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Top News

• Zuckerberg builds CEO agent: The Wall Street Journal reports that Meta is going even more all in on AI than ever before, assigning staffers to more deeply integrate AI tools into their daily workflows, and even use AI agents to develop custom tools of their own. Popular applications so far include My Claw — a variation of OpenClaw that gives agents access to chat logs and work files — and Second Brain, an internal project build atop Claude that functions as an “AI chief of staff.” Founder Mark Zuckerberg is also reportedly developing a CEO-bot that will get him vital updates more quickly than waiting for them to move up the chain conventionally. An occasional “don’t get too distracted by the Metaverse” or “avatars should always have lower halves” reminder might also help keep things on track.

• Wheely speeds to the US: The UK rideshare app is aimed specifically at the higher-end of the market, offering an alternative to chauffeurs and personal drivers rather than taxi cabs. CEO Anton Chirkunov told Bloomberg that they’re bringing the app to the US, after receiving requests from customers who have already been using the service in London, Paris, and Dubai. Wheely already counts around 100,000 active riders outside of the US, and 1,250 corporate accounts; they report 38,000 US sign-ups since announcing plans for North American expansion. Early markets will likely include Texas, Washington DC, and Miami.

• Gimlet Labs raised $80M Series A: The company built what they’re calling the first and only “multi-silicon inference cloud.” Here’s the problem: different steps in the process of generating AI responses require different kinds of hardware. To complete one action, an AI agent might go through one step that’s memory-heavy, another that’s compute intensive, and so on. As no single chip does this well, it means a lot of the hardware is sitting idle at any given time, which is less efficient. Gimlet’s solution is to slice up the workload and route each individual piece of the process simultaneously to the hardware that’s best suited for that action. Founder Zain Asgar argues that this speeds up the inference from 3-10 times, without costing any more or using up extra power. The $80 million Series A was led by Menlo; the company has raised $92 million to date.

TWiST 500

The political battle over prediction markets has been heating up for weeks now. On top of Kalshi’s recent troubles in Arizona and Nevada, two US Senators — California Democrat Adam Schiff and Utah Republican John Curtis — are introducing a bill to prohibit prediction markets from listing contracts related to sporting events. Specifically, the bill blocks any entities that are overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — which includes prediction markets — from offering sports contracts. The bill also limits “casino-style games,” like poker and blackjack, on these platforms.

In a statement, Sen. Schiff refers to the CFTC designation as a “backdoor” allowing prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket to evade state consumer protection laws and local regulations against gambling.

Elsewhere in the T500, observability and monitoring outfit Dash0 joined the unicorn club, raising a fresh $110 million round at a $1 billion valuation. They help companies monitor what’s happening within their IT systems, keeping an eye out for previously undetectable bugs that could slow down performance or lead to critical errors over time. How do they manage this? Telemetry data, collected via sensors embedded in apps and systems, which is then analyzed and interpreted by AI agents.

Dash0 earned its spot in the TWiST 500 for not just this innovative approach but early traction. Since forming in 2023, the company has signed over 600 enterprises, including the Telegraph newspaper and late night munchie spot Taco Bell. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2266: In our LaunchFest grand finale, Jason’s joined by Zipline founder Keller Cliffton, who shares his company’s journey from transporting life-saving blood donations to Rwandan hospitals through scaling up to 8 countries and deliveries of all kinds. Plus we’ve got Rahul Vohra from Superhuman sharing his own entrepreneurial backstory, from launching Rapportive while living in Cambridge through his latest startup’s merger with Grammarly.

E2265: This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at LaunchFest in San Francisco! Jason sits down with Robinhood co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Vlad Tenev. Together they reminisce about their first meeting — when Vlad pitched Jason on Robinhood in a dive bar — plus thoughts on the importance of doing multiple launches for a new product, how Robinhood identified its ideal customers, tips for navigating negative press and mistakes that feel existential, plus Vlad’s thoughts on working with AI and nurturing talent internally.

E2264: Today’s show was recorded LIVE at LaunchFest in San Francisco, California, and features JCal in conversation with Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev. On the docket: Jason and Vlad’s origin story, the importance of launching your product multiple times, what to do when your mistakes feel “existential,” leaning into negative press, facing down competition in the AI era, how Robinhood nurtures and develops talent, and much much more.

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