👋 Hey, Egemen here.

Founders keep quoting the same figure: the median gap between funding rounds has stretched to 744 days.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

An entire ad agency in the palm of your hand.

Your next campaign needs a dozen fresh ad variations by Friday. Your agency quotes two weeks and a five-figure invoice. Your in-house designers are already buried under this quarter's requests.

Hightouch Ad Studio fixes that. It reads your brand guidelines, your best-performing creative, and your product catalog, then generates on-brand ads your team can ship the same afternoon. You review and approve every asset before it goes live, so quality holds.

Growth teams use it to build variations for every audience, test more of them, and stop rationing creative because production got expensive. The work that once needed a full agency retainer now runs inside your own workflow, at your pace and under your direction.

You direct the work while Ad Studio handles production, and your designers get their week back.

Start your first campaign today

🧠 Deep-Dive: Navigating the 744-Day Runway Gap

Oh my… The joke is becoming a reality.

744 days should not a real number but it shows up in fundraising reports.

Back in Q4 2024, Carta shared Seed to Series A as 774 days - median number of days for founders.

Somewhere in a chain running from Carta to a virtual assistant company's blog to a startup credits directory, two digits swapped and an eighteen-month-old peak got relabeled as today.

Carta had that same interval at 616 days by Q2 2025.

The typo matters less than the habit behind it, which is treating one national median as a planning input.

PitchBook and NVCA counted $412.7 billion into US startups in the first half of 2026, a record.
And 87.5% of that landed in rounds of $100 million or more.
86% of every venture dollar went to AI.

Carta's Q1 2026 read on Series A tells the same story from the other end: around $300 million median for foundational model companies, $55 million for everyone else.

Seed is where this gets uncomfortable, and it's the part I'd want to know if I were raising this quarter.

(Source: Carta, "In seed-stage software valuations, SF and NYC are pulling away from the pack," July 21, 2026. Q1 2026 data via Carta's VC round benchmarking tool.)

Especially relevant for US founders:

Bay Area seed valuations for SaaS hit $33.3 million, another record. New York reached $24.5 million after an 80% jump in twelve months. Across the rest of the country the median sat at $12.7 million and has not moved in a year.

A founder in Denver reads "$24 million median seed," builds a raise and a dilution model around it, and is calibrating against Manhattan.

So the decision logic runs opposite to what the median implies. If you are outside the two hubs in the US, price the round against your own and sector rather than the national figure. Then size it against the Series A metric you actually have to hit instead of the number the median suggests you deserve.

👉 The founders who’ll get hurt over the next eighteen months are the ones who took a hub valuation without hub-level growth underneath it.

🗺️ Method

What if ChatGPT recommends your competitor first?

Your competitor is already showing up in ChatGPT. You're not. AutoSEO gets 2,500+ businesses visible in Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. No SEO knowledge needed.

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⚾️ Catch

Hiring in a new country? Read this first.

Every country has different employment laws, payroll requirements, notice periods, and benefits expectations.

Oyster's Global Hiring Guides help you navigate the details, avoid surprises, and hire with confidence—wherever you're growing next.

Get the country guides

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Henry AI

Henry AI raised a $16.5 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital, with Thomson Reuters Ventures joining as a strategic investor and follow-on from Y Combinator - it’s the scale of the week!

Meet The AI Startup Winning Over Real Estate's Toughest Customers

Exclusive: Brokers love Henry AI's deck builder. Now it's raised a $16.5M Series A led by FirstMark to automate more of the process -- and stay ahead of Claude.

Alex Konrad

Henry sells to commercial real estate teams. Its first product turns property data into client-ready marketing decks, compressing roughly fifteen hours of designer work into a median turnaround under four hours with thirty minutes of human review. More than 150 firms use it.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey, Egemen here.

Seed prices hit records this month and dilution fell again. Underneath both numbers, the count of firms able to write your first check is shrinking.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

The Free Playbook Behind Millions in Off-Amazon Revenue

Most eCommerce brands running external traffic aren't scaling — they're just spending.

Wrong channels, no real attribution, and at the end of the month, still no clear answer to the only question that matters: what actually moved your BSR?

The brands getting it right aren't necessarily spending more. They've just stopped guessing. They know which channels pull weight on Amazon listings, which ones look good in a dashboard but bleed budget, and why creator traffic consistently outperforms paid social on ROI when it's set up correctly.

Levanta put together a free playbook breaking down 7 proven external traffic strategies. Inside you'll see how top brands are driving millions in off-Amazon revenue and why most channels underdeliver when brands don't know what to look for before they start spending.

If you're serious about growing outside of PPC, this is worth 5 minutes.

Grab the FREE playbook

🧠 Deep-Dive: Nobody new is raising a fund

Peter Walker published fundraising benchmarks on 10 July covering more than 1,000 software rounds closed in the previous six months:

• Median seed valuation landed at $24.3M on $4.1M raised.

• Median seed dilution fell to 18% and has been drifting down for months.

Read those in isolation and founders look like they finally have leverage.

Early-stage valuations sit at record highs while the count of rounds actually getting completed keeps falling.

In every previous boom, deal count climbed alongside prices. This cycle runs the other way.

PitchBook's Q2 Venture Monitor, out 9 July, shows the mechanism. Megadeals of $100M or more absorbed 87.5% of the $412.7B deployed in H1 2026. AI took 86% of every venture dollar.

Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Founders Fund between them collected 48.1% of all capital LPs committed to venture.

First-time fund formation is tracking its lowest year since 2016.

(Source: Carta, "VC Startup Fundraising Benchmarks From 1000 Rounds", 10 July 2026. Software companies only.)

That first-time fund line is the one I keep going back to.

New managers write first checks into founders nobody has heard of yet. That is the entire job of an emerging fund. Andreessen Horowitz is not leading your $1.5M pre-seed, and Thrive is not going to read your deck.

When first-time funds stop forming, the layer of the market that backs people without logos thins out every quarter, and founders feel it long before any headline number admits it.

Which changes how I read that falling dilution figure. It describes the companies that closed. Founders who ran a process and got nothing never enter the calculation at all.

A market can post its best median terms on record in the same quarter it turns down more founders than it did last year.

We are preparing for a perfect storm and a massive crash in early stage funding if thigns continue in this trajectory.

👉 If you’re rasing now, confirm every firm on it is deploying from a fund raised in the last 24 months. Anything older should go to the bottom, and you spend that week finding a VC that can still say yes.

🗺️ Method: Check the fund before you check the partner

Ten minutes of filing history tells you whether a firm can actually write you a check. Most founders skip it and lose six weeks.

Most founders research the partner. Track record, board seats, portfolio fit, what they post about. Almost nobody checks whether the fund behind that partner still has money to put to work.

Step 1: Pull the firm's Form D filings on SEC EDGAR Search the firm name, filter to Form D.

Every fund vehicle files one when it starts raising, and you get the fund name, the vintage year and the target size for free.

Step 2: Count new investments on Crunchbase

Pull the firm's recent activity and count new portfolio companies added in the last six months. Ignore follow-ons into companies already on the list.

Step 3: Apply the rule

Two signals together tell you the firm has stopped opening new positions, whatever the website says.

Step 4: Ask on the first call

Partners answer this without flinching. It signals you understand how their business works, and it saves you six weeks of meetings that were never going to close.

👉 Say this, word for word: "Which fund are you investing out of, what vintage is it, and how many new positions are left in it?"

⚾️ Catch

Better cap table management starts here

Cap table management doesn’t have to be frustrating. From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting Pulley can make it simple. 

Just ask Linear. They knew they needed a partner who could handle the complexity of their equity management. That’s why they migrated to Pulley.

Learn why Linear chose Pulley

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Passionfroot

Passionfroot, also our favorite ad marketing platform, raised $15M - it’s the scale of the week!

Check our storefront here:

SCALABLE | Passionfroot

Let's work together! Visit my Passionfroot page for more info and to book your slot.

www.passionfroot.me/scalable

Passionfroot helps you scale your GTM - it’s the agentic marketing OS for the AI-era where you can drive growth through trusted, human voices at scale.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I read the headline last week and felt good about the raise I have been planning.

US startups pulled in more than $400 billion in the first half of 2026, past every full year on record.

Then I looked at how many companies that money reached…

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

The AI Agent You Can Trust

The best assistants don't multitask their attention across a hundred tools. Neither does Catch. It's an AI agent that focuses on one thing — the admin work you'd rather not touch — and does it exceptionally well.

Scheduling, flights, restaurants, follow-ups, vendors, clients. You hand it over; Catch handles the back-and-forth and comes back with it done.

No context-switching. No dropped balls. Just your admin, quietly cleared — so your focus stays on the work only you can do.

Meet the agent built for admin, and it'll be ready to work before your next meeting.

Get started at catchagent.ai — and give your attention back to what matters.

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Nobody counted the deals

The count is absolutely broken. 263 mega-rounds took 81% of all the money, and one company took close to 40% on its own.

New unicorn births fell by more than two thirds in a single quarter, down to a six-quarter low. That is the number I keep going back to. Unicorn formation tells you how many companies got enough capital to grow into something large, and it collapsed during the quarter that set the funding record.

(Source: CB Insights, "State of Venture Q2'26," July 7, 2026. CB Insights reports 81% of funding across 263 mega-rounds and nearly 40% for a single company. The split between that company and the other 262 follows from those two figures.)

PitchBook and the NVCA read the same quarter and landed in the same place. Investment and fundraising both hit records while exits improved, and all of it stayed concentrated in a small group of companies and funds.

My read is that most founders still price their odds off the dollar figure, and the dollar figure describes a few hundred rounds. The base rate underneath it moved the other way.

👉 Before you set a raise date, count the rounds that closed in your stage and sector over the last two quarters instead of the dollars raised. If that count fell, add six months to your runway plan now, while cutting is still your decision and not your investor's.

🗺️ Method

Win AI Search Without a Big Team

92% of VCs use AI to find companies. 58% of buyers start there too. If you're not showing up in AI answers, you're invisible before the conversation even starts. Join HubSpot for Startups, Anthropic, and Marketing Against the Grain on July 30th (11am ET) for a live AEO teardown. Real startup. Real recs. Register and unlock the free Startup Visibility Bundle.

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⚾️ Catch

What is an EOR—and why are companies using it?

Opening entities in every country can be slow, expensive, and hard to scale.

That's why more companies are using EOR to hire globally faster.

See how Oyster helps teams hire, pay, and support talent in 180+ countries while staying compliant along the way.

Get all the answers

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Databricks

Databricks has announced a massive strategic funding round led by Coatue, valuing the data and AI giant at a staggering $188 billion.

Databricks: Leading Data and AI Solutions for Enterprises

Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI.

Databricks

Databricks provides a unified data and artificial intelligence platform that combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses into an open "lakehouse" architecture.

Their software enables large enterprises to process massive datasets, run complex analytics, and securely govern multi-model AI systems from a centralized control plane.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I think the faster technology moves, the more valuable it becomes to identify what won’t change.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

4x your communication output. Same quality. No burnout.

The bottleneck isn't what you want to say — it's how long it takes to type it. Wispr Flow removes the bottleneck.

Speak naturally and get polished, send-ready text for executive summaries, client updates, board recaps, investor notes, or just the 30 Slack messages you're behind on. Flow strips filler, formats numbers and lists, and preserves your tone.

Used by teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. 89% of messages sent with zero edits. Works in every app on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

Start flowing free

🧠 Deep-Dive: What won't change in the next 10 years

Look, the smartest move isn't trying to predict or chase every new trend but it's doubling down hard on the stuff that basically never changes.

In mid-2026, in the middle of AI hype cycles, energy constraints, and economic K-shaped recovery, and all the other madness going around the world, I really liked this tweet:

Twitter tweet

Makes you think.

Tech enables faster iteration, but human nature, physics, and economic fundamentals don’t upgrade on a quarterly roadmap.

Time is still stuck at 24 hours a day, attention is limited as hell, and people will pay up for anything that genuinely saves time or gives them an edge.

Build around these core truths instead of shiny tools or trends, and you create something that lasts and compounds no matter what.

Chase the hype and you'll just get rebuilt cheaper by the next guy.

🗺️ Method

Why did one company's AI work, and another's didn't?

One had a dedicated owner. Resolution rate: 48.9%. One didn't: 0.38%. See the full breakdown.

See the data

⚾️ Catch

The toughest room in advertising. Ad Studio just cleared it.

Major brands just took over a Times Square billboard, and every ad was built in Hightouch Ad Studio. Sweetgreen, HelloFresh, and Tripadvisor cleared the toughest room in advertising. Create, edit, and launch on-brand ads in a few clicks.

See what you can build

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Heymilo

Heymilo raised $6M - it’s the scale of the week!

Leading AI Recruiter for High-Volume Hiring | HeyMilo

HeyMilo's AI-powered interviewer streamlines high-volume recruiting, offering data-driven insights and unbiased candidate evaluations to help you hire top talent faster.

HeyMilo AI • HeyMilo AI

HeyMilo provides an AI-powered talent acquisition platform that uses conversational voice and video agents to automatically source, engage, and screen job applicants at scale.

Their system integrates seamlessly into existing workflows to streamline early-stage candidate evaluation while preserving a personalized touch for high-volume hiring.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I think too many founders chase flashy models while ignoring the basics that actually ship. Here's my take on what's working practically right now

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

How AI-Era Pricing Is Reshaping Finance Operations

Usage-based and hybrid pricing models are changing how B2B companies generate revenue — and creating new headaches for the finance teams behind them.

Tabs co-founder Rebecca Schwartz and PwC Partner Amit Dhir sat down to unpack exactly what that means in practice: how pricing model decisions ripple into revenue recognition, forecasting, and financial ops — and what it takes to scale without piling on manual work.

Watch the on-demand recording to get practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to operationalizing usage-based revenue — including a forward-looking take on how AI will reshape financial workflows. If your team is navigating pricing complexity heading into the back half of the year, this is worth an hour.

Watch the recording now

🧠 Deep-Dive: AI Lessons for Founders Grinding

40% of enterprise apps are expected to embed agents by end of 2026. Don't wait, start now and start narrow.

1. Pick one painful, repetitive workflow. Broad assistants usually flop.

2. Shadow the real job 10-20 times. Then spec the agent around clear questions: what wakes it up, what context it needs, which tools, when it escalates. Details win.

3. One automation first beats nine half-baked ones. Use APIs over slow browser control for better speed and reliability.

4. Memory and guardrails matter. Shared context plus strict rules cut unpredictable errors. Test recovery from missing data early.

5. High coding standards now pay off later. Agents inherit patterns. Invest in clean CI and fundamentals.

6. Post-training evaluation setups often beat raw model size for reliability. Build simulation environments. Enterprises reward consistent outputs. Many agent projects fail here.

7. Collect user interactions relentlessly. General models commoditize fast.

My blunt opinion: publicly sharing your early systems attracts better feedback and leads quicker than stealth mode. Start with n8n-style tools, ship small, debug live.

👉 Try this this week: map one internal process, build a minimal agent, measure human intervention rate (aim under 20% on repeat runs), then tighten. That's faster learning than another benchmark paper.

🗺️ Method

AlphaSignal's 8-person team automated 18 workflows. No developer.

AlphaSignal runs the most-read technical AI newsletter with an 8-person team. One salesperson installed Viktor for prospect research. Sixty-seven days later it runs 18 workflows across sales, ops, editorial, and finance: proposal builder, deal updates, competitor monitoring, P&L analytics. No developer hired.

Get Started for Free

⚾️ Catch

While your trucks are running, calls are going to voicemail.

Every missed call is a job your competitor just booked. Podium's AI Employee responds in under 2 minutes, qualifies the lead, and schedules the job — while your crew keeps working.

See It In Action

☝️ Scaled This Past Week

Kredos AI has successfully raised $7 million in a Series A funding round led by BMW i Ventures - it’s the scale of the week!

AI Driven Consumer Engagement

Our human centered AI platform drives real engagement with consumers leading to positive payment outcomes for enterprises.

kredosai.com

Kredos AI is an artificial intelligence company that builds an automated platform to optimize the customer payment collection process for large enterprises.

The system combines behavioral science and machine learning to replace generic outreach with dynamic engagement that recovers revenue while protecting long-term customer relationships.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

My feed this month was a parade of nine-figure seed rounds.

A founder I follow called it proof the drought is over. I almost bought it, then I opened Carta's Q1 report and the story came apart.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

Your Admin Savior

Catch is an AI agent focused solely on administrative tasks. We don’t write code, create images, or analyze data. Our single mission is to build the most advanced agent you can trust to delegate your daily workload, expertly handling scheduling, reminders, email, and travel logistics.

Genuinely proactive, Catch operates with the initiative of a human employee. It is available wherever you already are, working seamlessly over the phone, WhatsApp, and iMessage to keep your day moving forward. Because true delegation requires absolute peace of mind, Catch is built on highly secured infrastructure and is fully SOC 2 compliant, ensuring your data is always protected.

Test Catch today to see how it handles the friction in your workflow.

Set up Catch today!

🧠 Deep-Dive: Venture is back. Just not for you.

Venture did come back.

Carta logged $30.4 billion in Q1 2026, ahead of where last year sat at the same point.

Down rounds fell to 11.4%, about where they were in 2019, and dilution fell with them. Terms tilt toward founders again. On paper it looks like the best market in years.

Then you see where the money went.

More than 60 cents of every venture dollar on Carta landed in AI companies, the highest share they have ever recorded.

Carta now splits valuations into three buckets: non-AI, AI applied, AI foundational. The gap is brutal.

An AI foundational model startup raising a Series A sits at a $300 million median. A non-AI startup at the same stage sits at $55 million. Carta's own words: these are not comparable markets.

This should change how you raise.

If you build B2B software and you are not an AI lab, the boom on your feed is not your boom. Investors will judge your round against a market you do not live in. Even inside SaaS, 83% of new capital went to AI startups, so the non-AI slice is fighting over scraps.

👉 The mega-round on your timeline is not your comp. Raise against the market you actually live in.

🗺️ Method

Their first after-hours call was a $20,000 job.

Air Texas was paying $2,000 a month for an answering service that couldn't close jobs.

Their first after-hours call with Podium’s AI Employee booked a $20,000 job.

Now no call goes unanswered after 5PM.

See how it works

⚾️ Catch

Half your market is one app away.

Your business is already on Instagram, SMS, and web chat. But 52 million immigrants in the US rely on WhatsApp to connect with businesses they trust — not email, not phone calls.

Wati helps you show up on WhatsApp and every channel they use. Are you still not there?

Meet Your Customers There

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Runlayer

Runlayer raised $30M - it’s the scale of the week!

As companies hand real work to AI agents, those agents need the keys to your systems, from the CRM to the data warehouse, and most security teams cannot see what the agents are doing with them. Runlayer sits in the middle.

Runlayer raises $30M to help companies go all in on AI

We've raised $30M from Felicis and Khosla Ventures to build the golden path for AI: let every team build agents while giving security teams the confidence AI won't go rogue.

Runlayer

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

80% of enterprise applications shipped or updated in the first quarter of 2026 now embed at least one AI agent according to Gartner.

Two years ago that share was 33%.

The jump from 2024 to early 2026 is steeper than any enterprise software curve since cloud took off.

70% of a typical founder-CEO's time is sub-optimal, and a huge chunk of it is sunk straight into email as in FRR.

Summer's here. Larry handles calls, jobs, and memberships automatically.

HVAC owners running 3–15 trucks are juggling calls they can't answer, membership lists they can't work, and software that doesn't connect. Larry fixes all of it.

Larry is Podium's AI employee for HVAC. He answers every call and books the job directly onto your dispatch board, 24/7. When your comfort club members are due for a tune-up, he texts them, books the visit, and follows up automatically. Your techs close estimates and collect payment from the field.

Air Design booked 13 extra appointments in their first 30 days.

Arctic Air grew revenue 30% year over year. Premier Heating & Air tripled lead conversion.

One system. One flat monthly fee. Built for HVAC businesses your size.

See what Larry can do for your business.

Learn More Today

Your time is the most expensive input your company has. You are spending the majority of it on calendar tetris and follow-up chasing.

That is why the admin layer, not the glamorous layer, is the highest-return place to put an agent right now.

👉 The inbox is where your most expensive hours go to die. Put your first agent there, not on the flashy work, and you buy back the part of the week that actually compounds.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I spent my morning studying a highly unusual trend highlighted in a fresh data analysis published on June 16, 2026.

While the broader tech ecosystem is fixated on multi-billion-dollar corporate acquisitions and soaring late-stage valuations, early-stage investors are quietly facing a structural data crisis.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

Your growth team woke up to a briefing they didn't ask for.

Monday 7am. Three messages in #growth.

Stripe revenue by channel, Meta and Google spend reconciled against GA4, Klaviyo flow performance, Shopify AOV by source. Posted by Viktor at 6am.

The campaign brief he wrote sits in #campaigns. Brand monitoring scrape runs every six hours. Competitor pricing update lands every Friday.

Your media buyer, content lead, and CMO open Slack to the same prepared room. 3,000+ integrations including every ad platform, CDP, and CMS you run.

"Viktor is like the most capable all-round colleague you can imagine." Sam, CEO, Givr.

Get Started for Free

🧠 Deep-Dive: The Shrinking Ground Floor of Venture Capital

New research notes that the overall seed-stage population is actually shrinking for the first time in recent history, as total startup exits have begun to outpace new financings.

The data reveals that the "top of the funnel" for new companies is tightening significantly.

• For years, the standard playbook for building a product from scratch relied on a predictable cycle where a massive base of raw pre-seed and seed startups would gradually narrow as they advanced toward a Series A.

• Today, that pyramid has been completely turned upside down.

Institutional seed funds are writing fewer checks overall, choosing instead to concentrate immense amounts of capital into a select handful of high-conviction bets.

_{(Source: Media Murph Capital Research, June 2026)}

This contraction matters immensely if you are currently building a business from day zero.

The classic safety net of securing a small, comfortable friends-and-family round to leisurely explore product validation has effectively dissolved.

With the seed population shrinking, the founders who successfully break through the noise are those who treat their initial prototype as a highly disciplined revenue engine rather than a science project.

Building a business in this environment means realizing that capital efficiency is your absolute greatest competitive advantage.

The market is heavily rewarding founders who prioritize self-sustainability over the validation of a venture capital check.

🗺️ Method: The AI Support Co-Pilot

Here’s a little something if you are drowning in simple support tickets and they eat up valuable engineering time.

You can build a lightweight AI middleware to triage and answer tickets before they hit a human.

How to build it (The Recipe):

1. Webhook: Connect Zendesk or Intercom to trigger on new tickets.

2. Context Injection: Grab the ticket text and automatically search your help docs for relevant paragraphs.

3. Prompt: Send a prompt to an AI API. Give it a clear command: "Here are relevant help docs: [Docs]. Here is a customer question: [Ticket]. If the docs answer the question, write a polite reply. If they do not, respond with 'escalate'."

4. The Router:

   • If AI generates a reply -> Draft it in your CRM for 1-click human approval.

   • If AI says "escalate" -> Ping your support Slack channel.

A system like this typically deflects a large portion of Tier 1 tickets. You can set this up in a few hours 0 or hit me up if you need help.

⚾️ Catch

The World Cup Has a Market for Every Match.

From the group stage to the final, trade real outcomes on Kalshi, official regional partner of the Argentine National Team. Who wins, who advances, who takes the trophy. Peer-to-peer, no house, cash out anytime. Get $10 free.

Trade Every Match

_{Trade responsibly.}

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Odyssey

Odyssey has successfully raised $310 million in a Series B funding round led by Natural Capital, propelling its valuation to $1.45 billion.

Our $310 Million Fundraise to Accelerate World Simulation

We’re thrilled to announce our $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation, significantly accelerating our efforts to develop AI that can truly understand and simulate the world.

odyssey.ml/our-series-b

Odyssey is a software and artificial intelligence company that develops advanced world models capable of creating highly detailed, multimodal simulations of real-world environments.

Their technology is designed to give autonomous systems and developers a deeper, physics-based understanding of the physical world, vastly accelerating the training and safety verification of next-generation visual and industrial AI.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

A founder I know shipped an AI feature that does the work of three support reps.

Then he kept charging the same price per seat as before.
He built something three times more valuable, and his revenue did not move.
That mistake is everywhere right now, and the data on it just got loud.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

Turn AI into Your Income Engine

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets—each vetted for real-world potential

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• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Per-seat pricing is dying

For ten years, SaaS pricing was simple.

Charge per seat. More users, more money.
Clean, predictable, and it worked. AI just broke it.

Here is the problem in one line. If your software replaces human work, every seat your customer removes is revenue you remove from yourself.

The founder I mentioned shipped an AI agent that let a client cut support from 20 people down to 6. Great product but he got punished for being good. Pure per-seat pricing dropped from 21 percent of SaaS companies to 15 percent in a single year, while hybrid models, a base fee plus usage, jumped from 27 percent to 41 percent.

Bessemer said it flat out in their AI pricing playbook. AI-native companies are walking away from seats and moving to usage and outcome pricing that tracks the value actually delivered.

source: bvp

The smart money already moved. Intercom charges 99 cents for every support ticket its AI actually resolves. HubSpot dropped its version to 50 cents in April. You pay nothing when the AI fails, and buyers love that because their risk drops to almost zero.

There is a second reason seats are dying that nobody talked about for years. AI costs real money to run. Every query burns compute. Old SaaS ran 80 to 90 percent gross margins. AI products run 50 to 60. (Source: Bessemer.) If one heavy user on a flat seat hammers your model all day, that seat can cost you more than they pay. Per-seat does not just cap your upside anymore, it can quietly torch your margins.

source: bvp

👉 If your product does work a human used to do, stop selling seats. Pick the one outcome your customer actually pays you to create, and charge for that. If you are not sure which metric yet, go hybrid.

A small base fee plus usage protects your margin today and lets you find the real price while you learn.

🗺️ Method: Change your pricing without blowing up revenue

Changing pricing is scary because it touches money you can already count on. Here is how to move without setting your ARR on fire.

First, pick your unit. The right one depends on what you sell.

• If you sell AI that resolves tickets or completes tasks, charge per outcome.

• If you sell an API or a dev tool, charge for usage.

• If you sell something humans still drive by hand, keep a seat and add usage on top.

• If you genuinely do not know, go hybrid. A base fee plus a usage line is the safest bridge, and it is what most winning AI companies use while they figure it out.

Then move without breaking trust. 3 rules:

• Grandfather your current customers. Put new pricing on new logos first, prove it works, then migrate everyone else with real warning. Surprise pricing changes burn goodwill faster than almost anything.

• Bill on a proxy you can measure. Real outcomes are hard to track, so pick a near-outcome metric both sides trust. A resolved ticket is easier to agree on than customer happiness.

• Run a pilot tied to one number. For bigger accounts, sell a short paid pilot against a single metric, like cutting resolution time by 30 percent. Hit it, and the pilot rolls into a contract anchored to a result instead of a guess.

👉Do not rip out per-seat overnight. Add a usage line on top of your current plan this quarter, watch what your heaviest users actually consume, and let that data tell you where the real price lives. You learn this by billing, not by guessing in a spreadsheet.

⚾️ Catch: The best pricing newsletter nobody told you about

Quick one. The data in today's deep-dive came from Growth Unhinged, Kyle Poyar's newsletter on pricing and go-to-market.

Pricing is the most under-tested lever in most startups, and this is the one to read on it. Kyle publishes the actual numbers. What models are working, how fast companies are switching, where willingness to pay is moving. It is the closest thing to a live feed on how B2B software gets priced.

I do not agree with every take in it, and I still read every issue. Worth your inbox.

Home | Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

Growth Unhinged is a newsletter by Kyle Poyar covering B2B GTM, SaaS pricing, and product-led growth (PLG) — read by 85,000+ operators and founders.

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged • Kyle Poyar

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Scotch

Scotch just raised a $20 million Series A, led by VMG Partners, with First Round Capital and Lerer Hippeau along for it.

Scotch builds an AI-native operating system for liquor stores. Point of sale, payments, inventory, and the back-office mess of state-by-state alcohol rules, all in one place.

Scotch | POS, Back Office & eComm for Liquor Stores

Run your liquor store smarter with Scotch. Fast POS, real-time inventory, and built-in eCommerce — all in one system, designed exclusively for liquor retailers.

scotchpos.com

Here is the lesson worth stealing. The giant AI rounds grab the headlines, but some of the best businesses right now are unglamorous verticals nobody else wants to touch. Scotch is not chasing AGI.

It uses AI to delete entire weeks of manual invoice reconciliation and compliance work, then charges for the time it hands back.

Pick a real industry with real pain, build the operating system for it, and you have something no horizontal AI tool will ever bother to copy.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey, Egemen here.

Couldn't sleep last night and we have a massive edition this week.

I was deep in an X thread at 2am and hit a chart that made me sit up. iOS app releases are up 80 percent year over year. The number of apps people actually use has not moved an inch.

That one gap explains almost everything happening in startups right now.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

You paid $5,000 for that website. You can't even update it

Agencies charge thousands. Take weeks. Hand you something that needs a developer every time you want to make a change.

Readdy builds you a professional, mobile-ready website in minutes, with SEO, hosting, booking, and payment integrations included. You just need to describe your business, and when you need to update something, you just need to ask our AI. No developer call. No extra invoice.

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🧠 Deep-Dive: 80% more apps. Zero more users.

Something broke in the App Store this year, and it is not what the headlines said.

App releases are exploding. Appfigures data shows global app launches up 60 percent year over year in Q1, with iOS alone up 80 percent. April ran even hotter at 89 percent on iOS. After five flat years, the store is booming again, and the reason is simple.

Tools like Claude Code and Replit turned "I wish this app existed" into "I shipped it this afternoon."

Here is the part nobody wants to print. More apps did not create more users.

(source: TechCrunch / Appfigures, April 2026)

We are building twice as much and reaching the same number of humans.

Building something is basically free now, so the only things that matter are distribution, the money to buy distribution, or the creativity to earn it for free.

The market already worked this out. VCs will still back AI startups, but mostly the ones showing unusual engagement or distribution.

(source: Tech Startups on Carta data, June 2026)

If you can build it in a weekend, so can ten thousand other people this month.

The one asset AI cannot copy in an afternoon is an audience that trusts you before you launch.

Pick one channel, post every day for 90 days, and start before you have anything to sell.

🗺️ Method: The case against raising

Tibo Louis-Lucas raised venture money for his second startup and drove it straight into bankruptcy. He came back with no funding, built Tweet Hunter and Taplio, and sold them for eight figures.

Twitter tweet

Now he runs a whole studio of profitable products on the back of one audience. His take on raising is blunt. Most VC-backed startups never turn a profit, and the ones that survive usually burn out getting there.

Here is the cleaner way to decide.

• Raise when the fire is already lit. You have a repeatable way to get customers and cash just pours fuel on it. Or you are in a real land grab where the winner takes the market and speed decides it. Or you need serious capital for serious infrastructure: hardware, inventory, deep R&D.

• Do not raise to go find product-market fit. Do not raise to hire a team before you have revenue. Do not raise so you can avoid charging customers. None of that is fuel. It is a countdown clock with someone else's expectations attached.

👉 Before you open a deck, get honest about one thing. If you do not already have a repeatable way to get customers, raising will not hand you one.

Keep your equity and go get your first ten customers.

⚾️ Catch: The man who built Claude Code stopped prompting it

Quick one that says a lot about where this is going.

Boris Cherny, the guy who built Claude Code, said it out loud at Anthropic's developer conference. He does not prompt Claude anymore.

He writes loops that prompt Claude, and his actual job now is designing the loops. His read: this is the shift the rest of us make over the coming year.

Sit with that. The building layer is not just getting easier, it is starting to run itself.

The job is shifting from writing prompts to designing the loops that write them. Which slides the edge even further away from "can you build it" and toward "do you know what is worth building, and can you get it in front of people."

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Supabase

Supabase just raised $500 million at a $10.5 billion valuation, led by GIC.

The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds

Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2026 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Megadeals Board.

Crunchbase News • Joanna Glasner

Individual apps are fighting over a flat pool of users. The company sitting underneath all of them just raised half a billion dollars.

Every vibe-coded app this year still needs somewhere to store its data, and a lot of them reach for Supabase.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I used to run a countdown in my head. Build the thing, raise the round, exit before 30.

Most of us got handed the same script. Nobody mentioned it was fiction.

Then I went looking at the actual numbers, and the countdown fell apart. Today I’ll be talking about those.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

Help make better ads

Did you recently see an ad for Roku Ads Manager in a newsletter? We’re running a short brand lift survey to understand what’s actually breaking through (and what’s not).

It takes about 20 seconds, the questions are super easy, and your feedback directly helps us improve how we show up in the newsletters you read and love.

If you’ve got a few moments, we’d really appreciate your insight.

Take the survey.

🧠 Deep-Dive: Not late, on time

I spent years racing a deadline that turned out to be made up. Here's the data that finally got me to stop.

What I never did was check whether the deadline was real. I just absorbed it, the way we all absorb it, and let it sit on my chest for years. So a while back I went and looked. The clock I'd been panicking against doesn't exist.

Some economists at MIT and the Census Bureau went through 2.7 million US founders. The average age of the people behind the fastest-growing companies, the top one in a thousand, was 45. They also found a 50-year-old has almost double the odds of a 30-year-old when it comes to building something that really takes off.

All the stuff I assumed was holding me back, starting later than I wanted, the years spent doing other jobs first, turns out that's the part that helps.

Source: Jay R. Ritter, University of Florida, "Initial Public Offerings: Median Age of IPOs Through 2025" (updated Dec 2025). 1980–2007 shown as the midpoint of the 5–9 year median range reported for that era.

Sit with that for a second. The founder you compare yourself to at midnight is three or four years into the same grind and probably carrying the same doubt.

When I look back at my early years, I don't regret the mistakes. I made plenty and most of them taught me something worth knowing. What I regret is how much of that time I spent feeling like I was running out of it.

So, feeling late? Feeling behind? Not making progress? It’s OK.

👉 Stop racing a clock that was never ticking. Just don't quit before year ten.

🗺️ Method

Cap table tools founders and finance teams love

As you grow, you need a cap table management platform that you can trust to keep up. 

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⚾️ Catch

This post from Greg Isenberg made me question this - is AI having its iPhone moment now? Worth a read!

Twitter tweet

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Cognition

Cognition has successfully raised $1 billion in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at an impressive $26 billion - it’s the scale of the week!

Cognition

Cognition builds autonomous software engineering agents

cognition.ai

Cognition is an applied AI lab focused on building autonomous software engineers, headlined by their flagship digital developer, Devin.

Their platform enables engineering teams to offload complex, end-to-end tasks like code refactoring, debugging, and software deployment directly to an AI agent that can reason through problems independently.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

For 18 months, AI startups won checks by demoing capability.

The May 21 funding cluster signals the next phase. Investors paid $416M into infrastructure and reliability plays in a single day.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight: Test your next launch before you launch it.

Concept Testing by Articos.

Every founder has shipped a landing page that flopped. A cold email no one opened. A pricing page that converted at half the rate it should have. The cause is almost always the same. Zero validation before going live.

Articos fixes that. Run your copy, pricing, or positioning against a synthetic version of your exact ICP and see what actually lands. In 30 minutes. For the cost of a coffee.

User Research Platform for Fast Insights - Articos

AI user research platform that helps product and UX teams run studies, simulate users, and generate insights in 30 minutes. No recruitment required.

www.articos.com/?utm_source=newletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=scalable

30 minutes per study. $8 to $20 per run. 86% human accuracy across 46 studies.

Validated against Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group. No recruiting. No scheduling calls with strangers. No three-week wait for an answer you already half-knew.

Run your first concept test free.

🧠 Deep-Dive: Reliability = Capability

Capability-only pitches are facing a different bar at the seed stage in 2026, and the gap is widening.

The pattern reads cleanly when you zoom out from individual headlines.

Capital is no longer flowing toward AI startups that demo well. It flows toward AI startups that integrate deeply, run reliably, and produce revenue from repeatable workflows. The May 21 cluster put $416M into that thesis.

Everything else on the same day raised $19M combined.

For two years, the winning AI pitch went: "Look at what our model can do." That cleared the bar in 2023 and 2024. It does not clear the bar in 2026.

The same investors who funded capability demos two years ago now want proof of three things: integration depth into the customer's workflow, retention from paying users, and a defensible reason your product can't be ripped out and replaced by next month's foundation model release.

2 things I wanna share here:

• Lead with the workflow, not the demo. If your first five slides are model capability and benchmark scores, you're pitching 2024. The 2026 pitch leads with the workflow you replace, the line item you compress, and the number of paying users running it every day.

• Quantify reliability, not capability. Benchmark scores carry less weight now. Reliability numbers carry more. Uptime, error rates, hallucination rates in production, customer-reported task success. Build the instrumentation before you raise.

This isn't the end of AI investing.
It's the second wave, where execution beats invention.
The founders who learn to pitch reliability now will cash Series B checks while capability-only competitors stall.

👉 Capability demos won 2024. Reliability metrics win 2026. If you're building in AI, retool your pitch around revenue, retention, and workflow depth, not benchmarks.

🗺️ Method

Claude is not just a chatbot anymore. Is your security team ready?

Claude.ai is one thing. Agentic workflows, MCP connections, ungoverned skills taking actions across your data? That's a different conversation — and most security teams aren't equipped for it.

Harmonic Security gives your CISO the visibility and controls to say yes confidently.

Share this Claude guide with security.

Help Security Say Yes

⚾️ Catch

Twitter tweet

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Cycles

Cycles raised $6.4M in seed funding to build a new multilateral clearing platform for fragmented financial protocols - it’s the scale of the week!

Cycles: Respect the Graph

The Open Clearing Protocol.

Cycles

In plain English: when money moves across different blockchains, different stablecoins, and different settlement systems, every transaction carries friction.

Cycles wants to be the layer that nets all of that out efficiently.

Think of it as a clearinghouse for the parts of the financial system that don't have one yet.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I think founders adopted AI coding tools faster than any developer tool in history. Shipping velocity is up 3-5x at most early-stage teams I talk to. That's the win.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight: One shared memory for your team

Half my context lives in meeting notes. The other half in Claude threads I can't find.

Memory Store fixes that: it plugs into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Slack, Granola, and Fathom, then turns every meeting, message, and decision into searchable memory your team and your agents can pull on demand.

One shared memory for your teammates, and agents

Memory for your entire stack. Sync conversations, snippets, and decisions across your AI tools.

Memory Store

Record once in Claude, recall it in Codex. Same context, every surface.
Backed by Y Combinator, free to try.

Try it for free today.

🧠 Deep-Dive: Real Cost of Vibe Coding

6 minutes.

This is the time to flag a malicious software package.

Every AI-suggested dependency adds attack surface.

Startups shipping AI-generated code at scale are all paying for behavioral analysis on their dependencies. That's the new floor for good engineering.

Lately, The Axios package compromise made this concrete. One of the most widely used JavaScript packages got hit with malicious code. Socket flagged it in six minutes.

Most companies running legacy tools didn't catch it at all, because legacy looks for known vulnerabilities, not behavior.

• Take dependency hygiene seriously. Every package is code you didn't write. Run something that watches behavior, not just version numbers.

• Lock AI tools to known-good output. Inspect what Cursor or Claude Code suggests before it lands in main.

• Well it’s not all bad- you can bake security into your sales motion. Mid-market and enterprise buyers ask supply chain questions in security reviews.

👉 AI coding made shipping cheap. It didn't make software cheap. Pay the security bill now or pay it later with interest.

🗺️ Method

Attio - the AI CRM for modern businesses.

Attio is the AI CRM that keeps you ten steps ahead.

Ask Attio anything. Where should I focus? What deals are at risk? Search, update, and create across your customer data.

Ask more from CRM. Ask Attio.

Try Attio for free

⚾️ Catch

Well, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock - you must’ve seen this. Spotify swapped its flat green icon for a 3D photorealistic green disco ball to mark its 20th anniversary.

They spent zero on media buys and dominated the brand conversation for ten straight days, with a capped downside because the change was always reversible.

Honestly A+ marketing scheme. Got everyone talking.

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Aboard

Aboard closed a $13M Pre-Series A - it's the scale of the week!

Your Partner for AI Transformation | Aboard

Ready for the next big leap? Aboard's solution engineers help you plan, build, and deploy AI across your business—from strategic roadmapping to custom software that actually works.

Aboard

The capital takes the company into production readiness for what it calls the first travel trailer built with automotive-grade engineering.

The trailer runs on an Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV) architecture, which means independent power generation, mobile connectivity, and automated comfort systems are baked in.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

Vibes and a pitch deck do not work anymore.

I am sharing my three exact moves to raise pre-seed capital in a market that is aggressively sorting us out.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight: Rehearse your audience. Decide with conviction.

Introducing Concept Testing by Articos.

Before your next email, landing page, or value prop goes live — run it against a synthetic version of your exact ICP first.

User Research Platform for Fast Insights - Articos

AI user research platform that helps product and UX teams run studies, simulate users, and generate insights in 30 minutes. No recruitment required.

articos

See what resonates.
Spot what's confusing.
Fix what's missing.

All before you publish a word or spend a dollar. 86% accuracy.
No recruiting. No waiting weeks.

Test your first concept free.

🧠 Deep-Dive: The Pre-Seed Barbell

41.7% of all Seed capital now goes to AI startups!

US startups raised $10.4B across 50,316 instruments in 2025. That's a 1% decline in dollars but a 13% drop in deal count.

Same money, fewer companies. The pool isn't drying up. It's getting concentrated.

The concentration has a direction. AI captures 41.7% of all seed capital. Add geography: 66% of top-decile seed valuations land in the Bay Area (44%) or New York (22%).

If you're a non-AI founder building outside those two metros, you're competing for what's left.

Three moves if you're raising in 2026.

• Stop benchmarking against medians. They hide concentration. Look at percentiles in your segment and geography.

• Right-size the round. Your relevant comp is the $7.5M cap on a sub-$250K round, or the $15M cap on a $1-2.5M round. Going higher tells investors you don't know the market.

• Build proof before the raise. The bar moved. Pick the proof relevant to your stage and bring it to the meeting. Vibes and a deck don't clear it anymore.

👉 The pre-seed market isn't shrinking. It's sorting. If you're not AI or coastal, your bar is higher, your raise is smaller, and your proof has to be louder.

🗺️ Method

Your inventory doesn't wait for you to check a dashboard.

Viktor sends daily inventory and reorder alerts to your team's Slack channel. If a SKU is trending toward stockout, you know before it happens.

Your content calendar and social posting run on autopilot. Brand monitoring runs in the background. Viktor handles the recurring work across ops and marketing so your team focuses on growth.

5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.

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⚾️ Catch: Paul Erdos Problem

OpenAI just shared something pretty wild.

One of their AI models helped disprove a math idea that had been around since 1946, which is a big moment for how AI can support real research.

Twitter tweet

☝️ Scaled This Past Week

Farther closed a $150M Series D on May 21 - it’s the scale of the week!

Farther - Welcome to Intelligent Wealth

Farther is the Intelligent Wealth Platform, natively built to drive greater wealth for clients throughout their financial lives.

www.farther.com

Farther rebuilt what big advisory firms run on. Most incumbents stitch together separate CRMs, custodial platforms, planning tools, and reporting systems that don't talk to each other.

Farther runs one integrated platform that handles client management, portfolio construction, and real-time reporting in a single environment.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

Every conversation I see about founder mental health is framed as self-care.

That's the wrong frame. We gotta look at the data.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight: Memory Store - Your company's brain

Every founder I talk to says AI made their team faster.

None of them mention what it also did: created 10x more context to track. Decisions buried in Claude chats. Customer insights stuck in a Granola transcript. Pricing logic in a Slack thread from last month.

Memory Store fixes that.

Twitter tweet

Memory Store pulls context from Slack, Gmail, Granola, Claude, Codex, Cursor, and Linear into one shared layer your team and your agents can both pull from. Record something in Claude, recall it in Codex. Decisions get tagged with the conversation they came from.

The team is launching with a ton of momentum from YC S26 Batch.

→ Try it at memory.store

🧠 Deep-Dive: Founder Mindset Tax

Founder mindset gets sold as a wellness issue. The numbers say it's a balance sheet issue.

Balderton surveyed founders across its portfolio in 2024. 88% agreed excessive stress directly results in bad decision-making. 72% said stress is already impacting their decision quality. 64% said it negatively affects business performance.

Those aren't soft numbers. Those are founders telling investors, on the record, that their mental state is degrading the business.

Now layer in what happens when it actually breaks.

• Silicon Canals' analysis of Atomico's State of European Tech data found burnout-triggered founder-CEO departures drop startup valuations 40 to 60% during the transition. That's a structural haircut on enterprise value because the operator broke before the company did.

• Startup Snapshot's Q1 2025 survey of over 800 founders went further: 34% had "seriously considered" leaving the CEO seat in the prior twelve months.

Here's what nobody puts on the cap table: you are the most expensive asset in the business. When you degrade, every downstream number degrades with you.

Think of it more like an asset-protection argument if you’re being a pure capitalist. Treat your operating capacity like burn rate.

👉 Your mindset is the OS the company runs on. Underinvesting in it is the most expensive decision you'll make this year.

🗺️ Method

Moda is the AI design agent with taste.

Your designer is busy. Agencies are expensive. And the deck needs to go out today.

Moda is your AI design partner for the moments when you need great work fast.

Drop in your brand, tell Moda what you need, and get polished, on-brand slides, docs, or ad creative in minutes.

Try Moda Free Today

⚾️ Catch: Karpathy joins Anthropic!

Huge news from the vibe-coding name-father, this’ll only get bigger!

Twitter tweet

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Dust

Dust closed a $40M Series B on Monday - it’s the scale of the week!

Most companies are stuck in single-player mode, where one employee opens ChatGPT, gets an answer, and the context vanishes into a private chat. Dust is the layer where AI agents and humans share context across the whole org, so the work actually compounds across teams.

Dust - Multiplayer AI for human-agent collaboration

Dust is where people and agents collaborate as co-contributors, so that work doesn't just get done – it gets rewired.

dust.tt

Dust builds the operating system on top of which other AI assistants get built and shared internally. That's a much harder wedge to commoditize, and the retention numbers say it's working.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I've been running AI agents inside SCALABLE for the last few months. Research scrapes for sponsor leads, draft cleanups, data pulls, etc.

Most of the time the output is fine but everything around it is exhausting. Whatever it is I want to do, sometimes the setup takes longer than the task itself.

Most "AI agent" products are LLM wrappers in a nice UI. They turn you into the agent's manager. That's not autonomy. That's just a slower way to do the work yourself.

Most AI agents demo well. Few ship real work.

Most AI agents can run a task. The problem is everything around it: setup, memory, context, cost, and figuring out what actually happened.

SureThing turns useful AI skills into autonomous agents with business context, persistent memory, cost-aware model selection, and a live dashboard. Paste a link, assign the work, and your agent reports back like a human teammate: what it did, what it cost, what needs your decision, and what happens next.

Built for founders, operators, and marketers who want AI to ship work, not become another tool to babysit.

Create Your Agent

If you're a founder, operator, or marketer who's been burned by agent tools that promise autonomy and deliver babysitting, this is worth 5 minutes of your time.

👉 The bar for "AI agent" should be: it ships work and tells you what happened. Anything less is a chatbot with extra steps.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

AI engineer equity grants at seed are up 64% in two years.

If your cap table math is from 2024, you've got a problem.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

Top Brands Use minisocial to Create Content That Converts

Want content that drives engagement, boosts conversions, and goes viral? Here's how.

minisocial combines micro-influencer activations with high-performing UGC creation. Join top brands like Plant People, immi, Imperfect Foods, and Topicals to see results like:

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With minisocial, it's simple: create your brief in 10 minutes, approve your curated creators, download scroll-stopping content with Whitelisting/Partnership Ad code access baked-in!

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Startup Salaries

Carta dropped their H2 2025 comp report this week. Two numbers stuck with me: salaries up 5.1% in two years, equity up 13%. Most founders I talk to know cash comp moved. Almost none have updated their equity assumptions to match.

If you're raising a seed in the next six months and you're working with 2024 cap table math, you're going to lose your first AI hire.

At startups valued between $1M and $10M, the median initial equity grant for AI/ML engineers is up 64% over the past two years. Not 6%. Sixty-four. The bar moved and a lot of us missed it.

Most of this comes back to team size. The median seed team is four people. Series B average headcount went from 53 in 2023 to 45 in 2025.

So basically fewer hires per company, bigger budget per hire. AI talent is usually the rate-limiter on your roadmap right now, so they get whatever the market is asking.

Hiring itself isn't dead either. Carta companies posted 5,652 net new hires in January 2026, roughly the 2025 average.

Hiring is happening selectively, and physical-economy companies are doing more of it than pure software shops.

What I'd do this week: rebuild your seed cap table assumptions on H2 2025 numbers. Assume your first AI engineer wants 60% more equity than you're modeling.

So either raise a bigger round, or skip the AI/ML specialist hire and let your roadmap move slower. Both are fine. Showing up to an offer with 2024 numbers is not.

👉 If your seed cap table still uses 2024 assumptions, your next AI offer is going to bounce. Rebuild it now, before the candidate is on a call.

🗺️ Method

100 Genius Side Hustle Ideas

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⚾️ Catch

Master Claude AI (Free Guide)

The professionals pulling ahead aren't working more. They're using Claude.

Our free guide will show you how to:

• Configure Claude to be the perfect assistant

• Master AI-powered content creation

• Transform complex data into actionable strategies

• Harness Claude’s full potential

Transform your workflow with AI and stay ahead of the curve with this comprehensive guide to using Claude at work.

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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Ineffable

Ineffable Intelligence has secured a record-breaking $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation - yeah, not a typo, what?!

Ineffable Intelligence

Ineffable Intelligence is an AI research company whose mission is to make first contact with superintelligence.

ineffable.ai

Ineffable Intelligence is a London-based AI research lab founded by AlphaGo architect David Silver, focused on developing the next generation of reinforcement learning models.

The company aims to push the boundaries of general-purpose AI, with its founder notably pledging to donate 100% of his future equity gains to high-impact charities.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

Getting crazy out there.

The median seed round in 2025 closed at $4M raised on a $20M post-money valuation.

That's not a seed by 2018 standards. That's a Series A.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

Write docs 4x faster. Without hating every second.

Nobody became a developer to write documentation. But the docs still need to get written — PRDs, README updates, architecture decisions, onboarding guides.

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Seed is the new Series A

The seed game has split into two markets that share a name and almost nothing else.

At the top, the 95th percentile seed round in 2025 raised $16.6M at an $80.5M post-money. That's nearly 3x the 95th percentile valuation in 2019.

At Y Combinator's March 2026 Demo Day, eight-week-old companies were pricing rounds at $5M on $40M post.

One investor told TechCrunch he was writing $3-4M checks at $25-30M post for seed rounds where founders already had $2M+ in revenue and signed enterprise pilots.

At the bottom, capital is concentrating. Across all US startups that closed a round in 2025, the bottom 50% took home just 14% of total cash, per Carta.

At the seed stage specifically, AI captured 42% of capital, up from 23% pre-ChatGPT. If you're not in the top half by ARR, AI moat, or pedigree, you're not raising a seed.

You're raising a pre-seed with a Series A label slapped on it. It’s total madness!

She's right. The numbers say so.

If you're going out for a $2M check at a $10M post in 2026, the math has moved.

VCs aren't writing three $3M checks anymore.

They're writing one $9M check to the founder with the better story.

The check size you used to call a seed is what investors now call passing on it.

Be honest about where you stand. If you're not in the top half by metrics, raise less, dilute less, and stop calling it a seed.

👉 Seed is the new Series A. Pre-seed is the new seed. Stop pricing yourself off the 2018 ladder.

🗺️ Method

Your business has grown. Is your accounting?

If your accounting hasn't kept pace with your business, it's quietly costing you. Outdated financials, no clear view of profitability, and hours lost every week — these are growth bottlenecks, not just bookkeeping headaches. BELAY's Financial Experts handle it all.

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This docs platform just raised $45M

Mintlify powers documentation for 20,000+ companies reaching 100M+ people a year. Backed by a16z and Salesforce Ventures. Your docs deserve the same infrastructure.

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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Parallel Web Systems

Parallel Web Systems has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia, bringing the company to a $2 billion valuation.

Parallel Web Systems | Infrastructure for intelligence on the web

Parallel develops a suite of agents and tool APIs for building AI with powerful access to the open web. SOC-2 Type II certified. ZDR Available for enterprises.

Parallel Web Systems | Infrastructure for intelligence on the web

Parallel Web Systems provides essential cloud infrastructure and search APIs purpose-built for artificial intelligence.

Their platform enables autonomous AI agents to conduct highly accurate, large-scale online research across a rapidly growing, proprietary index of the internet.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I went through YC's Spring 2026 Request for Startups this morning.

It's the guide currently live for founders applying to the Summer 2026 batch, which has a May 4 deadline.

Most founders will read the list as a checklist of ideas to copy. That's the wrong framing.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

What 2,000 SaaS Companies Reveal About Growth in 2026

Is your growth in-line with your peers in B2B SaaS & AI? 

Benchmark yourself against actual billings data for Maxio’s 2000+ global customers, alongside firsthand company perspectives to understand how growth varied by company size, business model, and strategic focus.

Key takeaways from the report: 

• Average growth across 2,000 companies

• Growth by revenue band 

• AI-led vs AI-enhanced. Who performed better? 

Download the report 

🧠 Deep-Dive: Where YC Is Leaning

The Request for Startups (Summer 2026) list isn't what to build.

It's where Garry Tan, Tom Blomfield, and the rest of the partner bench think the next category-defining companies will get built.

Read it that way and one pattern jumps off the page: only 3 of the 10 categories are software for software people. The other 7 push AI into places venture historically avoided.

Requests for Startups | Summer 2026

Y Combinator is looking for startups working on these ideas. If you're working on something we're interested in, we'd love to hear from you.

Y Combinator

AI has stopped being a feature. YC is saying it out loud: AI is now the operator, not the wrapper.

The trap is reading these categories at the surface. "AI for Government" sounds like a horizontal platform. It isn't.

If you're applying by May 4, the question isn't which RFS item to copy. It's whether your pitch picks a market specific enough that a big software company can't be bothered, and whether AI is doing the operating work inside it (not just sitting next to it).

👉 YC's RFS is a permission slip to go vertical. If your "AI for X" could be a feature inside someone else's product, you picked the wrong X.

👋 Become a SCALABLE member, gain an unfair advantage today.

• Full access to all content (fundraising, product, GTM, growth, and more)

• 100% OFF in Scalable Template Store ($847 value)

• Perks & discounts in 20+ tools and platforms

• Invite-only workshops & masterclasses

• Discounts in all future resources

• Private founders community

• 1:1s with Egemen

🗺️ Method

[Webinar] Stop babysitting your coding agents

MCPs give your agents access to information, not understanding. The teams pulling ahead are using a context engine to give agents the right context for every task, so they stay on track without the set up tax or the correction loops. Join live on May 6 (FREE) to see how.

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Turn Google Ads into predictable customer acquisition

Echelonn manages over $15M/mo in Google and YouTube Ads for 300+ ecommerce brands. One vertical. One channel. Total focus. If you're not confident your account is performing the way it should, book a free audit.

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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Sooth Labs

Sooth Labs has successfully raised $50 million in a Seed funding round led by Felicis.

Sooth Labs is a software-as-a-service platform that provides advanced observability and debugging tools specifically designed for the next generation of distributed AI applications.

Their tech allows engineering teams to trace complex data flows and identify bottlenecks within autonomous systems in real-time, effectively bringing "sanity" to the often unpredictable behavior of large-scale agentic workflows.

Do you like SCALABLE?

👋 Hey — Egemen here (started using my dormant X account after 2 years, give me a follow, I share more there).

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight: Real user research in 30 minutes, $20 a study

Last week I rewrote my homepage headline four times. Zero of those versions got tested against an actual audience before it went live. That's normal. It's also why founders ship worse copy than they should.

Articos is the fix I've been using.

User Research Platform for Fast Insights - Articos

AI user research platform that helps product and UX teams run studies, simulate users, and generate insights in 30 minutes. No recruitment required.

articos

• Define your ICP, brief your research goal, and Articos runs structured interviews with a stance-diverse panel of champions, pragmatists, skeptics, and blockers.

• You get motivations, objections, language patterns, and prioritized recommendations in a report your team can ship.

Decisions I used to ship on gut now get a 30-minute check first. That alone has been worth it.

Get your first study free →

🧠 Deep-Dive: Less product, more moat

Every headline this month is about Q1 2026's $300 billion VC quarter. For most of us building at seed or Series A, those numbers are noise. The real signal is buried one layer down.

Look at the stage-by-stage breakdown. Late-stage funding jumped 205% year-over-year, almost entirely on AI megarounds. That's a winner-take-most game most of us aren't playing. Early-stage funding rose 41%. Seed rose 31%. But seed deal counts dropped 30% year-over-year.

Translation: fewer founders got funded, at bigger rounds, with higher bars on focus. Investors are paying a premium for clarity and punishing optionality. The "all-in-one platform" pitch is dead at seed. Singular utility is what's getting checks.

Then there's the product side. Pendo's analytics research shows roughly 80% of SaaS features receive little or no usage. Industry benchmarks put average core feature adoption at 24.5%, with admin and power-user features landing closer to 5-15%. You're not shipping a roadmap. You're shipping a graveyard.

I keep seeing the same pattern on founder roadmaps. The core loop accounts for maybe a third of the planned build. The rest is features for edge cases, personas that don't exist yet, and buyer objections no one has actually tested. That's not a product strategy. That's a wishlist in a Linear board.

Here's the uncomfortable part guys:

• In a market where 80% of features go unused and capital only flows to teams with a clear singular value proposition, adding surface area doesn't defend you.

• This dilutes the one thing that might actually set you apart. The feature list you're proud of is the reason buyers can't describe what you do in one sentence.

👉 Your moat isn't your feature count. It's how unmistakably you solve one specific problem.

👋 Become a SCALABLE member, gain an unfair advantage today.

• Full access to all content (fundraising, product, GTM, growth, and more)

• 100% OFF in Scalable Template Store ($847 value)

• Perks & discounts in 20+ tools and platforms

• Invite-only workshops & masterclasses

• Discounts in all future resources

• Private founders community

• 1:1s with Egemen

🗺️ Method

AI ads that look and feel like your brand

Most AI tools fall short because they lack context. They generate in a vacuum.

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⚾️ Catch

The World's Biggest Dev Event Hits Silicon Valley

From AI and cloud to DevOps and security — WeAreDevelopers World Congress brings the entire modern stack to San Jose. 500+ speakers. 10,000+ developers. One epic September. Use code GITPUSH26 for 10% off.

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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Factory

Factory has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

Factory | Agent-Native Software Development

Build faster with AI coding agents. Factory Droids automate coding, testing, and deployment for startups and enterprises.

Factory.ai

Factory is an AI software company that creates "Droids," specialized autonomous AI agents designed to handle the most repetitive parts of the software development lifecycle, from writing unit tests to refactoring legacy code.

Their platform integrates directly into a team's existing developer tools, allowing engineers to offload routine maintenance tasks to AI and focus their energy on high-level architectural design and new feature innovation.

Do you like SCALABLE?