This week was big for chronically online X people. TBPN was just acquired by OpenAI. This is the first big win that the “new media” wave has gotten. I feel like it would have been much more fitting for a16z to acquire TBPN given their new media fellowship and focus on shaping modern thought. Could be because they already have Erik Torenberg.
Who’s next? Molly O’Shea? Emily Sundberg? Healthcare AI Guy (my alma mater)?
I think the trends are clear, and legacy outlets are just not what people want anymore. They want ~taste~. Unfiltered commentary coming from people who are builders, investors, students, and people trying to escape the permanent underclass is the only type of media I willingly consume (this is a half joke).
With the increasing online interactions that we have with AI, the type of personalities you consume from will become a larger factor of feeling human.
In case no one has told you today, happy Good Friday!
Pre-Seed + Seed Rounds of the Week
Whirl AI raised $8.9M in seed funding led by ICONIQ, with additional investors unspecified. The company is building an AI platform that continuously maintains “living” context across enterprise applications and configurations and uses purpose built AI agents to help IT teams research, implement, and test system changes far faster without sacrificing governance.
Rowan raised $3.3M in seed funding led by DRW, with participation from Motivate Ventures, Mercury Fund, and angel Eddie Lou. The company is building an AI powered platform that pairs expert guidance with proprietary tools to prepare small business owners for succession and enable more structured, transparent transitions for buyers and sellers.
Numos raised $4.25M in seed funding led by General Catalyst, with participation from Operator Collective. The company is building a transparent, auditable AI finance platform that sits on top of existing finance systems to analyze transactions and orchestrate specialized AI agents that automate workflows from variance analysis to close while showing sources and reasoning.
Alien raised $7.1M in pre seed funding led by Initialized Capital and Finality Capital Partners, with participation from Mantaray, Commonmetal, Scenius, Lvna Capital, Pioneer, and others. The company is building AI era trust infrastructure that continuously verifies humans and issues linked identities for AI agents (Agent IDs) anchored to accountable humans (Alien IDs) so online services can assess reputation and control in an “agentic” internet.
Miravoice raised $6.3M in seed funding led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from Neo and 25madison. The company is building AI voice agents for structured, rules based phone surveys that automate long form quantitative interviews at scale, aiming to make high quality voice data collection as easy as building a form.
NomadicML raised $8.4M in seed funding led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Pear VC and Jeff Dean. The company is building a physical AI data platform that uses vision language models and agentic reasoning to turn massive robotics and AV fleet video into structured, searchable datasets for monitoring, edge case discovery, and faster training iteration.
Anvil Robotics raised $5.5M in seed funding led by Matter Venture Partners, with participation from Humba Ventures, DNX Ventures, Spacecadet Ventures, and Position Ventures. The company is building a modular hardware and software platform for rapidly configuring and manufacturing robotics devkits, positioned as “Legos for robots,” so physical AI teams can avoid months of piecemeal prototyping.
X posts of the week
