No product? No problem. With a voting structure that makes Murati untouchable, Thinking Machines joins a new wave of speculative bets on founder-as-future. There’s a new superscaler in town — maybe. In late June, Thinking Machines Lab, led by Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, closed on a Seed-stage fundraise that saw […]
Investors aren’t just funding ideas anymore. They’re staking bets on people. Indeed, the AI talent wars are abound. In the last few months, we’ve seen Meta try to poach Mira Murati’s team with billion-dollar comp packages. We’ve seen entire companies — like Scale AI — funded as talent plays. And while Microsoft has scooped up […]
It’s gonna get worse before it gets better. With what we see with increasing prices because of the tariffs and things that are going on right now, that expense to the consumer is going to go up. As long as banks and other holders of consumer financial data continue to play fair — a tenuous […]
It is a great irony that the fate of the U.S. economy is now interwoven with that of an industry entirely dependent on clean, applicable, trustworthy data — a tenuous paradigm the government is now upending by sullying the trustworthiness of data collection and reporting. This has systemic implications for a financial system built on […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight early-stage bets on the future of tech. Today’s issue highlights a strategic AI customs startup emerging to solve a multibillion-dollar blind spot in global trade. Caspian, a San Francisco-based trade advisory platform, has raised $5.4 million in seed funding to help businesses recover duty refunds left […]
An EO From the Trump administration mandates the government to modernize payments–but may not move the needle much In late March, the Trump administration placed a rush order on a nominally major reshuffle to a government system pumping more than $5 trillion across the country. The White House’s executive order titled “Modernizing Payments To and […]
AI is rewriting the rules of ad-making, from bringing scripts to life on screen to driving better ad conversion. When prediction market Kalshi aired a 30-second ‘unhinged’ GTA-style cinematic ad during the NBA finals, it looked like something straight out of a high-end production studio: sweeping visuals, polished storytelling, and immersive sound. One would imagine […]
This week, a controversy in the fashion world uncovered consumers’ true sentiment toward AI. Vogue, the decades-old powerhouse of fashion, published a Guess ad with a blue-eyed and blonde AI model. And the Internet is in shambles — one TikTok comment called it “war on art, fashion, and culture.” AI might be ushering us into […]
And what’s really stopping them from doing it I believe that cash flow underwriting is the greatest innovation in lending in the last decade. And I don’t say that lightly. But here’s the thing that keeps bugging me: if cash flow underwriting is so great (and it is), why isn’t everyone using it already? To […]
Where is there room for innovation in consumer lending? It’s a question founders in fintech have been asking for over a decade as the likes of Affirm, Tala, Upstart, and more have looked to fill a role that was traditionally dominated by banks, and later by GSEs. A recent report from the NY Fed digs […]