Tech and Startups 11-11-2025
Hot startups landing mega-funding, Snap monetizing with Perplexity, frontier tech securing massive investments
📣 Headlines
• The startup funding surge in October included nine $500M+ rounds led by Reflection.ai and Polymarket, underscoring continued late-stage capital availability.
• Perplexity agreed to pay Snap $400M to power Snapchat’s search and My AI chatbot, a major example of startups monetising models via platform partnerships related report.
• Global investors are doubling down on frontier tech and markets as NVIDIA and Qualcomm join US and Indian VCs to back India’s next deep-tech startups with >$850M in strategic capital, while Ventures Platform raised $64M to keep funding African early-stage founders.
• MoEngage raised $100M led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives to accelerate global expansion and embed Merlin AI into marketing workflows.
• Open-source tooling and new workflows are reshaping product development: the open-source forces driving AI’s next chapter and the shift from ‘vibe coding’ to ‘context engineering’ signal changing developer practices (context engineering, vibe coding).
• Security vendors are shipping AI-native protections — Fortinet, SentinelOne and CrowdStrike debuted AI features, while endpoint and cloud vendors added memory protections and enhanced threat investigation (Keeper, Sysdig).
• Anthropic is expanding in Europe with new offices and leadership hires to scale enterprise sales and regional engineering teams.
• AI infrastructure investment and capacity are growing even as economics stay challenging: Dublin’s CEL Critical Power opened a US facility to support AI workloads while analysts warn AI factories face long payback periods despite huge upside.
🔧 Company Engineering Blogs
1,500+ PRs Later: Spotify’s Journey with Our Background Coding Agent (Part 1) (engineering.atspotify.com). Spotify uses Fleet Management with AI coding agents to automate cross-repo migrations, Java/POM updates, YAML/JSON configs, and UI migrations
The Tech Stack Behind Gusto’s Ruby on Rails Platform (engineering.gusto.com). Explore Gusto’s Rails-based platform, its tooling, deployment, and scale, including Ruby on Rails, ecosystem tools, and reliability
What 986 million code pushes say about the developer workflow in 2025 (github.blog). 986 million commits reveal faster, smaller, continuous shipping and evolving developer workflows in 2025
What we learned building agents at Vercel (vercel.com). Vercel’s Malte Ubl and Eric Dodds explore a repeatable, low-cognitive-load AI agent methodology using TypeScript tools and open templates
A Decade of AI Platform at Pinterest (medium.com/pinterest-engineering). A decade-long look at Pinterest’s unified ML platform, covering Linchpin, Scorpion, EzFlow, Galaxy, UFR, MLEnv, TabularML, and GPU-centric innovations across GPUs, Ray, and large embedding models
Build better software to build software better (slack.engineering). Slack engineers describe speeding up build pipelines using Bazel, caching, layering, and Starlark to cut 60-minute builds down to tens of minutes
Enterprise Platform Strategy at Scale (medium.com/capital-one-tech). Capital One shares lessons on enterprise platform convergence, investment models, and long-term stewardship for scalable, collaborative tech ecosystems
🌐 Communities & Protocols
Meet The Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights (newcomer.co). Meet Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights—AI founders curated with Index Ventures, spanning developer infra, agent platforms, and data tooling
Me & Farcaster: It's complicated (blog.vrypan.net). Personal reflections on Farcaster: from open, decentralized ideals to app-centric, growth-driven priorities and protocol evolution
Oredev Conference 2025 - Day 1 (nicolalindgren.com). Highlights from Oredev 2025 Day 1: Collective Risk Management, psychological safety, career reframing from tester to CTO, leadership talks, and synthetic monitoring strategies
💸 Founders & Funding
Angel Investors, a Field Guide (jeanyang.com). insights on angel investors, strategic and vanity angels, and fundraising tips from Akita founder Jean Yang, featuring Elad Gil, Jana Messerschmidt, Kevin Hartz, Dan Boneh, and Kevin Durant
The Billion-Dollar Solofounder (tinyempires.substack.com). Explores 1-person unicorns, AI-powered solofounders, scalable models, and strategies to build lean, distributed SaaS, content, and fintech businesses
Why Value Outlasts Valuation (om.co). Value trumps valuations in tech, with Neo and 1X Robotics illustrating hype vs autonomy and the rise of Chinese robot makers
Draftboard Launches Whisper List to Rank VCs by Network Strength, Not Deal Volume (bigtechnology.com). Draftboard unveils Whisper List ranking VC networks by strength to help founders vet connectivity over deal volume
A SF VC in NYC (nbt.substack.com). NYC-focused VC reflections on 15 years in NYC tech, founder relationships, and Footwork’s growing NYC portfolio
Founder Ideology (investing101.substack.com). Explores founder ideologies—Missionaries, Mercenaries, Minstrels; profiles Believers, Ideological Purists, Professional Founders, Hucksters, Rebels, and Performance Artists with examples like Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Adam Neumann, and Chamath Palihapitiya
Compounding OffDeal (fullydistributed.co). Explores deconstructing investment banking with AI-driven levers, workflows, and system-wide optimization inspired by Ramp, featuring Ori Eldarov
Tech’s Psychotic Break: ‘Fentanyl Capitalism’ Bets on Trump (thenerdreich.com). VC power-law, blitzscaling, fentanyl capitalism, and Trump-era tech politics explored by Catherine Bracy and Gil Duran
🎯 Product Strategy & Growth
Table Slayer (davesnider.com). Building Table Slayer with Three.js, Svelte, Turso, Cloudflare, Drizzle, Partykit, yJS for in-person RPG battle maps on TVs
Eroding the Edges: (AI-Generated) Build vs. Buy and the Future of Software (joereis.substack.com). AI-generated tooling is narrowing build-versus-buy gaps, enabling rapid prototyping with Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and AI collaborators
What do Omarchy, the iPod and Dropbox have in common? (danieltenner.com). Geeks critique tech yet shape culture; Omarchy, iPod, and Dropbox show how user experience and ecosystems drive mass adoption
It really is good enough (ag404labs.com). Freelance consultant uses Claude and AI tools to fix real client systems; critiques ethics, economics, and boredom of software
How Replit Built a $1B Developer Ecosystem Without Venture Debt (wearefounders.uk). Replit builds a $1B developer ecosystem with sustainable revenue and community, avoiding venture debt
Beyond Boundaries: How Personal Passion Fuels Revolutionary Tech Innovations (eliza-ng.me). Personal passion fuels diverse tech innovations: Librario API, tiled words game, open-source invoicing, learning tools, and privacy-first serverless platforms
🏢 Teams & Org Design
CodeTalks Hamburg: Move Fast and break Silos - Interdisciplinary Teams That Work (v01.io). Move fast and break silos with interdisciplinary, owner-led teams and practical first-principles guidance from a B2B SaaS CPTO
The Pandemic Stress Test (brajeshwar.com). Explores pandemic stress as a test for fragile, robust, and anti-fragile products and teams, with examples like Zoom, Slack, Shopify, and Notion
The Timeless Habits of Effective Remote Teams (lassala.net). Remote teams stay aligned through deliberate communication, human connection, pair programming, clear contracts, and evolving tooling from Skype to AI-assisted environments
Engineers Make the Best CEOs (trevorlasn.com). Engineering leaders ship products faster, read code, and bypass bureaucracy; Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk exemplify tech-driven CEOs
🛠️ Dev Workflows
Prototypes vs Products (svpg.com). Differences between prototypes and live products for AI-enabled product discovery and delivery, with tools like Lovable, Bolt, Figma Make for prototyping versus Claude Code, Cursor for production-ready builds
Changing my Dev Stack (2025), Part I: Simplify, Simplify (loufranco.com). Moving from React/Node to Linux, reducing dependencies, and rethinking a simplified dev stack for SPA apps
Wild to Domesticated (abhyrama.com). Wild-to-domesticated evolution of startups' programming languages from dynamic choices to safer, structured tools like Hack, TypeScript, Sorbet, Go, Rust, and Kotlin
Clean Boilerplate '26, a modern clean architecture implementation (etsd.tech). TypeScript-first Clean Architecture boilerplate 2026 with AI-assisted coding, agentic development, and practical patterns
Beads Blows Up (steve-yegge.medium.com). Beads, a Git-backed AI workbench, grows fast with Go vs TypeScript debates, multi-agent workflows, and vibe coding from Steve Yegge
🔐 Security & Failures
Weakly Link 25/45 (beny23.github.io). Explores AI security, scams, and poetry of software: ChatGPT misuse, AI-driven ransomware claims, Aardvark, prompt injection, slop-squatting, and reflections on legacy code
Behind every successful security company is a software engineer you’ve never heard of (ventureinsecurity.net). Explores how top security firms were built by unseen software engineers and the role of AI-assisted engineering
A postmortem on our $2.5M database gateway: lessons from pilot purgatory (quesma.com). Startup postmortem: $2.5M gatewy, equal co-founder trap, pilots, and pivot to Hydrolix, with ElasticSearch→ClickHouse MVP
We raised $2.5M for a database gateway and failed: Postmortem (quesma.com). Founder's missteps, two-pizza team, equity strategy, PMF versus feature, and a pivot from RefactorDB to Quesma amid $2.5M, pilots, and Hydrolix acquisition
Overcomplicate things (novice.media). Overcomplicate things: insights on AI memory for RAGs, Mem0 vs ImpliedAI, and the hurdle of practical solutions