Last week, I spent three days in Las Vegas attending Fintech Meetup and it was an epic show. Most of my time was consumed by the Lending Track, because I organized it, but I also caught some of the keynotes, did a breakfast Table Talk, and, of course, had plenty of one-on-one meetings. As you […]
This week, we’re looking at a familiar tension in enterprise AI—speed versus trust, and a startup betting that finance teams won’t accept one without the other. Numos, a San Francisco-based fintech, raised a $4.25 million seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Operator Collective to bring AI deeper into the finance stack. The […]
“In financial services, every decision you make has to stand up to regulators, auditors, compliance teams, and determined fraudsters.” – Laura Spiekerman, Alloy Financial services is a tough proving ground for agentic AI due to a high regulatory bar and zero tolerance for unexplained decisions. But Alloy co-founder and president Laura Spiekerman thinks agentic AI […]
This week, we’re looking at a company going after a problem most teams feel but rarely name: the growing coordination tax of working across humans, tools, and now, AI agents. Highlight AI just raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to build what it calls a shared intelligence layer for modern work. […]
Christine Yen, CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, discusses “mob coding” with Claude, building mecha suits for humans, and the visibility problem in software development. What happens when you build something for a customer, and it breaks without any visibility? Things look fine on your end, but other teams say something isn’t right. The customer insists […]
Proof’s Head of Product argues that agentic commerce will break the trust model behind digital transactions unless the industry solves a question nobody has answered yet: who issues the proof that a real human authorized an AI agent to spend their money? OpenAI has north of 800 million users. Anthropic, Google, and every other major […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week, we’re looking at AI that skips the draft phase entirely, moving straight from idea to finished output, with measurable time savings to back it up. Beautiful.ai secured $45M in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst’s CVF fund […]
“AI agents are actually the contrary of a black box. They are more auditable than a human being.” – Eléonore Crespo When Eléonore Crespo says she would rather study AI than watch Netflix, she is only half joking. That curiosity has turned into Pigment, a Paris?born business planning platform that wants to use artificial intelligence […]
I’ve been organizing fintech conferences for more than 13 years. Even after we sold our events business, I continue to dedicate my career to this space because I love it. I’ve watched fintech events grow from intimate gatherings of a few hundred people into week-long ecosystems that transform entire cities. And after all that time, […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week: an $11M Series A for a startup taking a safety-first approach to AI in healthcare. Amigo AI is building patient-facing agents, but with a training model that looks a lot more like medical school than traditional […]