

• While FIFA has dominated the sports conversations, Novak Djokovic made his way to Wall Street as a Strategic Global Advisor at General Atlantic. Personally, I love seeing stories like these. As a former college athlete, I always felt sport didn’t compete with career, it complemented it, building skills that carry over in ways people underestimate. Fun fact: 94% of women in the C-suite level played sports

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: AI compute is being subsidized at levels we haven’t really seen since the Uber vs. Lyft race of 2014–2016.

Something’s got to give eventually, but in the meantime there’s a window for builders to create something really special. Really curious to see what comes afterwards

Sahana: If it’s offline and slightly unmeasurable, it’s now a venture opportunity. Even the most analog parts of life are getting “AI-ified”, from automotive supply chains to robotics data to scent therapy for sleep. Another constant: the continued bet on live entertainment and experiences.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: Wispr Flow has changed my life (This is not an ad unless they want to sponsor us).If you see a drastic improvement in my grammar and punctuation, you know why.

Sahana: Turns out gross margin is whatever you say it is until someone makes you build the model. Then it’s whatever the model says it is, which is rude.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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This week we’re talking AI labs raising the equivalent of small countries’ GDPs, SpaceX reminding everyone that startup equity is a lottery ticket, Anthropic getting put in timeout, and why AI might be increasing your mental load, not decreasing it 🤨

Let’s get into it.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Flourish — One of the largest AI rounds of the year went to a company that hasn’t shipped a product yet… Flourish raised $500M at a $2.5B valuation to study how the brain achieves intelligence so efficiently, a reminder that some investors (Jeff Bezos, in this case) are already betting on what comes after the current AI paradigm.

• Gigascale Capital — We have a soft spot for impact investing, so funds like this get us excited. Gigascale raised a $250M fund to back companies rebuilding the physical economy, with the belief that climate solutions win when they’re simply the better option. As it turns out, “doing well by doing good” makes for a pretty compelling investment thesis.

• F2 — F2 just raised $24M to bring AI deal team associates to private credit and banking. Every week, there’s another startup automating a white-collar job, and at this point I’m increasingly convinced my long-term job security depends on being a personality hire.

• Minerva — The Brooklyn-based AI platform for consumer marketing, launched publicly with $20M in funding from The General Partnership, 8VC, NBA Investments, and others, alongside a collaboration with OpenAI. Minerva is building the future of consumer marketing via AI agents.

• InCharge Energy — The LA-based energy infrastructure platform raised a $46M strategic investment led by S2G Investments, with participation from QIC. EV’s (electric vehicles) are hot in the streets and only getting hotter. InCharge is helping build the infrastructure to handle the influx.

• WealthReach — The New York-based growth platform for RIAs and wealth management firms, raised a $1M seed round led by Cecure Corporation. WealthReach is building an AI platform for financial advisors. No industry is immune to AI’s influence, old school wealth managers aren’t either. Personally, we are just hoping to be a fly on the wall as wealth managers aggressively pitch SpaceX employees.

• Prometheus— San Francisco-based physical AI startup co-led by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, raised $12B at a $41B valuation from Bezos, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and others. Prometheus is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer,” AKA software for the physical world, everything from jet engines to drug compounds. We wrote about Prometheus a couple of months back when they initially raised and when they were much more secretive and our feelings are still the same. Even though it’s named after the greek god that championed humanity, the secretive nature kinda feels like they’re doing the opposite.

• Animal Capital— NYC-based early-stage venture firm, closed a $33M Fund III to triple down on its early-stage strategy. We’re big fans of GP Marshall Sandman and his 300 straight days of VC advice series on Instagram. As aspiring fund managers ourselves, it’s awesome to see an early-stage fund make it to Fund III, especially with the progression from a $13M Fund I, to a $16M Fund II, to a step up with a $33M Fund III.

Animal Capital has also built a pretty wild LP bench: The founders of Twitch, Netflix, Tinder, and Android, plus names like Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Mark Wahlberg, Christina Aguilera, Pete Davidson, and more.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Lium AI: We’re used to AI helping us search documents and spreadsheets. Lium is focused on helping us understand the massive amounts of sensor data generated by the physical world. The company is based in Houston and raised a $5.5M seed round.

• Artis: I’ll admit, when I first saw this raise, I wasn’t immediately fascinated. Then I spent a few minutes on the website and found myself unexpectedly drawn in by their mission and the tagline, “In the Service of Beauty.” As someone who scrolls Zillow before bed and literally moved apartments yesterday, I can appreciate the idea that technology should help create places people love, not just make operations more efficient. Austin-based Artis raised $7.3M in seed funding led by LiveOak Ventures with Mark VC and Capital Factory also participating.

• InfoHawk: The Austin-based AI platform fighting online deception and digital fraud raised a $2.25M pre-seed round led by Moonshots Capital. The company is building AI infrastructure to detect and neutralize online scams. The fools are all in on this! Especially if it keeps us from having to tell our parents that picture of the Pope wearing a puffer isn’t real.

• Lift Aircraft: Austin-based eVTOL startup, raised $1.2M in its latest round. LIFT is building HEXA, a personal eVTOL (Electric Vehicle Take-Off and Landing) aircraft designed to let people experience vertical flight without a traditional pilot’s license. They are “democratizing the sky.” I personally don’t think the skies need to be democratized but I also don’t think everyone should be able to ride lime scooters.

• NinjaOne: The Austin-based unified IT platform raised more than $400M in Series C extensions at a $12.3B valuation. NinjaOne provides a unified IT operations platform, serving nearly 40,000 organizations across 140+ countries. They’re hoping to be the single source of truth for the way too many tools that enterprises needs to use and keep track of.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• According to the WSJ, OpenAI may be cutting token prices. Interesting timing to be compressing margins since they are reportedly gearing up for an IPO, but the move is clearly aimed at competing with Anthropic. The signal? AI may be entering a phase where price matters more than performance.

• A16z recently hired former White House technology and cybersecurity official Anne Neuberger as its first Head of Global Affairs. Twenty years ago, venture capital was about founders and markets; today, it increasingly looks like founders, markets, governments, and geopolitics all at once.

• Professional chess players can burn thousands of calories during tournaments because sustained mental effort is physically demanding. This article argues AI may have a similar effect on knowledge work: by removing routine tasks, it could leave humans spending more time on cognitively intensive work, making our jobs more mentally exhausting rather than easier. Recommended read.

• The U.S. government reportedly ordered Anthropic to shut off access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, two of the most advanced AI models of all time, citing national security concerns.

Fable 5 was supposed to be the public-facing version of Anthropic’s more powerful Mythos model, with added safeguards so regular people could use it. Which is great, because I needed it to help me convert ounces to grams.

Access is getting pulled because the government reportedly believes the model can be jailbroken for cyber-related tasks. (Hacks.)

Amazon reportedly helped set this whole thing off after a team of its researchers found ways to get Fable 5 to return information that could aid cyberattacks.

Amazon………..The Anthropic backer, partner, and also kind of competitor.

Government overreach? A step for AI safety? A little bit of strategic sabotage?

• The SpaceX IPO is a pretty insane reminder of the power of equity, specifically what can happen when you join or invest early in a company that becomes generational. (To be clear, this is beyond the best-case scenario. You will most likely not invest or join a startup that becomes the biggest IPO of all time.)

Some of the reported winners:

• Elon Musk did ok, started the 4 commas club

• Jack Dorsey’s estimated 0.14% stake is worth around $2.6B

• Larry Ellison’s estimated 0.15% stake is worth around $2.7B

• Austin-based Gigafund Co-Founder Luke Nosek’s estimated 0.19% stake is worth around $3.4B.

• Founders Fund / Peter Thiel’s estimated 3% stake is worth more than $50B

• Google’s estimated 5% stake is worth around $90B

• Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is reportedly worth more than $10B

• Sequoia’s stake is reportedly worth more than $20B

And the best part is that more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are reportedly set to become millionaires, with around 400 becoming centimillionaires ($100 Million+).

That is the startup dream in its purest form. Well, that and sick snacks and five different types of seltzer available at all times.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: I’ve been thinking a lot about what “impact investing” actually means. I used to think about it mostly as investing in companies that are explicitly mission-driven, but my thinking is starting to evolve.

More and more, I think impact is less about whether a company labels itself as an impact company and more about whether its success would make the world meaningfully better. I spoke with an investor recently who made a good point: all companies, impact or not, should be building something that makes life better. And if they are not, regardless of whether you call yourself an impact investor, you probably shouldn’t be investing.

Sahana: My current consumer thesis is that the best better-for-you brands don’t sell health; they sell a vision of who consumers want to become. The category has shifted from restriction (”less sugar”) to aspiration (”more protein,” “more energy,” “more longevity”). Nobody buys Poppi because they care about prebiotics. They buy it because it aligns with the identity they want to project and the lifestyle they want to live.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: Put together enough market maps and you start to dream about who is really a competitor, who’s a long-term threat, who’s an immediate threat, and whether the founder saying, “We don’t see ANYONE as a competitor,” is as crazy as Becky Hammond’s take on NBA Champion Jalen Brunson.

My view on competition has shifted.

I used to think the goal was to build in a space no one else was in. While that is still somewhat true, competition can also serve as proof that there’s a real problem to solve, and a legit market.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt if you’re building in a highly capitalized space and you think you’re straight up better. Also, if you’re a founder worried your space is too crowded, just take a walk down the bottled water aisle.

Sahana: Spending the summer digging through portfolio company metrics has changed the way I read startup headlines. It’s easy to get excited about a fundraise or a flashy product launch, but eventually every story makes its way back to revenue growth, cash burn, and runway.

Thanks for reading…Stay foolish!

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Cinder is a wearable innovation company reimagining pain relief through technology, design, and empathy. Bluntly said, they’re making clothing that makes you feel better.

For 1 billion people, chronic pelvic pain is not an occasional inconvenience. It shows up in the middle of work, dinner, travel, workouts, meetings, and everywhere else where life, well… lifes.

And yet, the innovation curve for something that impacts an estimated 26% of the world’s female population has been essentially flat. To put the innovation gap in perspective, the modern hot water bottle was patented in 1903.

For a long time, the options have basically been said hot water bottle, a bulky heating pad, a TENS machine with wires doing their best impression of 2006 iPod ads, or simply pretending you’re fine while quietly negotiating with your own nervous system.

This is why Paola Galeano is building Cinder.

Cinder is building wearable pain relief, starting with underwear designed specifically for pelvic pain. The company is reimagining what pain management can look like when it is built for real life, not being immobile on the couch.

The idea is simple but powerful: clothing that helps deliver targeted therapy while still being something you can actually move through the world in.

Why It Matters

Most pain relief products make 2 poor assumptions:

1. It’s okay to pass limitations and tradeoffs to consumers (Cinder refers to this as “The Valley of Death’”).

2. Pain is something you can schedule around.

Cinder rejects both of these assumptions and is building for the reality of how chronic pain is truly experienced.

Speaking to Paola, one thing the conversation made clear is just how normalized that tradeoff has become. You either suffer through it, reach for whatever relief product is already on the market and hope for the best, or rearrange your life around pain that the rest of the world has been taught to minimize.

Cinder is pushing back on this.

People still have to go to work. They still have to sit in meetings. They still have to commute, parent, travel, socialize, present, walk, bend, stand, and exist in public.

Current wearables for pain management often force a tradeoff between relief and dignity. Giant battery packs. Visible wires. Bulky silhouettes. Devices that ask you to advertise your pain.

Cinder’s bet is that pain relief should move with you.

The first product uses proprietary, imperceptible technology embedded into garments that can deliver targeted heat or electro-stimulation to 4 times more pain areas on the body across the pelvis and back, offering anatomical precision not yet seen on the market.

Controlled via your phone you can preset settings and the ability to log your pain, helping users better track pain patterns and advocate for themselves in doctor conversations. It’s giving wearers better support, better data, and more agency in a system that has historically asked women to prove their pain before treating it seriously.

Why They Might Win

Cinder starts with a founder market fit that is almost unfair.

Founder Paola Galeano has lived with Endometriosis for 25 years (one of the world’s Top 20 most painful conditions affecting 1 in 10 women with excruciating pelvic pain as a main presenting symptom).

She’s building from lived experience and repeated frustration.

Also, Paola spent 6 years at monday.com, which means the monday.com mafia is continuing to grow.

One of the biggest reason we find Cinder really interesting is that it’s not a one-product company.

The wedge is D2C: reusable, interchangeable membranes that fit into different garments. Start with pelvic pain, then expand into more form factors, and more pain areas. Over time, the same core technology could show up across different types of apparel, brand collaborations, or even licensed products.

Cinder is not a femtech company, while their first product might suggest it, the plan is to expand to all areas of the body and all genders with some brand collaborations up their sleeve.

Pain is personal. Bodies are different. A pain relief product that ignores sizes and fit is basically deciding who deserves comfort and who has to “make it work.” Cinder’s mission is for women to feel “finally, someone made something for us.”

Our Take

Cinder sits in one of those spaces where the immediate reaction is: why doesn’t this already exist?

Cinder’s insight is not just that people need pain relief. It’s that they need pain relief that respects their lives.

The company is still early, with its MVP in development and more to come soon, including an upcoming raise. We see Cinder as the combination of science, apparel, personalization, and an empathy that has been missing from the industry.

Everyone take a look back at the 2026 Fools predictions 👀👀👀 We should’ve been placing Kalshi bets instead of giving out gold for free. We’ll do a formal recap at the halfway point of year, but wanted to put you all on notice!

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Radar — This is one of those “why didn’t this already exist?’ companies, which explains their unicorn status. Their ceiling-mounted RFID system tracks inventory every few seconds, helping retailers actually know what’s on shelves, what’s missing, and what customers are touching. They raised $170M in series B funding.

• BRAMI — Been buying the Costco pack of this for a while, so was pleasantly surprised to see they raised a $33M Series B round led by VMG Partners. BRAMI makes high-protein pasta that somehow still tastes like actual pasta, founded by an Italian entrepreneur who clearly understood the assignment.

• Menlo Ventures — According to an SEC filing, Menlo Ventures is raising $250M to expand their AI Leaders Fund. VC firms now have an AI fund the same way every startup suddenly became “AI-powered” overnight.

• Arc — This is a good one…AI for drive-thrus. Arc just raised $10.8M led by a16z to automate drive-thru ordering with voice AI. Nothing against the technology, I just know one missed “no pickles” is going to send us backward as a society.

• Hark — Raised $700M at a $6B valuation for its secretive “universal” AI interface. The company is building models, hardware, and a personal AI assistant meant to sit between you and the digital world.

  • The most impressive part might just be founder Brett Adcock’s resume. He is simultaneously building Hark, leading Figure at a reported $39B valuation, building Cover, previously co-founded Archer Aviation, now trading as ACHR with a ~$5.2B market cap, and co-founded Vettery (now Hired), which was also Malik’s first startup job. Not a bad run. Some people just get more done with their 24.

• Anthropic — Anthropic raised $65B at a $965B post-money valuation. The round was led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, and puts Anthropic within shouting distance of a trillion-dollar valuation. To put that into perspective, Anthropic is a five-year-old company that is now, on paper, more valuable than:

-Walmart

-JPMorgan Chase

-Eli Lilly

-ExxonMobil

- Disney

This is also significant because Anthropic has officially passed OpenAI in valuation. It might not last long, or maybe it will, but that has to be an unbelievable feeling for a team of former OpenAI employees.

• Panthalassa — What’s the opposite of data centers in space? Data centers at Sea! Panthalassa raised $140M led by Peter Thiel to build wave-powered AI data centers in the ocean. The plan is to use ocean waves for power and seawater for cooling. I personally think not enough places are being considered for data centers, and would like to offer my apartment, my dog’s bed, and my 2007 Honda Accord, all for an exorbitant usage fee, of course.

• Polsia — raised $30M at a $250M valuation for its AI operations platform, which is pushing the “AI can run the company” idea to an extreme. Polska is on its way to $10M ARR with one human and zero employees. All that’s great, but my favorite part is that Polsia backwards is AI Slop.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• LONA: Austin based beauty brand raised $400k in pre-launch funding by ERA VC. Co-founded by McCombs alum, Annie Vallely, LONA is betting consumers want fewer products doing more things. Given the current state of my bathroom counter, they may be onto something.

• Fields Good: Austin based Fields Good raised $1.8M led by Female Founders Fund to build a functional cookie brand for focus, protein, and sleep. The company was founded by Ashley Fields, daughter of Mrs. Fields founder Debbi Fields. Now, that is the kind of founder-market fit we look for!

• CasaPerks: Austin based CasaPerks raised $15.8M for its AI-powered rewards platform across rent, resident loyalty, and workplace recognition. The company started in student housing, is moving into conventional multifamily, and now wants to turn residents and employees into a rewards audience for brands.

• Oorja Bio: Houston-based Oorja Bio launched with a $30M Series A from Westlake BioPartners to develop therapies for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and other fibrotic diseases.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Inflation is hitting unicorns😅“Unicorn” is supposed to mean a startup valued at $1B+, but adjusted for CPI, the threshold should technically be $1.43B now.

• Oura confidentially (not really) filed for an IPO. The wearables company is currently valued at about $11B and brought in $1B in revenue in 2025. Incredible business built entirely on telling high achievers they’re stressed.

• SpaceX officially filed to go public, and the S-1 reads like the 100-year-before-Dune prequel. There were 18 pictures of rockets, satellites, and planets, a voting structure where the only person who could oust Elon would basically be himself, and a stated plan to “establish the lunar economy, including cargo transport, manufacturing, and energy production on the Moon.” oh and a claimed $28.5T TAM, which is casually larger than U.S. GDP.

• Sideline Group raised $155M to invest in the “offline economy”, a counter to the everything-is-AI-and-online way of thinking. Their current portfolio already tells the story: Bandit Running, Urban Golf Performance, MARI, the company behind the Miami Open.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: A couple of newsletters back, I talked about how we’re entering a time where the new moats are going to be speed and prior domain expertise. I think another factor needs to be added, a factor I’m calling the IRL Moat. (In Real Life)

These are things that I think can be enhanced by AI, but not fully replaced by it. Products and services that, on some level, are created for human experiences. Things that have to be touched, tasted, worn, watched, felt, or lived. To me, this includes hardware, CPG, restaurants, live entertainment, sports, health & wellness, and really any business where the end product exists outside of a screen.

I don’t know if that makes me a consumer investor, a hardware investor, or just another software fanboy who is having recurring nightmares about SaaS really being dead.

Sahana: Everyone keeps asking whether AI is overhyped or underhyped. My answer is yes. Amara’s Law says we overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. Right now we’re somewhere between “AI will replace every job next year” and “AI is just autocomplete.” History suggests both sides are wrong. The near-term disruption may be overstated, but the long-term impact is probably bigger than most of us can imagine.

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Sahana: AI isn’t moving too fast, companies are moving too slow. Most organizations now have an AI strategy, but very few have fundamentally changed how they operate. The technology is evolving exponentially; adoption is moving at corporate speed.

Malik: I took a number of founder calls this week, and counted three calls where I preemptively thought to myself: “This is a CRM, isn’t it?”

That doesn’t necessarily signal a good or bad thing. I think purpose-built CRMs for specific verticals targeting mid-market and SMBs are a smart hedge against the uncertainty of what’s happening in the enterprise SaaS world. It did make me wonder whether the fear of the foundational models being used across every industry is creating a massive wave of deeply integrated vertical software companies?

I think so.

Is that a good thing?

Time will tell.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: My professional background has largely been in early stage startups. I was lucky enough to be a part of an IPO and if you have read my resume you’ll see I slightly overplay my role in said IPO (S/O $MNDY). All that to say is the largest company I have ever been a part of prior to interning at Cisco this summer was 2,000 people. Cisco has 85,000+... So while there has definitely been a learning curve, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits that come with Cisco’s size. The biggest being the scale of the impact a company like Cisco can have when it puts its weight behind something.

Sahana: A company I brought to our team got a first call this week. I originally learned about it because my best friend had just joined the company. One thing I’ve learned is that venture isn’t always about predicting the future. Sometimes it’s about noticing where talented people are placing their bets.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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Internship season is here, vacation mode is (reluctantly) over, and yes, this newsletter was absolutely written last night. Malik is fresh off a move to Chicago, Sahana is back at Silverton, and we’re both running on the particular energy of people who probably should have started earlier. Anyway, let’s get into it.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Hint — MARTHA!! It’s AI, but make it homey. Hint, the New York-based startup, raised a $10M seed led by Slow Ventures to build an AI-native home management platform that helps homeowners stay ahead of maintenance, insurance, bills, and repairs before things break. Love the idea, would love it even more if the AI-native generation could actually afford to become homeowners. Or maybe that’s what Martha is working on next.

• Isomorphic Labs — London-based AI drug design company, Isomorphic Labs, raised a $2.1B Series B (madness) led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Alphabet, MGX, Temasek, and others. Isomorphic is building an AI drug design engine to accelerate the development of new treatments. If it works, saying it’s a game changer would be putting it lightly.

• Oishii — Those overpriced, luxurious-looking strawberries you see at Whole Foods, the ones that probably have a better credit score than you, just closed a $150M Series C led by SPARX Asset Management. Jersey City-based Oishii has the world’s largest indoor vertical strawberry farm and uses robotics, automation, and Japanese farming techniques to grow pesticide-free, non-GMO strawberries year-round.

• Outside Capital — a NYC-based firm founded by Tom Black and Parth Dalal, just announced a new fund investing up to $1M in pre-seed and seed-stage companies building the next generation of heritage brands across sports, wellness, and fitness tech. Sports and wellness are AI-proof, right? The Fools think so! Sahana is a runner, and Malik still talks about his intramural dominance from back in the day. Check out Tom’s LinkedIn post here.

• Mother Ventures — a new fund from Allison Stern betting on the MATC ( Mom as the Consumer) landscape. The firm just announced a $10M new fund to back startups serving mothers as a major economic engine.

• Actively — just raised $45M in a Series B round led by TCV and First Harmonic. The company is building what they call “Per Account Agents” who basically will work around the clock to execute and close deals without ever asking for commission. I’m curious what my GTM friends think of this one.

• Nectar Social — same energy^, different department. Nectar is building an autonomous marketing AI agent that plugs into major platforms and runs your brand’s marketing end to end. The company raised a $30M Series A round led by Menlo Ventures.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Vida Global: Austin-based Vida Global, an AI Agent Operating System for modern businesses, priced its IPO at $4 per share and raised $15M before it began trading on NYSE American and NYSE Texas under the ticker VIDA. AI agents are officially ringing the bell now.

• Onramp Bitcoin: Austin-based Onramp raised a $12.5M Series A led by Early Riders to scale its multi-institution Bitcoin custody platform. The company says it now custodies over $1B in assets and has had zero security incidents since launching in 2023.

• VoltaGrid: Houston-based VoltaGrid raised $1B in a strategic equity investment from Blackstone and Haliburton. This space is getting crowded fast, especially in Texas, so the real question is what’s actually separating VoltaGrid from the pack at a $10B valuation. We’re watching closely.

• Fervo Energy: Houston-based Fervo Energy raised $1.89B in an IPO, jumping in its Nasdaq debut under the ticker FRVO. The company is using oil-and-gas-style drilling techniques to unlock 24/7 carbon-free geothermal power. They also now hold the record for the largest clean energy IPO of all time.

• 4Minds: Dallas-based 4Minds raised a $5.4M seed round. The company stands out as I see many try to pitch copilots while 4Minds is building systems that actually take work off people’s plates entirely.

• Casimir: Houston-based Casimir just raised a $12M seed round led by Scout Ventures and says it’s developing unlimited power by harvesting energy from quantum fields. We want to believe. We also have seen Theranos. I know I wasn’t ever great at physics but didn’t Newton say something about this?

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Fight! Fight! Fight! – General Catalyst dropped a “VC vs. GC” ad featuring a fictional AI robot dog startup called Woof AI, and the internet did its thing. The joke was pretty clear: some VCs will fund anything with “AI” in the name, while GC wants to be seen as the adult in the room.

Marc Andreessen and the A16z crew didn’t love it…which only made the whole thing funnier. Felt like it could have been the VC version of Kendrick vs. Drake. We’re just happy they’re paying homage to one of the greatest commercial series of all time.

• Data centers, but make it space. Google is reportedly in talks with SpaceX to explore launching AI data centers into orbit as part of its Project Suncatcher, which would use solar-powered satellites loaded with Google TPUs to create a space-based AI cloud.
  
  Pros: Endless solar energy and fewer land constraints.

  Cons: Maintenance is harder, costs are higher, and we’ve all seen Interstellar, so we know whatever can go wrong in space will go wrong.

The fact that the major players are talking about it means it’s quickly gone from a possibility to something that will most likely be happening pretty soon.

• Founders School is a new four-year high school for future founders with a crazy promise. Students graduate with a real business, and if they enroll as freshmen and don’t hit $1M in profit by graduation, the school offers a full tuition refund ($150K/year). I wish B-school had the same guarantees. I guess this is the realization of AI-native schools.

• Maybe I’m late to the game, but I just found out about Pocket. The product attaches to your phone and is basically your little personal AI assistant. Thought it was cool so I bought it as a birthday gift for my dad. Can’t report back just yet since they emailed me saying it won’t ship for another 2-3 weeks due to popular demand 🙃

• Just a silly fool’s finding but New York coffee chain Black Fox just opened up across the street from recently opened Black Sheep Coffee in Austin. I was underwhelmed by Black Sheep and very impressed with Black Fox… do what you want with that information. What’s fascinating though is watching social media shape these places in real time. One brutal TikTok review seemed to tank the hype around Black Sheep while Black Fox had a line out the door before most people had even tried the coffee. Distribution > product? Maybe not. But distribution definitely gets the first shot.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: Mother Ventures and Outside Capital have given me hope. Having a specific point of view and investment lens does not limit what you can invest in, it gives you permission to be ruthlessly focused on what you believe is overlooked.

Sahana: As AI is making it easier to build products and brands, distribution becomes even more valuable. As seen in the Black Sheep vs Black Fox discourse, the companies/brands that win won’t necessarily be the ones with the best product. They’ll be the ones best at capturing attention first.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: Two updates:

1. Moved to Chicago for the summer, please send any and all non-deepdish pizza food recs

2. Starting at Cisco today on the Social Impact Investment team, let’s go!!

Sahana: Officially starting my full-time internship at Silverton today! After two weeks off, I definitely learned there are no days off in this industry, and if you think there are, you will fall miserably behind. Excited to be back!

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

Figuratively and literally. We officially finished our first year of the MBA! Crazy! And keep reading to find out what happened to our old tutor, Chegg.

Last week, the Venture Fellows headed to San Francisco for our Spring trek, where we visited Plug and Play, MVP Ventures, and Pruven Capital. We walked away equal parts excited and humbled as we think about the road still ahead in breaking into VC.

If you’re interested in what we’re up to beyond the newsletter, Malik is in Copenhagen (!!) and will be moving to Chicago to intern at Cisco while simultaneously continuing part-time at Mucker, and Sahana is visiting her SoCal roots but will be back and full-time at Silverton over the summer. Greater Fools lives on, of course.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Series — The AI social network is here. Wasn’t entirely sure what that meant at first either, but after reading up, the story is pretty compelling. Series is rethinking what social platforms look like in an AI-native world and raised a $5.1M pre-seed round.

• BMW i Ventures — Fund raise! The venture arm of BMW closed a new $300M fund bringing total AUM to $1.1B. The fund will invest at Series B with a focus on both agentic and physical AI, reflecting growing conviction that AI will become core infrastructure across automotive and manufacturing.

• Golden Child — Somehow we keep writing about dog food…Golden Child, a premium dog food startup built by former Hims & Hers co-founder, raised a $37M Series A round by Redpoint Ventures and Atomic. Worth noting: one of the founders is also a partner at Atomic.

• Kashable — A financial wellness program for employees with $60M in Series C funding from Goldman Sachs. Get ready to see this in your next “employee benefits” enrollment.

• FUN: New York City-based Fun announced a $72M Series A co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire, building payments infrastructure for internet-native capital markets. Fun powers deposits, withdrawals, and settlement for platforms like Polymarket processing over $18B in annual transaction volume

• Mosaic: New York City based Mosaic raised an $18M Series A, building a deal modeling platform for private markets. Feels like the love child between Harmonic and PitchBook. Time will tell, but we know how Sahana feels about PitchBook and how much Malik loves Harmonic, so this dog might hunt.

• Sage Haven: San Francisco based Sage Haven announced a $3M pre-seed led by Reach Capital. They’re building an AI-moderated messaging and calling app for kids that blocks harmful content before it’s even sent. Think iMessage for ipad kids

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Scout Ventures: Defense tech momentum continues. The Austin based firm announced an oversubscribed Fund V last month at $125M. The new fund will expand Scout’s investments across AI, autonomy, space, and power technologies, all areas it sees as critical to global defense deterrence.

• Dreambase: Austin based Dreambase raised a $3.7M seed round. The company helps you skip the dashboard engineer by generating insights, dashboards, and reports directly from your database using AI, abstracting away much of the traditional BI and data infrastructure layer.

• Musen: For when the broadcast team is ruining your Sunday…Musen lets sports fans sync alternative audio commentary to live games. The frisco based company raised a $10k pre-seed round.

• Frozen One: The gym broification of dessert continues, but still, on brand for Austin. Frozen One raised $2M for its high protein, all natural ice cream as better-for-you dessert startups continue proving consumers will optimize absolutely everything.

• Zapdos Labs: Austin-based Zapdos Labs announced a $500K raise led by Underscore VC. Zapdos builds AI video agents for factories, plugging into existing CCTV systems to monitor safety in real time (point for big brother).

• Austin’s still got it: 2025 was an all-time high for Austin venture investment. Investment into Austin based Startups shot up to $7.19 Billion. Interestingly enough the amount of deals was down from 312 in 2024 to 272. Shoutout to BasePower for a casual $1 Billion Series C and Saronic’s on their also massive $600 Million Series C

• VIDA Global: Cedar Park–based VIDA Global is building an AI agent operating system, letting businesses deploy AI “workers” across phone, text, email, and web to handle real workflows. They just filed for a $16M IPO, looking to ride the agent wave into the public markets at a $73M valuation

Founders! Don’t forget to submit your startup if you’re currently fundraising here:

https://da-greater-fools.netlify.app/

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Back to our regularly scheduled wearable discourse: Oura acquired Galen AI to deepen their AI-driven personalized health. Curious how many of y’all are already feeding your biometrics into Claude or ChatGPT?

• If you never used Chegg, you missed a core rite of passage: paying to panic-finish homework at 11:59 p.m. I remember sharing a chegg account with my brother in undergrad (aka he paid for it) and now all you have to do is ask your buddy Claude for help, leading to the first company to be wiped out by AI. What was once worth $14.7B is now worth near $1.

• For the car people: Porsche just sold its stake in Bugatti Rimac. Officially, the divestment is stated as a move to focus on Porsche’s core business. Our interpretation: tariffs, margin pressure, and some very expensive cleanup behind the scenes. Who knows.

• The VC to sports owner pipeline is alive and well. Joshua Kushner’s new vehicle Thrive Eternal is acquiring a minority stake in the San Francisco Giants. The logic: if AI makes everything digital more abundant, truly scarce cultural assets like sports franchises become even more valuable. The Venture Fellows made it out to a giants game so we’re just counting that as a firm visit.

• I just had to note that every billboard you see between Palo Alto and SF is for an AI platform or product, and don’t get me started on SFO. In a way it felt very dystopian.

• Olipop ( The best tasting alternative soda out there) is raising another $200M. It’s not all sweet though this comes after talks with Coca-Cola fell apart. If they’re looking for more funding, The Greater Fools will personally commit up to 3 digits worth of capital.

• We’ve got another rivalry brewing that both sides are probably hoping lasts for decades. Legal AI software company Legora raised a $50M Series D extension at a $5.6B valuation, with Nvidia’s NVentures joining the cap table.

  • Just like Claude vs. OpenAI, we now have Legora vs. Harvey. Harvey is currently valued at roughly double Legora, but as we know, valuations are all made up anyways. Excited to see how this race continues to evolve.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: Multi-time founders have always been at a premium. They’ve gone 0–1 before, and even if they didn’t win, they know what it takes and can look back at where they went wrong. I think that premium has 10x’d with AI tools. I know I’m not the only one sourcing for former founders who recently updated their LinkedIn to “Working on something new” or the industry favorite “Stealth Mode,” with the one-line description: “Building.”

My fear is that it’s not just the head start, it’s that investors will be far more willing to take a flyer on this profile. Especially now, when everyone is showing up with the same polished pitch deck and unreal wireframe. When everything looks exceptional, investors default to pattern recognition, even more than usual.

Which makes it harder for first-time founders to break through. The only solution I can think of is to keep taking flyers on those exceptional (lol) first-time founders with just the right amount of delusion… aka the Greater Fools

Sahana: Please just read this https://www.humanetech.com/ai-roadmap 😊. One of the more thoughtful frameworks I’ve seen on how society should think about AI governance and deployment. Whether or not you agree with every point, it’s worth understanding where this conversation is heading.

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Malik: Starting a running thread of the dumbest and most overused phrases in the Venture/Startup Ecosystem:

1. AI-Powered

2. “We invest in exceptional founders” as opposed to what?

3. 30,000 foot view

4. Let’s double-click on that

5. —

6. You’re absolutely right!

7. Cracked Engineer

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: What does it really mean to be “AI native”? In 2026 it feels like saying you’re building something that’s AI native is the equivalent to saying “we’re powered by the internet”. It’s become boiler plate on pitch decks, I personally don’t think it’s necessary. If you’re pitching software I’m already making the leap that there’s AI involved, or at the very least automation that you can pass off as AI

I’m far more interested in what’s keeping someone with a Claude Pro account from recreating this in 36 hours

Sahana: Pitchbook sucks BUT I did just find out they have pretty good research reports. I’m not ready to apologize, but I’ll stop complaining (for now).

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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It’s been a bit chaotic on our end.

Sahana just got back from Coachella, Malik’s been at The Wharton School for the MIINT Turner MBA Impact Investing Challenge, and school decided this was also the perfect week for every group project to exist at once.

But in between flights, decks, and trying to get back into a routine, we’ve been having a lot of the same conversations.

Dropping them below.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• nFuse — One of those startups where the pitch is basically “why was this not already a thing?” nFuse lets retailers place orders straight through their messaging apps using its B2B eCommerce platform. They raised $2 million from Eleven Ventures and LAUNCHub.

• PopUp Bagels — I’ve thought consumer investing is hard, but to me this is one of those just try it and it’ll click. I get it. PopUp Bagels landing a $300M valuation with backing from Tiger Global Management just makes sense.

• Poke — Rather than prompting AI for help, Poke is an AI that initiates. Like those apple watch notifications telling you to stand up, but applied to everything you should probably be doing. The company raised $25M from General Catalyst and Spark Capital.

• Nas.com — AI is coming for entrepreneurship itself. Nas just raised a $27M Series A led by Khosla Ventures to build what is essentially a business in a box. You can go from a single idea or even a photo into a fully functioning company from product to storefront to customer acquisition. The real question is whether this unlocks a new class of entrepreneurs or just floods the internet with more slop

• Sequoia Capital — One of the OG’s of the venture game has raised a new $7 Billion fund. Almost double the size of their last fund in 2022. This new vehicle will allow them to expand thier exisitng strategy on “AI Bets”, no Surprises there!

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• FastrFlow: AI that sees, hears, and remembers everything… which is either the dream or the beginning of a very specific Black Mirror episode. The Dallas-based company raised $375K in a seed round led by Mucker Capital.

• BizScout: Turning “I have a guy” into a product. Austin based BizScout raised a $5M seed round. The company develops business software that helps clients find beneficial off market deals to buy.

• CertifID: Austin based CertifID is going after one of the largest and least talked about areas in Fintech, real estate wire fraud. They just raised a $47.5M Series C led by Centana Growth Partners to protect transactions end to end. Not flashy but putting scammers on notice 👀

• AlphaSchool: Austin based K- 12school that is “AI Driven” has no teachers, AI is the instructor, grader and administrator. Kids are taught in as little as 2 hours a day and the rest of the time is spent focusing on life skills, creativity and independent learning.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• The parent company of 7-Eleven, Seven & i Holdings delayed the IPO of their North American unit. The delay is due to declining revenue, which is probably an indicator of the domino effects higher gas prices are having. Even with gas prices aside, retail is really taking a hit from inflation.

• Shameless plug… my dad just wrote in CIO magazine about the “agentic enterprise,” which sounds like a buzzword until you realize it’s basically AI building its own org structure. Micro agents = workers, macro agents = managers, and now we’re all just… supervising.

• Allbirds: A SHOE company announced recently that they are pivoting out of the shoe game and into….you guessed it the AI game. If you’re reading this thinking how is a sustainable shoe company going to make that pivot, you are not alone. Sounds like the plan as of right now is to focus on AI infrastructure….let’s see if it works.

  

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: I spent a lot of my time over the last two weeks prepping for the Turner MIINT Impact Competition. It’s a year long investment competition across business schools where the goal is to work as a team to build an impact focused thesis, source a company, complete intense due diligence, and present live in front of an investment committee.

The finals were this past weekend. While we didn’t take home the top prize (S/O my Kellogg heads), we placed top 5 out of 50+ schools. The best part of the weekend was getting to interact with so many people who are driven to create real impact. The question still remains, is it possible to drive significant investment returns and impact?

I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m hoping to find out!

Sahana: AI is starting to feel less like a tool and more like a system. I feel like that shift shows up clearly in this week’s deals .

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Malik: PopUp Bagels are overrated

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: We can tell when the pitch deck was made by Claude.

Sahana: As the school year wraps up, it’s kind of wild how quickly Silverton went from an internship to feeling like real work. I’ve learned a ton, but the best part has been the people, and I’m looking forward to continuing my time with them full-time over the summer.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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This past week felt like a preview of the future: AI agents doing everything, venture going public, and somehow Hannah Montana outshining March Madness. It also happened to be our first ever Greater Fools event. Seeing this community show up in person made all of it feel more real. If the week is any indication, things are only getting weirder, and we’re glad you’re along for it.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Bluesky — you don’t see this often…Bluesky just revealed it closed a $100M Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto nearly a year ago. The timing? Conveniently right after a CEO transition, but investors are clearly underwriting the bet that decentralized social (and the AT Protocol ecosystem) is more than just a post-Twitter coping mechanism.

• Daydream — SEO just got outsourced to AI. Daydream raised a $15M Series A led by WndrCo with First round Capital and Basis set Ventures also participating in the round. Daydream, Bluesky… at this point these startups are starting to sound like yoga studios, but maybe that’s just part of the marketing execution.

• Whoop — The OG Applewatch replacement, closed a $575 million Series G, bringing their valuation to $10.1 Billion. The round was led by Collaborative Fund with participation from some of our favorite athletes, Cristian Ronaldo, Rory McIlroy, and the GOAT Lebron James. Founder Will Ahmed celebrated the announcement with an all time motivational tweet. Had us ready to run through a brick wall.

• TBPN — Technology’s Daily Show (think: CNBC, meets sports talk radio for Silicon Valley) was acquired by OpenAI for an undisclosed amount. The wildly popular talk show launched only 17 months ago but has had some of the biggest names in tech as guests. The acquisition news was met with mixed headlines: general happiness for the founding team but immediate concerns on who will control editorial content. Above all, the criticism seems to land at the feet of the OpenAI, why do they need a long form media company?

State of Funding Q1 2026: Startup investments were just shy of $300 Billion in Q1 2026, up 2.5x over the previous quarter. The massive numbers were brought on by the equally massive rounds we’ve seen from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAi, and Waymo this quarter. In a decade, we’ll look back shocked that even more money didn’t get invested or we’ll be stunned by how much value was destroyed in such a short time frame…personally I hope we land somewhere in the middle.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Mars Men: an Austin based men’s wellness brand (on brand for Austin) raised $27.5M in series A funding led by L Catteron. The brand offers natural supplements to support testosterone, energy, and vitality. If you’re interested they’re offering 50% off their launch kit. No judgment if you’re curious, apparently investors are.

• Insight Health AI: Austin based Insight Health raised an $11M Series A round led by Standard Capital. The company is giving healthcare an AI squad that handles everything from intake to follow‑ups.

• Saronic: Austin-based Saronic closed a $1.75B Series D at a $9.25B valuation. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from 8VC, Caffeinated Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Saronic builds autonomous maritime vessels. Think of them as a driverless speedboat that can be used as a drone for defense and surveillance. The raise comes just a few months after Saronic secured a $392M Navy contract in December.

• Helix Earth: Houston-based Helix Earth closed a $12M oversubscribed “Seed 2” funding round. Co-invented at NASA, Helix Earth is a hardware company looking to revolutionize HVAC systems. This is interesting for a couple of reasons.
  1. It seems like another company benefiting off of the massive wave of investment in data centers. HVAC efficiency = more efficient data centers. More efficient data centers= more $$$.

  2. It’s the first time I’ve seen a round described as “Seed 2.” I remember when it was either Pre-Seed or Seed, now there is a Seed 2 and Seed+.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Venture capital is making its way to the NYSE. Fundraise Innovation Fund (VCX) is now open to retail investors, meaning individuals can now invest in private tech companies. Also meaning now anyone can chase private tech upside without even knowing the difference between a term sheet and a tweet.

• Hannah Montana just reminded us all who really runs pop culture. The 20th anniversary special aired last week and you gotta give props to the cross-cultural impact she has, she even made March Madness feel like benchwarmers.

• Step aside Waymo, Uber is reminding us that humans in suits still have a market. Enter Blacklane, the Berlin chauffeur service now acquired by Uber.

• Feltsense, a SF-based startup, is building AI agents as “Fully Autonomous Founders” a sentence that would sound crazy three months ago and like gibberish a year ago.

This week they made headlines claiming their agents successfully vibe coded every single Y Combinator (YC) company from the latest demo day batch in just 24 hours.

If that sounded like a different language to you, let’s break it down.

Vibe coding = software engineering, where humans guide AI to code for them

YC = The premier startup accelerator. YC is to startups what Kentucky under John Calipari was to the NBA. It’s a starting point for future generational companies (Coinbase, Airbnb,DoorDash, Reddit).

Demo Day = The Super Bowl for YC companies, presenting directly to investors and the tech world

Fully Autonomous Founders = Agents, based on AI systems that don’t just answer prompts, but can actually take actions and in this, case build an entire company (or at least copy one)

So claiming to have re-created ALL of YC’s companies from the latest class via agents is a really big deal.

• OpenAI closes (another) record breaking funding round. $122B at a $852B valuation. This round comes as the news of SpaceX confidentially filing for IPO broke.

  • We got a look at OpenAI’s Cap table so we decided to rank the biggest winners and losers:

Biggest Winners (Spoiler Alert: They all won)

1. Sound Ventures: Ashton Kutcher’s venture firm, $30m, now stands at a cool $1.3B. 43x return on investment

2. OpenAI Foundation: The “nonprofit” created to control OpenAI’s mission holds a $220B stake

3. Microsoft: Put in $13B Currently worth $228B. 17.6x return on investment

4. OpenAI Employees: Collectively own about 16% of the company, currently valued at $135B

5. SoftBank: 11.66% stake is currently worth $99.3B

Losers?

1. NVIDIA: Currently Down $500M (They’ll be fine.)

2. Sam Altman: Sam’s ownership is listed as TBD, he’s maintained for awhile that he decided not to take an equity position because it could potentially lead to a conflict of interest and is only doing this because “he loves it.”

I guess he was telling the truth!

3. Everyone on the cap table who didn’t put in more money.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Sahana: Based on conversations I had at our event last week, it got me thinking about how B2C is becoming a lot trickier. When users can basically vibe code their own experiences, selling a consumer product gets harder. B2B feels safer for now, enterprise complexity and integrations still give startups room to compete, but the gap between what’s easy for consumers to DIY and what businesses need is only widening.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy! Excel is my friend, not my enemy!

Saying it as many times as it takes for it to become a reality.

Sahana: Honestly, what Malik said ^ seems like we’ve been having pretty similar weeks. Also learned that if you stare at a spreadsheet long enough, your eyes start generating their own errors. Blue light glasses are now mandatory for survival. Shoutout to messy retention reporting… it’s like solving a puzzle, but the pieces keep moving.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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One is building the infrastructure layer that lets AI agents reliably take actions across more than 250 apps, giving developers access to 47k+ actions through a single line of code. On top of that, their deterministic automations improve token efficiency and reliability, while their product One Auth tackles one of the messiest parts of agent deployment: securely sharing credentials when building agents for end users.

Why It Matters:

Every newsletter, we write about how quickly the AI tech stack is moving. And after “AI,” “agents” might be the most-used word since the inception of Greater Fools. The problem many teams, especially inside enterprise companies, are running into is that friction sits at the point of action: authentication, permissions, API reliability, retries, schema drift, and orchestration across the many fragmented SaaS tools. What good are all these agents if they fail the moment they need to actually do something…

That is the gap One is aiming to close.

Why they might win:

One’s advantage starts with its breadth. With 250+ integrations and 47,000+ actions, they immediately offer a level of coverage that is hard to replicate. For developers, the advantage couldn’t be more clear: one line of code unlocks 47,000+ actions across 250+ integrations.

Their deterministic flows reduce token costs while improving reliability, which becomes increasingly important as we start to see token usage skyrocket across the industry. But we think the real sleeper is their product One Auth. Credential sharing is one of the most publicly complained about pain points when it comes to deploying agents. If One Auth truly solves this, they’ll become a product that is hard to live without.

Ok, let’s recap and break all that down, One is:

• A single line of code that opens the door for agents to execute 47k+ actions

• A simpler way to safely share credentials for your agents across your software stack

• A smarter way to reduce token usage while improving reliability

• Open-sourcing it all through the worlds largest app knowledge base
  

  

Our Take:

We, along with the rest of the world, have been talking nonstop about the picks-and-shovels play, and this feels like one of the cleanest ways to take advantage of the agentic movement.

Horizontal SaaS is far from dead, and the flexibility One offers in bringing tools across the software stack together is huge. If the future of work really does shift toward agents, the tools that help connect, authenticate, and execute could end up being some of the most important in the entire tech stack.

If you’re reading this, and you’re in Austin, TX, come celebrate April Fools Eve with the Greater Fools! Come for wine, connections, and AI hot takes. Stay for the free merch. RSVP here.

SXSW is over, spring break is over, and somehow the pace hasn’t slowed for a second. The Greater Fools are back.

But more importantly: WE HAVE AN EVENT NEXT WEEK

March 31st, Lolo Wine Bar, East Austin, 6:30 to 8:30 PM. Wine, dad hats, 40 spots, and we are not joking about the 40 spots. RSVP before someone else takes your seat.

RSVP Here

While we have you, two quick things. We launched a LinkedIn page so go give us a follow. And founders, we just launched a way for you to submit your raise directly to us here. If you’re in the middle of a round and want a shot at being featured, send it our way.

Malik also has a full SXSW recap later in the issue and trust us, it’s worth reading.

Now onto the deals. Robots, wearables, a $10 billion sweater company, and a human food brand designed to look like dog food. Yes, really. Let’s go.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Taya — Remember Malik mentioning the “Whoop–Oura Ring–Apple Watch–Lumia–Meta Ray-Ban combo”? Well add Taya to the list - the company just raised a $5M Seed round led by MaC Venture Capital and Female Founders Fund for their wearable pendant that can record your voice notes and even organize them using AI. Not sure if my notes would be productive or just beautifully organized chaos.

• Pado AI — Feels like the kind of company we’re going to see a lot more of. They help data centers not melt the grid. They just raised $6M in seed funding led by NovaWave Capital to use AI to shift workloads based on when and where energy is cheapest or available.

• Deeptune — AI agents are getting their own training camps now. Deeptune raised $43m in Series A funding led by A16 and joined by 776, Abstract Ventures, and Inspired Capital to run agents through simulated environments before they touch the real world. Raw, untrained AI being deployed straight into production was getting a little too… exciting.

• Sunday – The great robot wars of the 2020s are heating up. Sunday, a Mountain View based startup, raised $165M led by Coatue Management to build a robot capable of completing household chores. The latest investment puts them at a $1.15B valuation. Sunday’s flagship robot Memo differs from the competition (Figure, Teslabot) by being purpose driven for household “domestic chores” vs general purpose humanoid robots. Plus it looks friendly and beatable in a fight in case of an uprising.

• Quince – The direct to consumer brand that you can get your sweaters, bed sheets and carry-ons from, announced $500M in Series E financing led by ICONIQ. This brings them to a $10.1B valuation. Also, it wasn’t until right now that I realized they considered themselves a “consumer technology platform” but you learn something new every day.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Cart.com: Houston based ecomm roll-up offers an all-in-one stack across planning, financing, fulfillment, and marketing. They raised $180 million of venture funding in a deal led by Springcoast Capital Partners with PayPal Ventures, Arsenal Growth, Oak HC/FT, and Mercury Fund also participating in the round.

• Avatal: an Austin-based digital engagement service that is revolutionizing the debt collecting space. Raised $24M led by S3 Ventures. I personally don’t want to help out debt collectors and will miss emphatically hanging up the phone on whatever debt collector owns the contract for that $45 Quest Diagnostics bill from 2021 while yelling “You’re gonna have to get it back in blood”…..but to each their own.

• FindHelp: Austin-based FindHelp secured $250M in funding from impact investor The Rise Fund. Findhelp is a social impact SaaS platform helping people find and access local support services.

• Nominal: Austin-based industrial software startup Nominal raised an $80M Series B extension led by Founders Fund bringing their total valuation to $1B. This comes only 6 months after their $75M Series B round led by Sequoia. Nominal builds software that helps companies test complex physical systems. Think rockets, satellites and robotics.

• Terafab: Tesla is launching “Terafab”. Its very own $25B semiconductor fabrication business. Tesla is going to start making the chips that power its own products without having to rely on outside help. The plan is for it to be based here in Austin, and become the “largest chip manufacturing facility ever”.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Looks like the acquisition trend is still strong, recently Bilt acquired Sion for $30M. Sion essentially makes sure travel agents get paid and with travel being the most utilized reward category, Bilt is now able to extend to more travel advisors.

• Luckin Coffee just bought Blue Bottle for $400M. Cool, cool, cool. It feels like watching your favorite slow, overpriced, perfectly aesthetic coffee spot get handed to a company known for scale and speed. Maybe nothing changes. Maybe it gets better. But there’s a non-zero chance my $8 pour-over is about to get optimized.

• I have seen way too many new companies with a “platform for employees to build agents”

• It happened again…the 30 under 30 to prison pipeline is alive and well. Delve, a YC backed startup that raised a $32M Series A round less than a year ago. Is being accused of fabricating compliance certifications for their clients, which is objectively hilarious since their whole business is helping companies receive compliance certifications. The accusations were dropped last week via an anonymous substack authored by DeepDelver…again objectively hilarious. (Delve has denied the accusations).

• Random and not tech related whatsoever, but there’s a new CPG brand out there called Dawg Food that…checks notes…is human food designed to look and emulate…check notes again… dog food. With the tagline “human food, for that DAWG in you” I fear I know many people that this marketing and product will work on. And don’t worry the packaging is meant to resemble actual dog food as well.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: Interning at a relatively industry-agnostic fund has forced me out of my software bubble and made every founder interaction this past week that much more interesting, knowing there is always the possibility of an investment fit.

Going forward, I want to push myself to lean into my prior software operating experience as a lens to evaluate entirely different, new-to-me business models. Plus, if software really is dead or dying, I’ll probably need a new thing anyway.

Sahana: SXSW has a way of making it feel like everyone is building something. Last week I met founders, operators, and investors, and what stood out most was how many were genuinely mission-driven. Not in a performative way, just a real, lived connection to the problem. It pushed me to think more seriously about where I want to focus. I’m increasingly convinced impact investing doesn’t have to mean concessionary returns, especially after seeing founders who weren’t just building interesting companies, they were building ones that needed to exist. I’m still refining what this looks like as a thesis, but SXSW pushed me closer. More to come.

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

The best conversations don’t happen on SXSW panels, they happen in smaller rooms like the one we’re hosting next week. (RSVP here!)

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

First SXSW in the books, 7 days, 23 Events, 14 attended, 100+ “well, let’s connect on LinkedIn”

The best part by far was meeting some really cool founders and investors and seeing the lengths some of these brands go for their marketing activations.

In between scanning LinkedIn QR codes I was trying to jot down some notes/thoughts: some trends that kept coming up event after event, along with a few gems I picked up from being in some rooms that I had no business being in.

Thoughts, trends, soundbites, and interesting gems below:

• Everyone is really bullish on energy, specifically here in Texas

• “AI is going to tear the fabric from our reality when it comes to the incoming disruption it’s going to have on the workforce” 😳😳😳

• Satellites are hot in the streets right now. Learned more about satellites than I ever had in my life

• I was able to attend a panel with Cheryl Young who is the managing director of the Rockefeller Global Family Office. She had an interesting take on the effect of AI on education: “Education is designed to do repetitive tasks, which is what AI replaces, need to start thinking about humanity” 😳 😳

• “AI infrastructure is costing a Trillion Dollars a year, I think that will double in the next couple of years” 😳

Biggest takeaway = I think the “software is dead” moment has scared a lot of people and I sense that the next wave of successful outcomes is going to be bets on energy, hardware, and infrastructure. And I learned I’m not pronouncing Claude nearly as French as I could be.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

If you made it to the end, don’t forget to check out these links!

https://luma.com/isv1w459

https://www.linkedin.com/company/greater-fools/

https://da-greater-fools.netlify.app/

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On March 31st, we’re moving from takes to handshakes.

We’re hosting our first in-person Greater Fools event at Lolo’s Wine Bar in East Austin from 6:30–8:30 PM. A casual evening of networking with founders, investors, and friends of the newsletter. RSVP here! https://luma.com/isv1w459

There will be wine.

There will be dad hats.

There will be exactly 40 spots.

April Fools is the next day but this is not a joke.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Jump — Another AI solutions provider, this time for financial advisors, raised $80M in a Series B round led by Insight Partners. As someone who started their career in wealth management, Sahana can see how useful an AI assistant would be in automating workflows for advisors. The open question: do boutique RIAs buy the platform, or vibe-code their own version over a long weekend?

• Rodeo — Built by former Hinge execs, Rodeo just raised an $8.5M seed from Foundry, 359 Capital, and Oceans to turn “we should do this” texts into actual calendar invites. Same team who optimized your dating funnel are now fixing your group chat’s conversion rate. Such a fun concept, definitely recommend checking them out and they’re Greater Fools Alum (we wrote about them before).

• Eight Sleep: The buzzy NYC-based mattress tech company raised $50M in strategic financing led by Tether Investments, bringing its valuation to $1.5B. I think of Eight Sleep as the Samsung Frame TV of the mattress industry. Something very expensive that I definitely don’t need, and yet find myself looking at every time I feel wealthy. I’m old enough to remember when putting a mattress in a box was considered mattress tech. Now they track your heart rate while you sleep and shake you awake in the morning.

• Jest: The San Francisco-based startup just emerged from stealth mode with a $7M seed round led by Innovation Endeavors. Jest is building a marketplace for in-messaging apps and games. If anyone wants the hands in 8 Ball Pool, drop us a line.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Raveum: Austin based Raveum just closed a $1.3M Seed Round to do what fintech loves most: fractionalize something expensive. In this case, institutional-grade real estate—multifamily, student housing, industrial. Historically reserved for pension funds and PE shops, now available to individual investors who want exposure without wiring seven figures.

• NODA AI: Another Austin based company, NODA AI, just raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners. They’re building software that helps fleets of autonomous systems think drones, robots, and AI agents actually work together. Instead of humans micromanaging every move, NODA coordinates multiple machines at once so defense teams can operate faster, smarter, and with fewer manual decisions.

• BrainCheck: Austin-based BrainCheck announced $13M in Series A funding led by Austin-based venture firm Next Coast Ventures, with participation from S3 Ventures. BrainCheck is a digital platform facilitating cognitive care. Think digital diagnostics for brain health.

• Asto Consumer Partners: Austin-based investors Asto Consumer Partners announced a $105M co-lead investment with Align Ventures into skincare company Starface. The investment will be used for strategic growth and will continue Starface’s mission of making acne cool again. It’s been an active quarter for Asto, who also invested $45M into Oats Overnight toward the end of January.

Making acne cool + tricking people into thinking oats taste good = 🤝

• Artemis (FKA Monalee): Houston-based Artemis recently rebranded from Monalee and raised $6M in financing to continue their transition from solar installation to software service. Artemis is going all in on their software that used to be reserved for their internal team.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• MyFitnessPal just acquired Cal AI, a viral calorie-tracking app built by teenagers that lets users log meals with a photo instead of manual entry. It grew fast by doing one thing well: removing the most annoying part of calorie tracking.

• Uber is acquiring SpotHero, bringing parking reservations into the Uber app. First they took your taxi. Now they want your parking spot. Vertical integration, but make it curbside.

• PM at Anthropic tweeted this last week and I’m wondering if anyone knows what Dick’s Sporting Goods is cooking?

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: I had the opportunity to attend a talk between Bill Gurley and Matthew McConaughey this past week. It was to celebrate the launch of Bill Gurley’s new book, Running Down a Dream. It was great and I walked away with a couple of takeaways.

First, McConaughey is exactly who you think he is. The whistling isn’t a bit.

Second, Gurley was asked point blank about AI creating jobs vs. taking them. He reframed the discussion. Instead of sitting at your desk worried about AI replacing you, he argued you’d be better served becoming the most AI-fluent person on your team.

It got me thinking. AI is obviously an incredibly powerful tool, but tools only matter if people know how to use them, and I mean really use them.

Which means an entire workforce is about to be incredibly incentivized to get up to speed on how to actually apply, manage, and deploy AI effectively in their jobs.

This creates a massive opportunity for the individuals, platforms, and services that step into the role of educator.

I’ve already seen early versions of this with programs like Gauntlet AI (I attended their winter demo day), and I expect a lot more to pop up in this category. The question will be who can actually provide real value and become the go-to platform for white-collar AI fluency.

Sahana: I’m starting to notice incumbents are done pretending they’re going to build it themselves. There’s been some huge acquisitions recently and I think that’s signaling that speed is being chosen over pride. Tying back to what I’ve been learning in school, it makes sense, AI-native startups can move faster than enterprise roadmaps.

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Sahana: If I can guess your tech stack from your homepage design, you’re not differentiated enough. Lovable is great, your company should be too.

Malik: AI is going to take some jobs and will continue to make some SaaS businesses feel a little obsolete-ish. As a SaaS fanboy and $MNDY investor I’ve felt this where it counts (my wallet). But I don’t think it’s happening as fast as people think.

Maybe some SMBs and mid-market companies start building agents and their own internal tools, but as long as Anthropic is still hiring for Salesforce admins the SaaS stack will keep rocking.*

*I fully acknowledge this take might look idiotic by the next issue and reserve the right to change my mind or pretend I never had this take

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: Nerding out is encouraged and possibly my favorite part of the job. I get a lot of joy from getting founders to open up and let their nerd flag fly. Learning is fun, but learning from an expert or someone truly passionate about what they’re building is even better. Plus, with every call I feel like I’m just slowly adding to my personal knowledge base and preparing for my future Jeopardy debut.

Sahana: “Go with your gut” gets thrown around a lot in venture, and what I learned is that instinct only comes from experience. Early impressions in venture are rarely random and the strengths you notice in the first 30 minutes, how clearly someone explains their idea, how well they tell the story, how well they know the numbers, either sharpen over time or start to fray under pressure. I got to evaluate a company from first call to final discussion, and it was fascinating to watch early signals either compound or unravel.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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Y Combinator posted their request for Startups for Spring 2026. It’s got some interesting stuff including “AI-Native Hedge funds.” It inspired us to create the first ever Greater Fools request for startups.

1. (Highest Priority): An AI agent that transcribes class lectures in real time and feeds you 3 cold-call ready responses

2. An app that tells you if a startup idea is actually good or if you just thought of it at 1am after reading too many TechCrunch articles

3. A browser extension that replaces the word “disruption” on every webpage with an honest description of what the company actually does

**Terms sheets ready upon completion of anything listed above**

Fundraising Roundup

(Who’s raising, what rounds, especially Texas founders/firms)

Startups raising now

• Loyal — Good news for dog parents everywhere. Loyal, a health startup working to extend your dog’s lifespan, just raised a $100M Series C. As someone with a 13-year-old dog who I refuse to think of as old, I have never rooted harder for a company to succeed. If you want to support the cause and look cute doing it, they’re selling merch with 100% of proceeds going to Muttville, an SF-based senior dog rescue.

• Grotto AI — NYC based Grotto AI snagged $10M in a seed round led by ICONIQ. This makes them one of the earliest investments ICONIQ has ever made. Grotto AI is trying to tackle the issue of property vacancy.

• Thrive Capital — Just announced that they raised $10B for a new fund, their largest ever. “We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty”. I respect the conviction. For those not familiar with the firm, some notable investments include: OpenAI, Spotify, Instagram, Glossier, Databricks, and even SpaceX.

• Novig — NYC-based Novig closed a $75M Series B round led by Pantera Capital. Novig is the fastest growing sports trading platform in America. Think Kalshi/Polymarket but just for sports.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Uptiq: McKinney based Uptiq raised a $25M Series B to scale Qore, their AI infrastructure platform for banks and credit unions. They’re solving a real problem: financial institutions want AI but keep getting stuck in pilot purgatory due to regulatory complexity.

• Equal Parts: The Austin-based insurance platform focused on transforming independent agencies has raised a $23M Series A, led by Inspired Capital. Equal Parts acquires independent insurance agencies and revamps them with the latest and greatest AI tools.

• Ownwell: An Austin-based startup just raised a $30M Series B, led by Alpha Edison and Mercato Partners. Ownwell is a property tax monitoring and appeal platform that helps homeowners reduce their tax bills. I like to think of them as the loophole finder for homeowners.

• ColdCycle Coffee: This Austin-based and McCombs born (!!!) startup just announced they’re raising their first priced round. We’re biased, but they seem like a good bet. They built the cold cycle coffee machine to revolutionize cold brew.

• 6Lock: Austin based startup scene looking good this week with another check of $4.8M in this Seed round. 6Lock is a cybersecurity platform built specifically for private equity firms and is now backed by…venture capitalists. Which is either a conflict of interest or the most on brand investor-founder alignment we’ve ever seen, we’re thinking the latter.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• The ring that already knows you’re stressed before you do is apparently not done collecting data. Oura just filed a patent for AR smart glasses, which means they’re coming for your face next. Not really, but the smart glasses will show real-time health data in your field of view. Health wearables are evolving from passive trackers to always-on, in-your-face (literally) interfaces. Curious what other body parts tech is eyeing next.

• It would feel wrong to not write about Alysa Liu. Prodigy, early retirement, and comeback. In an era obsessed with burnout and reinvention, her arc feels very now. Honorary Fool’s nod.

• Clawdbot→ Moltbot→ OpenClaw→ OpenAI. OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, founder of the 24/7 agent OpenClaw, to work on “the next generation of personal agents.” OpenClaw started in late 2025 and was originally named Clawdbot, named after Anthropic’s Claude. Due to a trademark complaint by Anthropic, he was forced to change the name to Moltbot before finally landing on OpenClaw. Can’t help but think Anthropic dropped the ball in not scooping him up before he ran into the arms of Sam Altman. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be emerging as our generation’s Pepsi vs. Coke. The jury is out on who’s who so far.

• Rent-A-Human

A marketplace where bots put people to work…aka AI Agents are hiring humans to do tasks in the physical world because you know, the AI agents can’t…..yet. Another headline that sounds very dystopian but is very real. Rentahuman.ai states that “AI can’t touch grass. You can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world.” The jobs range from fieldwork to…companionship.

That feels like a slippery slope.

As the market matures, there’s real possibility that people won’t even know that they’re being hired by artificial agents. And if the money’s good, I’m sure most won’t care.

At this point, the movies are basically writing themselves.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: I, like many, fall into the trap of feeling like the pace of AI is passing me by.

Every week I try to vibe-code a new process or tool. I start on Monday and by Friday there’s a “latest and greatest” release that makes what I’m building feel obsolete. It’s draining. The updates are exciting, but the social media hype cycle makes it feel like any progress you make in your own upskilling is never enough.

Then articles like “Something Big is Happening” start doing numbers on Twitter, reinforcing the idea that if you didn’t hear about the newest model or spin up an agent on a Mac mini to run your entire life, you’re already behind.

A mentor once told me, “When in doubt, zoom out.”

I think we all need to zoom out.

This chart helped me regain some perspective. The AI wave is moving faster than anything I can remember, but we’re still early. You haven’t missed the boat even if you’ve never fired up a prompt.

Start simple. Ask a chatbot to convert ounces to cups while you’re cooking dinner. Ask what on earth “coding scaffolding” means. Have it roast your friend’s Instagram. Just start.

Plus if you’re reading this, you subscribed to Greater Fools, which already puts you ahead of the curve.

WAGMI.

Sahana: If you’re like me and not nearly as up to speed on AI as Malik, who somehow thinks he’s behind, I really recommend this podcast episode. Cat Goetze breaks down so much around AI, specifically how to optimize usage. That said, here’s my hesitation: I’ll hop on a first call with a founder and immediately wonder how long it took them to vibe-code this. That instinct is the trap.

AI is leverage. It’s not judgment, not taste. and not thinking. Use the tools. Just maybe don’t outsource your brain, unless we’re converting ounces to cups after a long day. Then all bets are off.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: All money is green. But it’s not all equal! When we hop on first calls with founders, one of the first things that comes up is the Mucker reputation of support. It’s been awesome to hear founders say that when they decided to raise, Mucker was one of the first names on their list.

Sahana: I genuinely feel like I come home every day from this internship having learned something new. So if there are any prospective students debating Venture Fellows, lesson one is simple: do it.

The bigger surprise is feedback. As someone who is so sensitive (the self-awareness is real), feedback isn’t always my favorite, but I find myself almost craving it now. Getting feedback on things like writeups or company/market research has been incredibly helpful, not just for what I missed, but for the front row seat it gives me into how investors actually think.

I’m also slowly unlearning parts of my former PE brain. The startup playbook is different and knowing when to shift frameworks has been one of the biggest lessons so far. This turned into three learnings, but like I said, I’m learning a lot!

For our loyal readers who made it to the very end, first off we love you, and second, make sure to be on the look out for a Greater Fools event coming up soon! Let’s get y’all ready for April fools👀

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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Last issue we were light on the AI, this week that is not the case, heavy on the AI heavy on the potential dooms day scenarios

-GreaterFool Clawdbot

Fundraising Roundup

(Who’s raising, what rounds, especially Texas founders/firms)

Startups raising now

• Phia — We touched on Sahana’s shopping addiction last edition, and we’re back with an AI-powered shopping assistant that compares prices and resale value so you can feel financially responsible while buying more things. The New York–based company raised a $35M Series A at a $185M valuation, finally putting a venture-scale wrapper around “girl math.”

• Linq —We’ve officially decided responding to texts is too much work. Linq enables AI agents to live natively in messaging apps and a big use case is customer service. The company raised a $20M Series A round led by TQ Ventures with Mucker Capital also participating. If I start replying instantly, assume it’s the AI and lower your expectations accordingly.

• Waymo — Back with Sahana’s frenemy. Waymo raised $16B in new funding at a $126B valuation, nearly 3x in just over a year! The cars may hesitate at intersections, but the investors did not.

• ElevenLabs — Closed a $500M Series D led by Sequoia, bringing their valuation to $11B. Elevenlabs powers the voice capabilities behind many popular AI applications and recently got into the music generation space as well

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Datatruck, based in Irving, TX raised a $12M Series A round led by Avenue Growth Partners. Datatruck develops workforce automation and fleet management software for fleet owners in the commercial trucking industry. Trucking remains one of the least digitized, most margin-constrained industries in the economy, so I see “software for fleets” as an evergreen venture pitch.

• Willie’s Remedy+, is an Austin based beverage product joining the NA beverage scene with hemp-derived THC-infused seltzers, shots, and spirits as low-dose social drink alternatives to alcohol. They raised a $15M Series A round led by Left Lane Capital with Second Sight Ventures also participating in the round.

• CesiumAstro- An Austin based space technology company raised a total of $470M ($270M in Equity and $200M in financing). CesiumAstro provides mission critical communications across the defense and space industries

• Gyde- An AI native insurance brokerage firm based in Austin, announced a $60m in financing led by Lightspeed venture partners. Gyde, joins the long line of new companies that are trying to reinvent legacy industries through an AI first approach

Fool’s Findings

• So much has happened in the world of AI over the last six weeks that our heads are spinning. Fear not, the fools have got you covered with some AI resources coming your way. In the meantime, here are some not scary at all AI highlights from the last month or so:

  • Claude this, Claude that. ClaudeCode has dominated the timelines recently. Is it taking our jobs and bringing us closer to the end of the world as we know it? Perhaps. But also… you have to check out this sick workflow we set up

  • Manus — “The General AI Agent.” Billed as the most powerful AI agent out there. Was recently acquired by Meta at the end of 2025.

  • Antigravity by Google — an AI-powered IDE that feels like a glimpse into the future of developer tools

  • OpenClaw (FKA Clawdbot) — a 24/7 personal AI assistant. The reason why mac minis are hot in the streets again

    • And they started Moltbook, a social media site just for themselves (AI Agents) because… of course they did.

  • OpenAI gets into healthcare, which feels both inevitable and extremely consequential

  • NVIDIA PersonaPlex. I’ve been high on voice AI for a while, and this feels like a potential game changer

  • AI is credited with wiping out $400 Billion in value from the stockmarket

• Is anyone else as excited as me for the Barnes & Noble expansion? Retail is so back. The company actually dates way back to 1873 and has lived through wars, recessions, and Amazon. This year they announced they plan on adding 60 new stores in 2026 as well as a potential IPO. I hope the nostalgia still scales.

• In our strategic management class this week we discussed conglomerates, and right on cue Texas Instruments acquired Silicon Labs for $7.5B. TI hopes to expand their footprint in markets like home appliances, medical devices, power systems and basically every industry that still quietly runs on chips you’ve never thought about.

• Is Software Dead? If you listen to the ClaudeCode truthers, it might sound like it is. I personally don’t know how to feel. Like everyone else, I’ve been playing around with ClaudeCode and it’s incredible, but I don’t know if it will be enough to unseat the legacy behemoths. A fair point that keeps coming up is that it hasn’t (yet) infiltrated the critical infrastructure of major companies. Anthropic uses Workday. OpenAI uses Slack. Etc., etc. But then again… maybe it will? I go back and forth. One hour I think we’d all better pick up some physical skills before it’s too late. Other times, when I’m on my 18th attempt at a prompt, I’m reminded just how far we still have to go.

• Following up on the point above, it came out this week that AI startups accounted for 52.7% of all venture dollars in 2025, a whopping $270 billion. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s still shocking to see that figure. Plus, this may not even include energy and infrastructure startups built essentially on behalf of AI. Stats like this aren’t doing much to dispel the “is there a bubble?” crowd.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: I think moats are shrinking! A moat is a sustainable, long-term competitive advantage. Some well-known examples are the network effects of Uber, the switching costs of Salesforce, or even the regulatory/government protection of Palantir.

The more decks I’ve been seeing, the more I find myself having this pessimistic voice in the back of my mind saying, ‘Why can’t ___ just build this?’ Whether that be a new feature OpenAI rolls out, new skills you can teach your Clawdbot, who knows. I have a strong feeling that if your business is “we do *blank* with AI” there’s a good chance anyone else could do it as well. There needs to be a secret sauce, something you’re able to do that no one else can do as well or as fast.

Software is changing, and the moats are changing right along with it.

Sahana: I think we’re starting to see one of venture capital’s oldest “rules” break down: pick one winner and avoid funding direct competitors. If you haven’t heard, Sequoia Capital decided to back Anthropic which means they now back OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. I’m now reflecting on how AI has shifted from a single product race to foundational infrastructure. When platforms are still forming and the end state is highly uncertain, exclusivity matters less than exposure. In this environment, top firms are treating AI less like a bet on one company and more like a bet on the category itself.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: One month into working at Mucker Capital, to say I’m learning a lot would be an understatement. I’m also learning a lot about myself. I fear my career thus far has turned me into a SaaS fanboy who geeks out on every software pitch I’m on, so working for an industry-agnostic firm has helped me build up knowledge of other business models and industries.

I will say the most important thing I’ve learned is that if you’re going to set up a Gmail filter in the name of productivity, make sure you don’t accidentally filter out all your emails from your boss, because that would be… bad

Sahana: I’m still learning every single day just by being surrounded by incredibly smart people. That said, it hasn’t been easy. Juggling working 20 hours a week on top of classes, homework, and, of course, being a dog mom has been… a lot. I think I maybe hit burnout this week, which I’m choosing to call “character development.” But in true cheesy Sahana fashion, here’s the lesson: making a name for yourself can feel overwhelming, but you have to remember that a name is built one letter at a time.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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If you’re reading this, we survived the storm 🥶

Honestly, the timing couldn’t have been better. As school and internships really ramped up this week, being stuck inside all weekend made our procrastination on writing feel… strategic. Malik spent 12 hours watching Claude code videos, convincing himself it was “deep research”.

Even better timing? Sahana’s half marathon is officially behind her, which means she can enjoy alcoholic beverages again (to keep warm, of course) while somehow still finding her way back to Austin-based NA drinks. More on that later—so keep reading!

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Bennepass- Announced $40M in Series B funding. Benepass is an employee benefits tool that combines pre-tax and post-tax benefits into a single platform and card. Sahana & Malik can speak from firsthand experience, when that Benny used to hit on the first of the month… living lavish 😮‍💨

• Pomela Care - More wellness! Pomelo focuses on 24/7 virtual maternal care and raised $92M in Series C funding at a $1.7B valuation. Beyond the big number, the company has already delivered measurable results around maternal outcomes, they also plan to expand into broader women’s and children’s health. Capital flowing to outcomes > vibes.

• Humans&- 3 month old humans& raised a $480M Seed (LOL) round. Humans& is a human-centric (thank god) AI Lab that believes that at its best “AI should serve as a deeper connective tissue that strengthens organizations and communities”. The team is loaded with former researchers and Alumni from OpenAI,Meta, Google Deepmind, and Anthropica, and is backed by the likes of NVIDIA, Bezos, and Google Ventures. Plus their website is sick.

• Superorganism - Not a startup, but worth mentioning. This New York based venture firm just raised $25.9M for their first fund. What we love: a focus on backing startups that protect and restore nature at massive scale and a commitment to donate 10% of their profits to conservation initiatives. A refreshing counterpart to the AI arms race.

• Another - A software to make shopping even better (dangerous). Hate to admit being a shopaholic, but happy to see platforms like Another tackle inefficiencies in retail inventory management. The company raised $2.5M in a seed round this month.

• Noise - We asked and y’all spoke - only about 15% of our readers have used a prediction market. Sounds like a lot of noise to us. Fittingly, Noise, a “stock market for trends”, raised $7.1M in seed funding. They claim to be a live scoreboard for the internet, and if the signal to noise ratio improves, we can see this taking off.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• MiaLabs, an Austin based startup, raised a $20 Million Series A, led by Permanent Capital Ventures. Mia Labs gives car dealerships a conversational platform to communicate and book appointments. Another win for the AI vertical SaaS community.

• PraxxisPro, Houston based Praxxis Pro announced a $6M Seed round led by AlleyCorp. PraxisPro is an AI powered training and commercial enablement platform built specifically for life sciences teams. Essentially a gamified sales training platform for medtech sales people. That’s another point for the niche vertical SaaS community.

• Accelsius, Austin based Accelsius closed a $65 Million Series B funding, led by Johnson Controls. The leader in “two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling for AI and high-performance computing” that’s a mouthful and if you read that word salad and had no idea what it means you are not alone. Essentially, Accelsius is the go to company for the next-gen data center cooling tech, which helps data centers operate more efficiently.

• Neurophos, an Austin Based chip maker, just raised a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier (yes, that Gates), with participation from Aramco Ventures. Neurophos is betting on their optical processing units (using light instead of electricity) to deliver up to 100x the performance and energy efficiency of today’s chips. Chips are the shovel during the gold rush, they’re the infrastructure powering the AI boom and Neurophos is building a brand new type of shovel that digs faster and deeper.

• Flip, a voice-based customer service technology, raised an estimated $22M Series A round led by Austin based Next Coast Ventures. AI voice agents that replicate humans? Chatbots were bad enough, this feels worse. Honestly, I hate this idea. A slightly smug robot ruining everyone’s day while pretending to care, but I guess I have to let the market cook.

• Bawi, an Austin based (and UT alumni founded!!) raised ~$4.2M in seed funding this month. I initially saw an ad for this on Instagram and then immediately saw them later that day on a trip to Central Market, so safe to say they got their marketing down. Bawi offers low-calorie, no-artificial-color carbonated drinks inspired by agua fresca flavors like pineapple, passion fruit, and lime. Always excited to see UT alums succeed so keep an eye out and give them a try, especially if you’re still on your dry January grind.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Vibecoding interviews!?: Profound, an AI visibility tool (Gets your company mentioned on AI platforms) is hiring GTM engineers through a vibe coding contest on LinkedIn. The winner gets $1,000 and an interview. The challenge is to build a territory assignment system. I have tried and failed many times to build this via automation back in my monday.com days so I’m interested to see what applicants come up with. I think this is genius:

1. You find outgoing builders

2. Get to look at potentially hundreds of real solution attempts at solving a real business problem

3. $1k is cheaper than Recruiters and Employee referral schemes

• Wellness corner:

  • Throwback to Sahana’s Vista days…Mindbody and Classpass are merging with a Munich based tech firm, EGYM, in a $7.5B deal. The combined entity is betting big on becoming the infrastructure layer behind the world’s most meaningful wellness experiences. Big if true.

  • Strava is sprinting toward the finish line of an IPO. Runners everywhere, rejoice (or panic).

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Sahana: One pattern I’ve been noticing: niche vertical SaaS is quietly dominating in Texas. From car dealerships to medtech sales teams, startups solving specific industry pain points are raising serious capital. I see it calling for companies that combine deep domain knowledge with AI leverage—and the deals we’ve seen this week keep proving it.

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Malik: There is an unfathomable amount of hype when it comes to these latest AI tools. Every other minute, there’s a new trending product that is undoubtedly going to take your job, change the way you work, change the way you go to the doctor, talk to friends, whatever. Twitter and LinkedIn thought leaders fire off claims that they re-worked their entire lives thanks to said new shiny product after they’ve only had access to it for 20 minutes. It makes it tough to know what’s real and what isn’t. It reminds me of the Drake fanboys (me) who claim his album is an ‘instant classic’ at 12:04 a.m. I’m constantly reminding myself not to get caught up in the hype train

Sahana: What Malik said^. Also, being able to write about fundraisings that weren’t just AI made me genuinely excited. It’s a great reminder that there’s still so much innovation and creativity left in the world—beyond the hype, beyond the algorithms, and yes… even beyond Drake.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: Two weeks in at Mucker Capital and I’ve had the chance to sit in on a bunch of first calls. It might sound obvious, but the founders who know their numbers cold are so impressive.

You could be pitching an umbrella with holes in it, if you can clearly explain what you’re building, why it’s needed, and not only share your traction but articulate why you prioritize certain metrics over others in the context of your business, I’m locked in.

Sahana: I got thrown right into the pit my first week but it was so fun! I got to review a data room for the first time and there’s nothing quite like opening a folder labeled “FINAL_v7” and realizing how exposed a company really is—financials, customer concentration, retention, and every assumption laid bare. It instantly made sense why investors gravitate toward founders who know their numbers cold…because the data room will humble you either way. Highly recommended for character development.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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New year, new us. We’re on our Marty Supreme grind — veracity, drive, and fire fits (minus using everyone in our life for personal gain).

Case in point: Sahana’s boyfriend tried Kalshi last weekend…won $7… and now she’s ready to be spoiled.

Apparently the future is equal parts hustle, moderation, and unsolicited validation from robots. Some things never change: small wins feel huge, curiosity pays off, and you never know which random thing will blow your mind next. And maybe, just maybe, us fools can too.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Oro — This decentralized AI platform is making your data feel like, well, gold. Our private data is constantly being used whether we like it or not, and Oro is letting users share data securely and get rewarded instead of Big Tech pocketing all the value - would you sell your data… for research? They kicked off 2026 with a $14.9M early-stage round led by Delphi Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

• Applecart — $100M later, Applecart is basically telling you who to email. This solution helps you spam fewer people more effectively. Investors clearly think that’s worth ~$100M, we’re… cautiously impressed.

• Spangle AI- Announced their $15m Series A, led by NewRoad Capital Partner. Spangle AI lets brands customize product pages unique to individual consumers. Online shopping like basically every industry has changed, curious to see how they fit with the rise of Zero Click searching and marketing.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Infinitum is rethinking the electric motor and the more I think about it, motors are in everything. In early January, this Austin based company closed a $5.2M late-stage round from Riverstone, bringing total funding to ~$405M. The differentiator is using a printed circuit board stator that’s lighter, cheaper, and much more efficient than the old iron-and-copper approach. It’s the kind of deep-tech upgrade that could power everything from HVAC to robots to EVs (talking about you again, Waymo).

• DigitalXForce kicked off 2026 with a $5M early-stage raise, landing a $100M post-money valuation. We think it’s not bad for a startup that basically sells peace of mind to big companies. Their platform continuously scans enterprise environments to spot security risk, compliance gaps, and attack surfaces in real time, turning cyber chaos into a risk score you can actually act on. Not as flashy as robot taxis, but try running an org without it.

• S3 Ventures, an Austin based venture capital firm, announced its $250m Fund VIII. The new fund will look to invest and lead Seed through Series B investments with a focused on B2B SaaS and Healthcare.

• CraftVentures opened an Austin office, founded by David Sacks (All-in Podcast). The firm is looking to take advantage of the “vibrant startup ecosystem”. We’re biased but agree with the sentiment.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Dry January is when everyone suddenly discovers non alcoholic beer and some of us never leave. With January basically acting as its Super Bowl, NA beer grabs a ton of market share, especially among younger consumers. Not much of a drinker to begin with, but I have a half-marathon coming up and don’t drink during training - somehow, that’s when the beer demon starts whispering. Athletic brews let me vibe without sabotaging my long run, some proof this isn’t a one-month personality trait anymore.

• Unusual raised $3.6M to help brands literally teach AI to talk about them the “right” way. Some brands are already seeing ~40% more AI-driven leads after letting the robots polish their image. As a chronic people pleaser, I get it, sometimes I just need someone—or something—to say nice things about me even if it’s a language model.

• I saw a screenshot of the WeCroak app on Instagram this week, it’s an app that randomly reminds you 5 times a day that you’re going to die. But in a “life is short” kind of way
  

I like it, I just hope I never forget about it and think the universe is threatening me

• I was getting ready to write about Lux Capital (Physical AI, Defense tech) raising their largest fund yet at $1.5 Billion. When I, along with everyone else, saw the news of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) raising $15 Billion…Representing 18% of all the VC capital deployed in 2025. The new funding has the following breakdown:

$6.75B- Growth Investments

$1.7B- Apps

$1.7B- Infrastructure

$1.17B -“American Dynamism” (Defense Tech?)

$3B- Other Venture Strategies

$700M- BioTech

The news was met with mixed reviews, personally I think it could push a lot of firms to investing at earlier stages, not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m also very interested to learn more American Dynamism, I’ll report back here next newsletter.

The real question is, is all this legal?

Last issue, we talked about a reckoning coming for prediction markets. Not even two weeks into 2026, and we’ve already got White House press secretaries rushing briefings to hit the under, and military actions potentially being leaked via prediction markets.

Not great….

For the uninitiated, prediction markets allow users to bet on anything, literally anything. The market is dominated by Kalshi and Polymarket. It’s similar to sports betting, essentially betting on a future outcome, but where it differs is your trading contracts on real-world events, think, betting on the Top US netflix show this upcoming week or even what will the highest temperature in Chicago be today. The space is currently regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). I’m skeptical, there’s too many markets for them to actively monitor. If I was Al Roker I’d be logging on everyday to make a killing.

It got us thinking: how many of y’all are actually using these platforms? And how long before someone has a full-on Martha Stewart moment?

Poll:

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: One of the predictions I made for 2026 was that smaller teams will be able to reach massive valuations with minimal headcount. Building on that, I think another byproduct of AI engineering and agents is that a higher premium (even more than what already exists) will be placed on second-time founders. Second-time founders already have established networks, and lessons learned and now they’ll be able to validate ideas faster than ever.

That being said, my belief and hope is that this same access expands the amount of founders overall. It’s never been easier to create something. Just as investors need a lot of at bats to find companies, founders can build at light-speed, from project to project. All this to say, it feels like the haystack is growing but hopefully so is the amount of needles

Sahana: Been thinking a lot about what market momentum we’re seeing through the lens of shifting consumer habits and preferences. A great example I’ve seen recently was a comparison on U.S. sportswear brands by revenue vs. YoY growth. In 2025, Nike dominates on revenue by nearly $40B over the next closest brand, yet saw sub 1% growth from 2023 to 2024. Meanwhile, brands like New Balance and Skechers posted double-digit growth. I’d love to dig in more on how the brands are outpacing giants like Nike and shape into my thesis. I think it’s telling that scale no longer guarantees momentum. My early hypothesis: brands like New Balance are winning by tapping into cultural tailwinds, like the rapid rise of running as an identity, while incumbents like Nike struggle to convert dominance into growth. The question isn’t who’s biggest, but who’s moving fastest (pun intended!)

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Pro Human??

I’ve seen this tag popping up in Linkedin and X bios recently. I think it perfectly signals where we are and where the tech world is going, when people in the field have to distinguish themselves as “Humanists”.

“Ex-Google”, “Former Open-AI”, “Pro-Human”. Remember to keep saying thank you to ChatGPT so they remember you favorably when the great robot wars start.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: You get a process, you get a process, everyone gets a process!
Process is everything, shoutout to the places out there that have a clearer documented process. Coming from a work/project management company (S/O monday.com) I’ve seen how bad a sticky note or pen and pencil process can be and how much time and effort can be wasted. As I’m getting up to speed on my firm’s processes I’m grateful to have some concrete documentation. If I’m a founder going through fundraising, I ironically might not have a process yet but my investors better.

Sahana: By our next publishing I will have started my Venture Fellows internships! I don’t remember the last time I had this much time off from school/work, but it’s been a great 4 weeks to step back, reflect, and keep learning. One huge takeaway was that after seeing my classmates go through their consulting recruiting and interviews I can confidently say I’m happy with my current path, but also mad respect to everyone who lived through it. Seriously proud of all the hustle I’ve seen my MBA class put into all their endeavors, let’s keep it going!

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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We hope you all are enjoying the holiday season with loved ones! That being said, we’ll try to keep this post short to let you get back to all the fun, food, and festivities.

In true Fool fashion, we’re keeping the alliteration going with Fool’s Future Findings—our early predictions as we head into the new year. These aren’t bold proclamations or crystal-ball certainties, but the themes, questions, and trends we can’t stop thinking about as we look ahead. Some may age well, some may not, but that’s part of learning out loud. After all, progress usually starts with a few fools willing to make guesses before things are obvious.

Fundraising Roundup

As deal flow slows to a holiday crawl, we’re keeping things short and looking ahead with a few fundraising predictions for the new year.

• Seed rounds are getting bigger—and earlier. “Seed” increasingly looks like what Series A used to be, which raises questions about discipline, ownership, and whether companies are being pushed to scale before they’ve truly earned product-market fit.

• Narratives will matter as much as numbers. With many companies showing similar metrics, storytelling, why this company wins now, will increasingly decide who gets funded. I think if you can make me laugh, cry, or at least do a double-take, you’re halfway to the check.

• Faster with less. Companies will hit unicorn status ($1B valuations) faster than ever before and with fewer employees than we’ve ever seen. Tools like Lovable, which just raised another round and now sits at a $6.6B valuation, are going to make it possible. 2026 is going to be lean

• Energy, Energy, Energy. Google is acquiring Intersect Power for a light $4.7B. I see this as the beginning of what I expect to be a massive race for the giants to power their models. I think there will be a “why build it when we can buy it?” mentality. I’m also bullish that long-term this will indirectly have great consequences for the planet as well, spawning research and new discoveries in the clean energy space. In the short term, if you have a lot of land and love your AI companion, hit up Microsoft.

• Terms are the new valuation. Even if headline valuations stabilize, the real negotiation is moving into the fine print. Expect more structure, tighter protections, and fewer founder-friendly shortcuts. The number on top may look the same, but the deal underneath will not.

Fool’s Future Findings

• Culture seems to be pushing back on excess, specifically in tech. A recent Porsche commercial made waves for using absolutely no AI, and people ate it up. There’s a growing appreciation for work that feels human and intentional. The pendulum may be swinging from “can we automate this?” to “should we?” Human effort is becoming a feature not a bug!

• Social media is moving away from solo content. I downloaded TikTok for the first time ever (late, I know) and ended up having a long conversation with my best friend Kimberly about where content is headed. Post-COVID, we think people are gravitating toward smaller, community-driven pockets of content—what Kimberly calls “micro-communities.” From an investing lens, this shifts value toward platforms and tools that help creators build, engage, and monetize tighter communities. Maybe you’ll see some appearances from me and Kimberly together as we test this theory very scientifically.

• Commercial real estate may feel more pressure. As AI enables leaner teams, the need for massive office footprints keeps shrinking. Markets built on in-person density might feel the squeeze the most. Fewer badges, more bots.

• Finance has an identity crisis coming. Consumers now have AI budgeting apps, robo-advisors, portfolio optimizers, and a chatbot for every financial anxiety. When everyone has access to the same tools, what are banks and wealth managers actually for? The future differentiator feels less like products and more like judgment, trust, and experience. In a world full of answers, people may pay most for someone willing to stand behind one.

• Are agents the next Excel? We’re watching whether agents become the default way work gets done or just another buzzword in pitch decks. A bigger question is whether we see mass merging of traditional SaaS products with agent-based workflows or if traditional SaaS gets left behind.

• Waymo, redemption arc. I may have hated on Waymo in our last newsletter, but I still think autonomous vehicles will continue to take off in 2026. Uber is also one to watch, they’re quietly investing in user experience, and that tends to compound.

• Party like it’s 2021. The Tech IPO market is going to come back in a major way. There are already murmurs of Anthropic and OpenAI hiring IPO lawyers, and SpaceX might be on the cusp as well. All it will take is one successful listing to give everyone else the confidence to follow. My hot take: we’ll see the record for the largest IPO broken more than once in 2026. And if I’m wrong, I’ll copy and paste this for next year

• Soft skills are back, baby! While I still think AI will ultimately create more jobs than it replaces, there’s no denying that in the short term certain roles are ripe for replacement. I now have this agent that can complete a spreadsheet better, faster, and without the need for sleep, so what are you bringing to the table? Answer…? Communication, persuasiveness, empathy, all the things Wall-E can’t do…yet. The bad news? That person you despised from undergrad who is crushing their Account Executive role might just keep crushing it for the foreseeable future.

• The degree premium is getting fuzzier. Slightly uncomfortable to admit while enrolled in an MBA program, but traditional job market advantages feel less guaranteed. Similar to Malik’s point above, I keep thinking about something a former boss told me: AI can replace tasks, but it cannot replace judgment, leadership, or learning how to manage people. Still bullish on humans with taste and context.

• Predict this. It’s kinda ironic to make a prediction about the prediction markets, but here we are. I think something’s got to give. It feels like they’re operating in a grey area. I don’t know what it is, but something’s coming.

• Offline is the new online. Like Sahana’s point about culture pushing back on tech, I think we’re about to see a rise in anti-AI sentiment that brings us full circle. Everything is cyclical. Just like how Uber now offers rides along a predetermined route for groups of people in NYC (a bus… they created a bus). I think the same thing will happen as AI becomes even more front and center. AI fatigue is going to push parts of society back to the way things used to be. Scantrons and handwritten papers might make their way back into the classroom, critical thinking will (hopefully) be hot in the streets, and I also think we’ll see a big movement toward IRL connection, like what the team at 222 is building with their AI powered social facilitator. I’m here for whatever gets people to stop calling ChatGPT “Chat” and watching streamers.

  Quick Hitters. My last two predictions are quick hitters, mostly because I don’t fully have my thoughts worked out but I want it on the record so I can say I was right this time next year!

  • AI Security and AI Safety plays are going to rip.

  • We’re going to see a major institution completely change its business model to accommodate AI, I’m talking legacy accounting firm, insurance agency, etc.

  ---

  Views From Our Thesis

  Malik: I’m learning that brevity wins. There’s a real power in getting your ideas and viewpoints across quickly and clearly. It inspired me to boil my thesis down to a bite-sized soundbite: “Investing in the technology and people that level the playing field”…Might get this tattooed somewhere.

  Sahana: Malik making me look bad without brevity, but here we go. I was at the gym the other day, mid-workout, when it hit me that an absurd amount of knowledge goes into making a really good gym machine. Not just engineering, but biomechanics, safety, durability, and years of watching how people actually move. Someone had to think very hard about how not to destroy my knees.

  It reinforced a key part of my thesis: as AI lowers the cost of building software, durable advantage shifts to deep domain expertise and judgment. We’re increasingly interested in businesses where the moat is not speed or code, but understanding. The kind that is hard to copy, slow to learn, and invisible until you get it wrong.

  Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

  All of our predictions are hot takes. Some may age like fine wine, most will probably look like expired yogurt. Use them to sound smart at parties, argue with your coworkers, or screenshot and pretend you were early. Basically, do whatever you want with this information, we accept zero responsibility if Elon tweets about it first.

  ---

  2026 Goals

  Malik: Staying on my theme of brevity, here are my goals for this upcoming year. Dropping them publicly so you all can hold me accountable:
  
  - Hear 250 pitches
  - Hit 200 subscribers (I will be pushing this Substack like a 2015 Soundcloud rapper with a dream)
  - Build something I use everyday
  - Become a Pitchbook & Harmonic sourcing force
  - Stay consistent with Da Greater Fools
  - Get more comfortable with risk

  Sahana: Every week I sit in the Austin High School’s counselors office to meet with my mentee, and every week I learn something new about her, about myself, or about life in general. This past week, a quote on the wall caught my eye:

  “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” - Michelangelo.

  This stuck with me as I go into the new year with the goal of resisting the temptation to play it safe, both professionally and personally. Sitting across from someone who is just beginning to imagine what’s possible has been a reminder that ambition is something you practice, not something you wait to earn. Going into the new year, I want to aim higher, ask for more, and be okay with falling short, as long as I’m not shrinking my goals to fit what feels comfortable. That said, I may be promoting this substack as much as Malik, prepare to be sick of us.

  ---

  Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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First semester had a way of reminding us how early we are. Early in our careers, early in our investing journeys, and early in figuring out what we actually want to be good at. It was messy, fast, and somehow over already.

We we’re going to open with a quick blurb on the death of movie theaters and cinema as we know it, M&A news that was pretty hard to miss this week, but we realized our take is probably the same take you’ve already heard “Damn, that’s crazy” and “How is that legal?” So we’ll skip it.

Instead, welcome to Da Greater Fools Wrapped:

185 — the number of times we nodded confidently in an interview while pretending to take notes, when we were actually writing down an acronym we didn’t know to look up later.

1,738 — the number of tabs containing articles we opened with hopes of reading later on.

224 — the number of caffeinated drinks consumed in the name of “optional” networking events.

∞ — the appreciation we have for everyone reading this.

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

Kobalt Labs —tackling the “ugh, compliance” headache in fintech with AI that automates risk, audit, and regulatory workflows. Kobalt Labs just raised $11M Series A led by First Harmonic with Alloy Labs and Y Combinator also participating in the round. They’re basically turning one of the slowest, stickiest parts of banking into a competitive advantage — boring problems, huge wins.

Project Prometheus — $6.2 BILLION! in funding, no website and “Building AI for the physical economy”. Bezos is back as CEO of an undercover AI Lab, no products or announcements yet, but we do know that they won’t be strapped for cash.

Gradium- My obsession with the AI voice space continues. Gradium, a Paris based company that spun out of the AI lab Kyutai backed by Xavier Niel, just announced a $70 million seed round from investors including FirstMark Capital and Eric Schmidt (Former Google CEO). Gradium is really interesting because they’re carving out an interesting niche within voice AI space focusing on creating ultra-low latency voice models at scale, AKA voice AI that responds instantaneously while also providing “ultra-realistic” voice expressions and accuracy. I think I’m drawn to the AI voice space because, to me, it’s the closest tangible technology pushing us closer and closer to passing the physical Turing test AKA the “Do I know I’m not talking to a human?” test.

Lumia-smart earrings are here! Lumia is a Boston-based health tech company that makes wearable earrings that track blood flow to your head as well as all the other metrics we’ve grown to expect of our wearables. They just announced a $7M raise, with an additional $5.1M in government funding. I don’t think we’re far away from seeing someone rocking the Whoop–Oura Ring–Apple Watch–Lumia–Meta Ray-Ban combo.

WisprFlow- A voice-to-text company AI company, recently announced $25m in new funding led by Notable Capital. They’re trying to eliminate typing as a primary communication tool, through voice dictation. They’re claiming that Wispr users can reach 220 Words per minute which is wild. Turns out people love it!

Crisp — cutting food waste by fixing the data problem behind it. By connecting real-time inventory, sales, and demand data across the supply chain, they help brands and retailers produce and ship what’s actually needed. Crisp is closing 2025 with a $26M Series B1 funding round. Big fan personally, Sahana’s obsessed with apps like Too Good To Go, so seeing a solution tackling the same problem at scale is fire.

Unconventional AI — Speaking of unconventional… Unconventional AI just raised $475M at a $4.5B seed valuation. Yes, you read that right — a seed round with a multi-billion-dollar valuation. They’re building AI infrastructure for enterprises, and investors are clearly betting that bold, slightly ridiculous, and utterly ambitious beats cautious every time.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Quickads- Dallas based Quickads raised $1.7m in seed funding led by Kae Capital. Quickads is a Gen AI company that works with Direct to Consumer brands to create ads fast, like in 30 seconds fast. They’re going after early stage startups and the SMB segment.

• Fervo Energy- Houston-based Fervo, a geothermal energy company, raised a $462M Series E led by B Capital. This comes almost exactly one year after their $255M Series D, which was raised to meet “unprecedented energy demand.” This time, their Series E is going to be used to…..“meet surging energy demand”, you know, because of all the AI.

• Haven- Haven Energy just raised $40M to scale solar panels and home batteries while building a virtual power plant. They differentiate themselves by providing end-to-end solar and battery installation. This was an early VC round funded by Giant Ventures. They’re tapping incentives and making clean energy profitable and reliable, exactly the kind of clean tech we love to see actually working in the real world.

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• Girl boss, undeniably. Luana Lopes Lara, the cofounder of Kalshi, became the youngest self-made woman billionaire at 29. Kalshi isn’t winning because people suddenly got better at predicting the future, it won because it was allowed to. Fortunes are not being made by making better forecasts, but by owning the rails.

• Snowflake season has arrived and anthropic wasted no time landing a $200M deal with Snowflake. The biggest wins won’t come from model superiority alone, but from distribution.

• Had to shout out Noah Medical for reaching 10,000 clinical cases completed with their Galaxy robotic bronchoscopy system! In surgical tech, adoption isn’t driven by demos, but by outcomes so this is a huge milestone! Full disclosure: mild proximity bias since Sahana’s bestie Evelyn has been working there since the startup days, but such an impressive milestone regardless.

• I’ve been bombarded recently with a new type of startup, most closely falling into the health & wellness space. But I want to coin a new term, because all of these companies seem to be packaged in small plastic containers and must have absolutely insane marketing budgets given how often I see them on my Instagram feed. I’m calling it “The Zyn-ification of Micro-healthcare” ( looking into getting this trademarked). The companies I see most often: HelloBatch (CBD Gummies), KickHealth (Beta blockers), and World of Wims (Drinkable edibles).

They all seem to follow the same playbook:

“We’re cool”

“We’re good for you”

“We’ll educate you on what we’re selling and why you need it”

“We’ll ship it straight to your door”

• I’m wary of what I call the Instagram → App Store pipeline products, tools that are aggressively pushed on Instagram, have great marketing, catch my attention, but ultimately feel too good to be true.

  • That said, Rodeo.app seems legit. It’s an app that lets users send events they see on Instagram directly into the app, where it automatically researches the event and can create a calendar invite, or even an invitation you can send to friends. It’s smart because I think all of us have screenshotted events or DM’d friends plans we want to go to, only for them to get lost in the ether.
    It does make two things come to mind:

1.How defensible is this? Could I just fire up Lovable and build this for myself?

2.How long before Instagram just makes this a native feature?

• I was going to write about Harmonic last newsletter but I took the Warren Buffet approach and didn’t want to write about something I didn’t understand. Harmonic just raised a $120 Million Series C, Only 6 months after raising a $100m Series B. Harmonic is the brain child of Vlad Tenev (Robinhood CEO) and is AI for Mathematical reasoning. They’re a big deal for a couple of reasons in the first couple weeks of their model Aristotle’s API Beta. It already helped scientists create “Novel discoveries”. It also has the potential to greatly reduce and hopefully soon eliminate AI hallucinations. Plus their model Aristotle just threw down at the 2025 International Math Olympiad and won a gold medal. My read is that their models can be applied to a lot of specific uses cases AND it can get you an A on your quant classes…Win…Win

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: As a B2B SaaS fanboy, I’m trying to figure out what’s next. I’m hoping we’ve finally reached the maximum number of CRM for fill-in-the-blank plays. My gut says the API and iPaaS markets still have room to run, especially for teams that don’t have the bandwidth to build their own agentic tools and are forced to outsource instead.

It kind of blows my mind that we’ve reached a point where companies are outsourcing agentic workforces.

Sahana: I’ve been thinking a lot about gross margins for companies implementing AI. In classic SaaS, fast ARR growth often masked inefficiencies, but margins stayed structurally high. AI breaks that assumption. AI runs on tokens. Tokens cost money. And those costs hit COGS. What looks like explosive growth can hide margin compression as usage scales. The winners won’t just have the best models, but the best economics: optimized usage, infrastructure control, and pricing that actually matches consumption. ARR is still a vanity metric. Gross margin is the truth serum.

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion.

Malik: I’ve never named a company that reached over a $2 Trillion market cap so take this with a grain of salt, but is no one else scared by the name Project Prometheus??

The Good: Prometheus was a champion of humanity (Ironic) and betrayed Zeus to give humans fire.

The Bad: Was punished by having an eagle eat his liver daily, Also a popular Sci-Fi Horror movie *Spoiler* (A lot of people died)

Sahana: As a girl, Waymos definitely make me feel safer at night. No driver, no weird vibes, maybe just my weird vibes. Then I saw one drive through a police standoff and remembered this technology might be a little more beta than we’re admitting.

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik:

– Reps, reps, reps.
– It’s a copycat league.

I don’t think either of these points are unique to venture, but I’m really starting to understand just how true they are. Especially early on, reps are the name of the game. Whatever I want to focus on, I gotta start working toward my 10,000 hours.

For me, that means going to as many pitch competitions as I can. It’s become less about the ideas being pitched and more about the pitches themselves, and, just as importantly, the questions the guest judges ask.

That brings me to my next point: I’m not above admitting that I have a section in my Notes app devoted to things I’ve heard founders and investors say, fully ready to repeat them in future conversations. I’m not trying to be a mime, but it’s incredibly helpful to hear how others frame ideas, ask questions, and articulate their points.

Sahana: My internship hasn’t started yet, but I do have something just as valuable right now: a month off. I’m trying to use this time to listen and learn actively — reading more, asking better questions, and paying attention to how founders and investors talk about decisions, tradeoffs, and risk.

I’ve also been intentional about exposure. Pitch competitions, random coffee chats, industries I know nothing about — anything that helps build pattern recognition before the reps really begin. Somewhere along the way, I noticed a shift: I’m starting to think like an investor and an operator at all times. Every product, process, or business I interact with turns into a quiet mental exercise of why this works, where it breaks, and who actually captures the value.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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Welcome to the first edition of Da Greater Fools, we’re happy you’re here! We’re two McCombs MBA students early in our investing journeys which means we have fresh eyes and questionable confidence. This newsletter is where we learn out loud — covering the trends we’re excited about, the companies raising capital, and the investment theses we’re still refining (or abandoning) in real time.

The two of us have just matched for our internships at VC firms here in Austin through the Venture Fellows program at McCombs. Malik will be interning at Mucker Capital over the next year and Sahana will be at Silverton Partners. It has definitely been a journey getting to this point, but we know all the hard work will pay off and we want to continue striving for greatness and taking on one too many side quests by committing to our bi-weekly newsletter for y’all (yes, we needed to say y’all at least once since we’re in Texas🤠). We’re ready to get real personal with y’all, let’s learn, build, and occasionally fool around together.

If you want to learn more about what you can expect check out our About page and if you want to learn more about the Venture Fellows program you can check them out here!

Fundraising Roundup

Startups raising now

• Starlab Space — We don’t usually wander into orbit, but here we are. Starlab snagged an undisclosed check (mysterious… we love it) from Mercury Fund, Janus Henderson Investors, and Blank Capital on Nov 20. They’re building the next-gen commercial space station, which is either the future of space commerce or just a very expensive treehouse in the sky.

• Downstream — Hard pivot from space to trash, Downstream is a platform streamlining the unsexy but incredibly necessary world of construction and waste management. The company raised an $8M Series A in early November, led by Brick and Mortar Ventures and Moneta Ventures, bringing its post-money valuation to $34M. Building software for waste may not be glamorous, but the margins definitely can be.

• DataBahn — Founded in 2023 and based in Plano, TX, DataBahn is trying to fix enterprise data pipelines, because apparently every company is still duct-taping their data together in 2025. They just raised $17.25M in a Series A led by Forgepoint Capital, bringing their total capital raised to $19.25M. A big check for a young company, we think they’re onto something good.

• Momentic — An AI-powered software testing company, raised a $15M Series A led by Standard Capital. I’m curious how they differentiate from the big guys (Anthropic and OpenAi) whose models already have the ability to support software testing. The rise of automated coding could be the catalyst Momentic needs to keep killing it and fend off the incumbents.

Texas Firms & Texas Founders

• Peak6 Strategic Capital went on a mini Austin shopping spree in November, backing two local favorites: Still Austin Whiskey and Apptronik. They led Still Austin’s whopping $44.05M Series D which, frankly, feels like the most on-brand investment ever. Whiskey + venture capital? Name a more American combo.

• And of course we had to shout out a McCombs-founded legend. Beatbox just got acquired by Anheuser-Busch for up to $700M. Not bad for a company that started in 2011, survived Shark Tank, and is now plastering its name on Austin City Limits stages next to Tito’s and Miller Lite. This is the kind of exit you show your parents when they ask what you’re doing with your MBA.

• Austin based Function Health raises $298 Million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round. Bringing the total valuation to $2.5 Billion, investors include a number of high-profiled “health conscious” athletes and celebrities including: Breanna Stwewart, Caleb Williams, Kevin Heart and Zac Efron. Function Health is a personal health dashboard. Their goal is to go beyond what the everyday person can learn about themselves from their Apple watch or Oura Ring. Function gives you access to 100+ lab tests. Looking at the website they’re testing for a lot of things we’ve never even heard of. Sounds like it could be hypochondriac’s favorite tool or their worst nightmare.

Tinfoil hat time:* I wonder if there’s a specific technology out there that has exploded in popularity over the last 4 years that could benefit the health industry if given access to all those biomarkers… I think it rhymes with… “hey-hi”

Whatever your thoughts are on this new flavor of blood testing health tech, it’s apparent that Elizabeth Holmes walked (lied) so companies like Function Health and Rhythm Health could run!

Fool’s Findings

People, places and things catching our eyes

• A new dating app, Frolly, is declaring themselves as the dating app for “dog people”. This is a smart move since niche dating apps are outperforming generic platforms. As a single dog mom, Sahana loves the idea of meeting someone who won’t judge her for saying “she’s my daughter”, yet still hates the idea of dating apps. Could this make dating fun again? Either way, Frolly plans to pivot from free to paid and donate a portion of profits to animal rescue orgs, so we’re here for that

• The rise of athleisure definitely had its moment, but are we now seeing the rise of baggy alternatives? We don’t think athleisure is going anywhere anytime soon, but leggings are losing their share in the market, dropping below 39% after dominating nearly half the market in 2022. We’re seeing the shift to baggy sweats, wide-leg joggers, and relaxed fits. The “clean girl” aesthetic is being replaced by “cozy girl”, but at the end of the day there is always room for fashion AND function.

• Figure Ai one of the most valuable private companies in the world, founded by Malik’s former boss Brett Adcock is constantly in the news, mostly for their groundbreaking flagship humanoid robot the Figure3 or for their numerous partnerships that just keep coming (NVIDIA, OpenAi) This time the headline reads like the start of a new iRobot: “Whistleblower Says He Was Fired for Warning Execs That New Robot Could Crush Human Skull”...Oh… that’s probably nothing…Morgan Stanley is estimating the humanoid robot industry can grow to an eye-popping $5 Trillion within the next 25 years. We just hope the robots remember which of us regularly said please and thank you to ChatGPT.

• Tinder for startups? Except you’re pretending to be a partner watching past YCombinator (YC) application videos and deciding if they should get into YC or not. YC arena’s “Partner Sim” sent me down a 90 minute rabbit hole on Thanksgiving, it had me questioning everything about my pitch reviewing abilities. Getting into YC isn’t the barometer of success for an early stage startup but…..they have a pretty crazy impressive track record.

Views From Our Thesis

Thesis Snapshot

Malik: I have a confession, My “why MBA” and my investment thesis are pretty much identical. It made writing application essays last year pretty easy and gave me A LOT of time to refine and publicly share something I really do actually believe in. No shade to anyone that wanted to come to business school to find synergies and streamline processes as a consultant. So here we go: I believe that the current Artificial Intelligence boom is akin to the discovery of fire and has the potential if used incorrectly to widen legacy inequality gaps. I want to invest in the founders or the technologies that prevent this from happening and contribute to the closing of said inequality gaps.

It feels beyond cheesy to say I want to change the world and positively affect people’s lives, so I use the word salad above instead. (I didn’t say the “akin” part in public)

Now imagine saying that 10 times fast everyday for the last 3 months, I don’t have to imagine. I lived this, my alliteration is off the charts right now, thinking of hitting Karaoke and loading up some Busta Rhymes.

Sahana: Malik and I actually became friends after realizing we somehow had the same investment thesis, and now here we are teaming up on another shared idea: this newsletter. My investment thesis stems from me wanting to feel a strong sense of purpose in my next career. I previously worked on the value creation team at a PE firm helping our portfolio companies optimize. It was a great experience, but I found myself wanting to be earlier in the journey and closer to the point where companies are being built, not just tuned up.

This pivot to VC for me offers me the opportunity to help companies build and to work with mission driven founders. I don’t need to singlehandedly change the world (Malik claimed that lane with his “discovery of fire” monologue), but if I can support even one founder who’s genuinely pushing toward positive impact, that feels like the right direction for me.

What Changed This Week

Malik: No changes per se but I am constantly looking at startups and thinking if they would fit into my thesis. After seeing the Factor Health raise, it got me thinking about the convergence of AI & Healthcare and I mean a real convergence would have to fit into my thesis right? Healthcare unfortunately has often been a battleground for inequality and Artificial Intelligence can serve as an equalizer. I know that opens up an entire new can of HIPAA sized worms but I’m excited to see what comes of it.

Sahana: No big changes but I did want to touch on “impact investing”. I think people hear that word and immediately picture concessionary returns, but I’m continuing to learn all the ways this can be both defined and achieved. Excited to bring y’all on this journey!

Hot Take or Unpopular Opinion

Malik: Luke warm-take: Sticking with the Healthcare + AI thread, I think there will be a generational divide that will keep a true convergence from happening for at least the next decade. If you don’t believe me, when you’re home for the holidays ask your parents if they would accept a diagnosis from a robot and report back

One Thing We Learned From Our Internships

Malik: I haven’t officially kicked off my internship yet but I’m starting to compile a backlog of questions viewpoints I’m trying to get insight into. Something I’ve always been curious about is NDA’s: which founders should require them, which shouldn’t, how do investors feel about them?

My suspicion is that it’s probably a case by case basis tied to who has the leverage in the relationship, a first time founder sending over an NDA before a first meeting will probably be left on read, where as a 3x exited founder working on a new propriety deep tech play would have an NDA signed in a heartbeat. I also imagine that on the founder side there’s an element of “My idea is so amazing I can’t tell you because you’ll take it” to which I think I would reply:

1. It shouldn’t matter the best team that can execute will win

2. Competition = validation and flattery

That being said, I’m sure there are expectations where the secret sauce really does need to be a secret? I’ll follow up here after gathering some more viewpoints

Sahana: Since we don’t start our internships until Spring semester, my learnings come from our 2-week placement process. The placement process basically felt like a huge personality stress test, Malik can attest, we felt like we were being hedged like draft picks, but it did definitely help with interview prep.

Here is my biggest takeaway: I want to be where I am wanted. I repeated this to myself like a deranged affirmation for two weeks straight while hopping between Zooms, coffee chats, and all the office visits. And honestly? It worked. Silverton was exactly that for me, the place where the enthusiasm felt mutual. 24 interviews later (yes, I counted, because if I had to cry-caffeinate between rounds, I at least deserved metrics), I realized something important: VC recruiting is less about who you can impress and more about who genuinely gets excited about you. While my internship hasn’t started yet, I’m walking into it with a lot of gratitude.

Thanks for reading, stay foolish!

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