Hi Readers,
Last week was a fun and interesting time in tech. After the largest IPO ever, the Fable takedown, and a new era of Taste, I can say I’ve seen it all.
Taste Labs went very viral on X this week with many people shocked that an inside joke (having “taste” in the AI age), turned into a startup backed by some of the best in the game.
Also, I have relocated to NYC for the summer and can say it is the perfect time to be here. With the Knicks winning and World Cup, I can now understand what all the hype was behind an NYC summer.
On the other side of the coast, YC had their Spring Demo Day and seeing Garry Tan get hyped for everyone to demo was very sweet.
Enjoy reading!
Young founders to Watch
Allen Wang building Ditto Dates
Ditto is an iMessage matchmaker that sets college students up on real dates with no app, no swiping, and no talking to a screen for weeks. Allen dropped out of Berkeley to build it, and in the last six months 150k students have met IRL through the platform. Known (the dating app) was the first of its kind to do this. Interesting to see how Gen Z is getting fed up with a lack of connection and yearning for it so much so that they are creating companies to bring people together. The millennials didn't really possess this level of yearning for connection (because at that time they were building the internet which caused such a break in reality and relationships that we only see the effects of now in current generations).
Nicole Fitzgerald building Tacit Labs
Nicole and the Tacit Labs team just announced a collaboration with OpenAI on LifeSciBench. A 750-question multimodal benchmark of realistic, long-horizon tasks in the life sciences. If you're watching where serious AI x biotech infrastructure is being built, watch this team.
Kahlil Lalji building Natural
Natural is the agentic payments platform powering money movement between agents, businesses, and consumers. Wallets, payments, ledgering, routing, identity, and compliance, all built for a world where AI agents are the ones transacting. Kahlil wrote a 15-page memo, raised $10M within 72 hours of sharing it, and the team has been building ever since. Honorable shoutout to Saanvi Mehra (fellow Penn student) and founding engineer on the team.
Seed of the Week
Probably raised $9M in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company is building a hallucination-prevention layer for AI that validates LLM outputs against a deterministic system, delivering data-science answers with full citations and audit trails at 99.99% accuracy.
Waniwani raised $8M in seed funding led by Seedcamp. The company is building revenue and compliance infrastructure for agentic financial distribution, letting insurance, mortgage, and home-services vendors surface their products inside AI apps like ChatGPT and Claude while staying compliant.
Nox Metals raised $11.5M in seed funding led by Hyperion with participation from Palmer Luckey and Y Combinator. The company is building an AI-powered, vertically integrated metals supplier that automates quoting, cut-path optimization, and order tracking so manufacturers can procure cut-to-spec metal faster without intermediaries.
ChatSee.ai raised $6.5M in seed funding led by True Ventures. The company is building a failure intelligence layer for enterprise AI agents that detects, classifies, and remediates recurring agent failures in production — giving autonomous systems a shared memory of what went wrong and why.
HighGround raised $6.5M in seed funding led by Next Frontier Capital. The company is building an AI intelligence layer for defense and aerospace capital markets, ingesting signals from 500+ federal procurement sources and serving them through chat, API, and an MCP endpoint that plugs directly into Claude and ChatGPT.
Kimba raised $6.5M in seed funding led by Selva Ventures. The company is building an AI-powered adaptive scent therapy device that monitors biometric signals in real time and delivers timed scent cues to improve sleep quality.
Braven raised $4.6M in seed funding led by Collide Capital. The company is building AI-powered infrastructure for insurers, brokers, and MGAs that uses autonomous agents to automate delegated-authority workflows including data extraction, binder validation, and bordereaux generation.
Swsh raised $4M in seed funding led by Game Changers Ventures with participation from SignalFire and MaC Venture Capital. The company is building an AI fan-engagement platform that turns user-generated content from concerts and live events into owned media libraries and first-party audience data for brands and artists.
Maia raised $1.2M in seed funding from institutional investors and physicians. The company is building an AI medical coding platform for orthopaedic practices that reads clinical and operative notes and recommends CPT, ICD-10, and HCPCS codes with full justification for each selection.
Nell raised an undisclosed seed round co-led by Index Ventures. The company is building a new medium for interactive storytelling backed by a notable angel syndicate including Anton Osika, Gokul Rajaram, Guillermo Rauch, Jason Citron, Lenny Rachitsky, and Thomas Wolf.
Copper Lane raised an undisclosed seed round in what was notably the first YC team swap on record. The company is building AI infrastructure and moved from funding to close at an unusually fast pace.