This week a lot happened.
1) We got the announcement of ChatGPT for clinicians…someone check on the OpenEvidence team please. 2) The world's first ever public venture fund opened. 3) The term “monitoring the situation” took on a whole new meaning as a tech livestreaming service and is not nearly getting the same love that the true Chads of tech (John & Jordi) get. 4) A new class of Thiel Fellows were announced. 5) Tim Cook announced his retirement. 6) Cursor is getting acquired for $60B.
This was all in a span of four days.
On a personal note, this week I learned a lot more about Nichole Wischoff and have found her entire story so inspiring. She is the epitome of being a “young founder” and an absolute killer.
Young founders to Watch
Brian Machado building Bracket Bot Brian
Bracket Bot is a human-scale mobile robotics dev kit, and Brian is building it as an affordable alternative while the rest of the industry sells $20k+ platforms. At $500, it gives developers a driving, talking, listening robot they can program in an afternoon.
Seungmin Hong building Simantic
Simantic is end-to-end PCB simulation software that combines signal integrity analysis with dynamic firmware runtime analysis on emulated hardware. Hardware simulation for embedded firmware is a genuinely under-served wedge most AI tooling founders ignore because it actually requires electrical engineering depth, so if you are building anything embedded, get on the waitlist.
Gabe Warshaw building Baton Media
Baton is a collaboration platform for unreleased creative material that solves chain-of-custody for works in progress so artists actually get credited and compensated when their material gets used. Prior to this, Gabe founded Prince Street Studios, a Brooklyn recording studio.
Artin Bogdanov building Sun
Sun is an AI audio-learning app that turns any prompt into an immersive audio course with interactive Q&A, basically what you get if Audible and ChatGPT had a son. He spent nearly 15 years in product design at Adobe and leading the AI BI team at Walmart Labs before starting Sun, and he is now building it through a16z Speedrun.
Jacob Bland and Jack Cameron building Saldor
Saldor is an intelligent web scraper that turns messy internet data into clean LLM-ready text or structured JSON with just a few lines of code. Jacob and Jack previously worked at Crusoe Cloud on AI infrastructure alongside teams like Together AI and Mosaic ML, where they saw firsthand how critical data quality is to model performance. Saldor is the RAG-era web scraper built by people who understand the pipeline end to end.
Pre-Seed Funding of the Week
ActionAI raised $10M in seed funding led by prominent UAE-based investors. The company is building reliability infrastructure for mission-critical AI automations and business intelligence that makes enterprise AI auditable, accountable, and scalable.
Thoughtly raised $5.5M in seed funding led by Armory Square Ventures. The company is building an AI engagement platform that embeds voice, SMS, and email agents directly into CRM workflows for revenue teams.
Qualitate raised $7M in seed funding led by IA Ventures and Crew Capital. The company is building an AI-powered expert intelligence platform whose AI moderator conducts expert-driven conversations at scale for investment and strategy teams.
Astor raised $5M in seed funding led by Monashees. The company is building an AI-native investment advisory platform registered with the SEC that connects to users’ portfolios and delivers recommendations by text or voice.
10x Science raised $4.8M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital. The company is building AI for molecular-level protein characterization to help pharmaceutical researchers determine which molecules merit follow-on work.
Brev raised $3.3M in pre-seed funding led by Resolute Ventures. The company is building an AI-native layer between business goals and day-to-day work, using agents that join meetings, update goals, flag risks, and track follow-through on action items.
X posts I liked this week
