A Whole New World (Model)

Top News

• Top AI scientist exits Meta: A few months back, every day in the Ticker was a new story about Zuckerberg luring additional AI scientists to his Superintelligence Squad. But plans change, and these days, the traffic seems to be moving in the opposite direction. According to the Financial Times, the company’s chief AI scientist, NYU professor Yann LeCun, plans to exit and launch his own AI project. LeCun’s reportedly in discussions about funding a startup that continues his work on “world models,” AI systems designed to simulate realistic environments, enhancing their understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. (World Labs and Google’s DeepMind division are both pursuing similar constructs.)

• Lighter sparks up $68 million: The crypto project from Quora and Lunchclub vet Vladimir Novakovski is both a blockchain and decentralized exchange, enabling trades of a derivative known as “perpetual futures.” (Essentially, these allow traders to speculate on the future price of a cryptocurrency without actually owning the tokens, and without an expiration date.) The overall vision, though, is far more expansive; Novakovski tells Fortune that he wants Lighter to serve as “the infrastructure layer that verifies that everything that happens in finance happens fairly… correctly… [and] transparently.” The project raised a $68 million round led by Founders Fund, and including participation from everyone’s favorite investment app and brokerage, Robinhood.

• It’s a Wonderful round: Israeli startup Wonderful has raised a total of $134 million since exiting stealth just four months ago, with a $100 million Series A announced just this week. They’re in a white-hot niche, deploying customer-facing AI agents — capable of naturalistic voice, chat, and email conversations — in a wide variety of languages, across international markets. There are a LOT of companies designing “smart” customer service chatbots right now. Wonderful hopes to distinguish themselves via customization, fine-tuning the product for different languages, cultures, and regulatory environments, so that it’s ready to deploy no matter where in the world the customer is doing business. They’re already on the ground across much of Western and Central Europe, with many more markets following later this year and into 2026.

TWiST 500

Obviously, we read The Information daily around here and quite often cite their original reporting in The Ticker. So no disrespect intended. But their write-up on browser and search engine maker Brave refers to it as a “little-known” startup. We here at the TWiST 500 have, of course, been following the company for some time. Speak for yourselves.

Anyway, per The aforementioned Information, who spoke with the company’s Chief Business Officer Brian Brown, Brave passed $100 million in ARR this year, and they’re now counting over 100 million monthly active users. That’s a big jump from 77 million at the close of 2024.

Brave’s search engine is built into its browser, and the ads featured in these search results are powering most of this revenue. They do have other side businesses going as well; when AI chatbots from Mistral, Cohere, Meta, Perplexity, and other AI companies perform searches on a user’s behalf, quite often they’re relying on Brave’s index.

Of course, Brave’s browser also offers AI-powered bells and whistles. The startup’s “Leo” agent acts as a personal assistant, helping you with emails, translating text, answering questions, and even writing up some quick code if that’s your thing.

AI browsers are an increasingly crowded market, with Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, and Browser Company’s Dia also battling for supremacy. Still, owning its own search index does put Brave in a relatively unique position. Their only true rival here might just be Google’s Chrome, which with Gemini integrations essentially also now functions as an AI browser with a built-in search engine. Thankfully, this particular David doesn’t need to actually defeat Goliath any time soon. Just remaining in the fight is victory enough for now. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2206: Jason’s in Japan this week launching Founder University, Tokyo, but thankfully he stayed up into the wee hours to record this special edition of TWiST. THREE TWiST 500 companies are circling IPOs: Ledger, 1Password, and Mercury. So you know Alex and JCal had thoughts. Plus, why is Marc Andreessen feuding with The Pope on X? Should we trust these viral allegations against AI startup Giga? Friends of the pod Gamma are growing FAST! Plus lots more news and updates.

E2205: On a special edition of TWiST, Alex chats with three of our favorite TWiST 500 startup founders. First, Billy Thalheimer introduces us to REGENT’s part-aircraft/part-boat autonomous Seaglider vehicle, which they’re building for both consumer and defense purposes. Then Ayan Parekh of Convexia tells us how they turn other labs IP leftovers into new drugs and treatments. Finally, we’ve got Hunter Leath of Archil discussing their unique approach to cloud data architecture.

E2204: It’s another special VC Roundtable episode, in which Jason and Alex welcome esteemed guest Deedy Das of Menlo Partners and Jay Eum of GFT Ventures. Together they discuss Roelof Botha’s unexpected exit from Sequoia, why being a VC may no longer be the best way to get rich, the growing importance of the pro-sumer market for AI apps, some tasty ChatGPT smile curves, and much more.

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Founder U and Angel University in Japan!

Jason’s coming to Tokyo on Nov 14 to launch a partnership with JETRO — bringing Founder University and Angel University to Japan, and connecting Japanese founders and investors with the global ecosystem. This event kicks off a ten-week program that we're starting in January, all culminating in an Immersion Week and Demo Day in SF. Register here: https://luma.com/cm0x90mk

We’re Hiring a Program Manager!

LAUNCH is seeking a program manager to help organize and manage the Japanese versions of Founder University and Angel University. Candidates must be fluent in both English and Japanese, and should plan on splitting their time between Tokyo and our home base in Austin, Texas. If you’re interested in this exciting opportunity, reach out to [email protected]!

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Need a flexible living and working environment in San Francisco? This thoughtfully designed loft-style residence at 787 Bryant St., the heart of the vibrant SOMA district and the city’s creative hub, is now available for rent or purchase. Check the listing for more details.

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