I write a newsletter about startups and investing—for ai builders of all levels.

I record mini-tutorials, review tools I’m testing, share my insights and give you a peek behind the digital curtain from an exited founder turned investor.

Hey folks,

YC summer batch is coming up soon, so i asked who’s applying and what they’re working on…

nearly 400 tools later 🤯 see them here³⁵⁹.

here’s some i found interesting:

• Niyam⁴¹⁷ - design hardware 10x faster

• Promise⁶⁶³ - habit tracking with your friends

• Faces⁵⁵⁶ - shareables to replace docs/pdfs/sites

• Socket^431† - mcp integrations for agents

• Solstis⁴³¹ - Build and run your automations in plain English

• Deepspace^339† - automated devops

*not endorsing as venture bets or otherwise :)

my only feedback to all that responded is; have an opinion on what you’re building and why yours—there’s a lot of tools that are variations or too similar to things we’ve already seen.

if its obvious, it may be less likely to be big and you’ll have many competitors.

speaking of obvious….

🔎 News worth knowing

• Figma launched a barrage of new products at Config. Figma sites to create and host websites, Figma Draw to create vector art, Figma Buzz for social assets and Figma Make for turning your designs into code. First tools all added their own AI chat, now they’re all adding ‘text-to-app’ functionality. I fired up notion and saw this

  

• Gemini 2.5 Pro¹⁴⁵ is now the best model to build an app (acc. to web dev arena¹³⁴). With the coding skills bump, it now follows instructions⁸⁹ more precisely (= really specific system prompts will work better), but there might be some tradeoff in its creative writing abilities.

• Stripe built a foundation model for payments¹¹⁷ for detecting fraud patterns. It also launched a bunch of AI-assisted tools like Smart Disputes⁴³, a Dashboard AI assistant⁴³ and more³⁵.

• K Navigator¹³⁴ is an AI co-pilot for biomedical research. Built by biologists, for biologists: it analyzes and visualizes multiomic patient data, navigates literature and biomedical databases via chat interface. Backed by 26.5M articles + 17 databases + multiomic spatial data. Free for academics.*

• OpenAI has a new role - CEO of OpenAI Applications¹³⁸. Fidji Simo (Instacart’s CEO) will take care of business and operations at OpenAI, while Sam will remain CEO of the company and look at research and infra. Also, OpenAI wants 10 countries⁸⁶ to give em billions to set up data centres and offer customised chatgpt.

*sponsored

want to partner with us? Click here²⁰

🌐 What I’m consuming

• Two solutions for messy B2B attribution²⁴⁹.

• 100 startups for each of YC’s request for startups²⁶² 2025.

• Google is down 8% after Apple said it wants to move to “AI search” in Safari.⁸⁸

• Steph Smith (from the Hustle, a16z pod) is now leading Groq’s growth¹⁶⁴ team.

• do you meditate? maybe you should to work with LLMs⁴⁷³.

⚙️ Tools I’m tinkering with

• Retellio²¹⁹ - Your AI product analyst. Get insights from 1,000+ customer calls & scale customer understanding for leadership. A Gong partner.*

• Anthropic’s Web Search API⁶⁴ - developers can add search results right from Anthropic’s API (costs $10/1k). I remember the web search results from Claude (web app) were similar to Brave’s search index.

• Tempo’s²²⁵ new MCP store²²⁵ has integration for Stripe, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Exa and more. Making apps that use these tools got a bit easier.

• Clerk Billing¹³² manages all the code (frontend and backend) for building a good payments experience in your app.

• Qsourcer¹⁰² - Create boolean string to power up your LinkedIn and Twitter searches

• Augment Code’s Remote Agent¹¹³ creates parallel agents that handle small tasks, clear your backlog, and eliminate engineering headache.

• Sim Studio³⁰⁹ - Drag and drop blocks to build agent workflows.

*sponsored

🍦 Afters

• Mistral Small 3 got a bump in performance²⁵ with v3.1 and the new Mistral Medium 3³⁷ rivals GPT-4o. (Large is coming too)

• OpenAI wants to renegotiate⁶⁸ how much Microsoft gets paid from ChatGPT’s revenue.

• Google Research built a new “Simplify²³⁸” feature to make reading complex text easier. The impressive part about this is the relatively similar length of original and simplified text—I haven’t been able to solve that reliably when using any LLM.

That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋

Enjoy this newsletter? Please forward to a friend.

• Find me on X²⁰, Linkedin⁴⁰, or Instagram¹⁸

• Read about me³⁰ and ben’s bites