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A hub for startup news, trends, and insights, covering the global startup ecosystem for founders, investors, and innovators. Community: @startupdis Buy Ads: @strategy (this is our only account).
🚀 ByteDance unveils Seed Diffusion — a new diffusion-based language model
Instead of generating text token-by-token, Seed Diffusion creates the entire output at once — similar to how image models like Midjourney work.
🔸 Outperforms Google and Inception Labs in most benchmarks
🔸 Key edge: speed — over 2,000 tokens/sec, 5.4× faster than standard models
🔸 Open for free testing: Seed Studio
A major leap in generation architecture — and a serious play from ByteDance in the AI race.
💳 The hidden history behind modern card payments
Before Apple Pay, Stripe, or embedded checkout, there were paper vouchers, magnetic stripes, and punched cards. This short timeline shows how payments evolved — from forgotten wallets to biometric tokens.
🗓 From 1914 to 2024:
🔸 1914 — Western Union issues the first metal “buy now, pay later” cards
🔸 1949 — A forgotten wallet inspires the birth of Diners Club
🔸 1958 — AmEx launches a paper card, replaced by plastic in 1959
🔸 1967 — Barclays rolls out the first ATM in England
🔸 1974 — The smart card is patented in France
🔸 1979 — Visa introduces the magnetic stripe reader
🔸 1983–84 — Holograms become standard to prevent fraud
🔸 1990s — Chip & PIN and global EMV specs transform card security
🔸 2007 — Contactless payments go live
🔸 2023 — Mastercard announces a shift to biometrics and tokenization by 2030
From punched cards to payment tokens, this is what 110 years of financial UX looks like.
📊 Excel killer? Meet NanoCell — a blazing-fast, privacy-first spreadsheet tool
A new tool just dropped that might be the cleanest Excel alternative we’ve seen — NanoCell, built by a veteran analyst for speed, simplicity, and control.
🔸 Handles huge datasets, financial models, formulas, and visualizations — all lightning-fast
🔸No complex macros or formulas needed
🔸 Built with only the essentials — no bloat, no noise
🔸 Keeps all data intact — no auto-loss like some competitors
🔸 Runs fully on a static server — safe for sensitive docs, no data leaks
👉 Try it here 👈
Open-source on GitHub
One-click tables, no Excel pain.
🧠 OpenAI drops its first open AI model since GPT‑2
OpenAI has released GPT‑OSS, its first open-weight model family in over six years. It includes a 120B and 20B version — both available under Apache 2.0, optimized for local use, and surprisingly powerful.
🔸 GPT‑OSS 120B matches o4-mini in reasoning benchmarks
🔸 GPT‑OSS 20B runs on a laptop and rivals o3-mini
🔸 Supports chain-of-thought reasoning and tool use
🔸 Full commercial use allowed under a permissive license
🔸 Designed for transparency, privacy, and autonomy
🔸 First OpenAI release meant to compete with LLaMA, DeepSeek, Qwen
👉 Try it here 👈
This is OpenAI’s biggest step back toward open AI — and it’s fast, free, and local.
🧪 PlayerZero is building an immune system for your code
Most tools try to speed up developers. But bottlenecks often sit elsewhere — like in QA. That’s where PlayerZero steps in: AI agents that detect and fix bugs before production, trained on your repo’s history.
🔸 Learns from past incidents, patches, and test cases
🔸 Suggests auto-fixes directly in pull requests
🔸 Designed for complex monorepos and legacy systems
🔸 Hooks into CI/CD in minutes
🔸 Used by teams like Zuora to monitor billing infra
🔸 Just raised $15M from the likes of Databricks' founder and Vercel’s CEO
Fun fact: the founder demoed it to the creator of Next.js — who didn’t believe it at first, but then invested.
🎬 The ultimate AI toolkit for video creators — in one link
We found a goldmine for content creators: a browser-based platform with every top AI video tool in one place.
🔸 Text-to-video, subtitles, noise removal, face cloning — it’s all here
🔸 Supports trending models like Veo 3, Minimax, Kling, and more
👉 Save your dream video editor 👈
Perfect for creators who want speed, quality — and less post-production pain.
💰Why an AI engineer turned down $1.5B from Zuckerberg
In his bid to build the ultimate AI dream team, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered ex-Meta engineer Andrew Tulloch a staggering $1.5B deal to return — a 4-year package of salary, equity, and performance bonuses.
But Tulloch said no❕
🔸 He currently owns 3.75% of his AI startup, Thinking Machines
🔸 Based on current market buzz, that stake could be worth $3B in the next round
🔸 Turning down $1.5B wasn’t irrational — it was mathematical
🔸 Now it’s a race: will Thinking Machines hit IPO before the AI bubble deflates?
Zuck offered a fortune. Tulloch bet on more.
🌐 Build landing pages in seconds — meet Pagy
Pagy just launched: a blazing-fast browser-based tool for creating websites and personal pages without writing a single line of code.
🔸 No installs — works entirely in your browser
🔸 Pick a template, edit text/images/links right on the page
🔸 No designer, no developer, no code needed
🔸 Built-in hosting and analytics
🔸 100s of ready-made designs from devs and the community
👉 Try it here 👈
A perfect tool for fast MVPs, link-in-bio sites, or spinning up ideas on the fly.
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🖌 Photoshop adds new AI tool for seamless image blending
Adobe has launched a new feature in Photoshop called Harmonize — it automatically matches lighting, shadows, and colors to blend one image into another in seconds.
Perfect for creators, meme lords, and anyone tired of manual tweaking.
Drop it in, harmonize, done.
🧊 Frozen for 30 Years: The Oldest Embryo Baby Born in the US
A boy named Thaddeus Daniel Peirce was born in Ohio from an embryo frozen 30.5 years ago — the longest-known frozen embryo to result in a live birth.
🔸 The embryo was created in 1994 and stored by Linda Archerd, who gave birth to one child that year and kept the remaining embryos frozen for decades, paying $1,000 annually.
🔸 With age and menopause, Archerd decided to donate the embryos, but only to a white, Christian, married US couple.
🔸 The Snowflakes program from Nightlight Christian Adoptions matched the embryos to Lindsay and Tim Peirce, a couple who had tried to conceive for 7 years.
🔸 Rejoice Fertility Clinic in Tennessee performed the transfer — one embryo didn’t survive thawing, but two implanted, and one led to birth.
🔸 Most clinics refuse to work with outdated freezing methods. Rejoice’s founder believes every embryo “deserves a chance at life.”
A surreal mix of faith, biotech — and long-term moral investment.
📣 Why Sam Altman Says You Shouldn’t Track User Growth Early On
In the early stages of a startup, it’s not about how many users you have — it’s about how much they love your product.
Altman explains why obsession with absolute growth is a mistake, and what you should focus on instead:
🔸 A small group of obsessed users is better than a wide pool of casual ones
🔸 Deep engagement signals product-market fit more than raw numbers
🔸 Retention and frequency are your best early metrics
🔸 Word-of-mouth is the ultimate validation
Almost all great companies start with a product that a few people love.
🤖 Neural Agent — your AI-powered desktop assistant
A powerful open-source AI agent that can take full control of your computer: search files, browse the web, fill forms, send emails, and more.
🔸 Automates all routine tasks while you code, design, or think
🔸 Runs on Claude, GPT-4, Azure OpenAI, and Bedrock — top-tier models
🔸 Fully integrated UI — type commands into a small bar and get results instantly
🔸 Simple setup with an easy-to-use API and step-by-step install guide
👉 check it out 👈
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🧠 The Perplexity story: From DeepMind intern to Google’s challenger
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is quietly building what Google once dreamed of—an “answer engine” that replaces search.
And the industry is starting to notice.
🔸 Srinivas grew up in the same Indian city as Sundar Pichai—his childhood hero
🔸 Inspired by Google’s origin story, he started Perplexity after a stint at DeepMind
🔸 Unlike OpenAI, the team refused to build their own model—focusing instead on product and UX
🔸 Their AI-native browser Comet is gaining traction with early adopters
🔸 Investors now value the company at $18B, while acquirers circle
Perplexity may be the most credible threat to Google’s search empire—and it’s still playing the long game.
⚙️ 100 free tools for every task
A single site with tools for all your daily needs — no sign-up, all free:
🔸 Text tools — grammar check, plagiarism, converters
🔸 PDF tools — merge, compress, split
🔸 Video tools — trim, convert, resize
🔸 Image tools — crop, remove background, compress
🔸 And many others across dozens of categories
Grab it here 👉 ezytoolz.com 👈
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🧠 1000+ ChatGPT prompts for every task
A massive prompt library for studying, coding, business, medicine, entertainment, and more.
Grab it here 👉 superhuman.ai 👈
Well-organized, easy to use, and completely free.
🧠 GPT-5 is here — and it’s OpenAI’s biggest leap yet
OpenAI just released GPT-5, its most advanced AI model to date, and for the first time, it's available to all ChatGPT users — including those on the free plan.
The model is faster, more accurate, and more versatile across writing, coding, and even healthcare.
🔸 Outputs over 2,000 tokens/second — 5x faster than before
🔸 Hallucinations reduced, safer replies now use "safe completions"
🔸 Handles logic, reasoning, and long documents far better than GPT-4
🔸 Free users get GPT-5 Mini after hitting usage caps
🔸 GPT-5 now integrated across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure
OpenAI also demoed “vibe coding” — generating full apps from prompts in seconds — showing just how far generative UX has come.
👉 Try GPT-5 now 👈
Altman calls it like having a team of PhDs in your pocket. Whether that’s hype or reality — GPT-5 is a major step toward AI you actually want to use.
⚙️ How to build a voice-enabled second brain in 3 hours
Capture ideas in seconds and turn them into content, strategy, or action — without dashboards or overengineering.
Here’s how the setup works:
🔸 Use Voicenotes.com to record and transcribe voice memos
🔸 Connect Voicenotes to Make.com via Webhook
🔸 A Gemini 2.5 model classifies each note: content, business idea, observation, or reading
🔸 Notes are routed into Notion databases automatically
🔸 Content ideas trigger AI-generated LinkedIn drafts, sent to Typefully
🔸 Business ideas get enriched with SWOT analysis and action plans
Built with just four tools: Voicenotes, Make, Notion, and optional AI APIs. Total setup time: ~3 hours.
🖌 New image model drop: Qwen Image goes public (and free)
China just dropped a beast — Qwen Image, a free, open-source image generator that’s already turning heads.
🔸 Handles any style: realistic, stylized, cartoons, posters, comics
🔸 Understands prompts like ChatGPT — with strong visual-text alignment
🔸 Can edit images with precision (think Flux Kontext quality)
🔸 Preserves original style — no plastic mess, no hallucinated chaos
🔸 Fully open-source and no usage limits
👉 Test the model here 👈
This might be the strongest free image model yet.
🔍 Motive lands $150M to expand its AI fleet platform to the UK
Motive, the AI-powered platform transforming physical operations for fleets and equipment, has raised $150M in new funding led by Kleiner Perkins. The company is now expanding into the UK to help solve challenges in logistics, safety, and driver shortages.
🔸 Motive serves 100,000 customers and 1.3M drivers, with nearly $500M ARR
🔸 AI detects risky driving with 4x better accuracy than competitors
🔸 Clients report 80% fewer accidents and up to 2,000% ROI
🔸 Platform covers safety, compliance, maintenance, and fraud prevention in one dashboard
🔸 The funding will accelerate global rollout, R&D in India, and UK go-to-market efforts
Motive’s edge lies in precision at scale — using AI trained on billions of miles to drive real-world impact across the global physical economy.
🔍 ChatGPT agent controls live cam, finds boat on request
A ChatGPT-powered agent was given access to a public webcam overlooking a marina — and asked to locate a specific boat.
It moved the camera, zoomed in, scanned the docks… and found it.
The line between digital agents and physical tasks is getting thinner by the day.
📣 Bezos on the power shift from marketing to product
In a 2012 interview, Jeff Bezos predicted a major change in how companies should think:
Word-of-mouth is more powerful than it has ever been before.
If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.
🫂Your own AI team, no code needed
Eigent is a new app that lets you build a squad of AI agents to handle work tasks for you — like NPCs, but productive. Think of it as a plug-and-play stack of paid neural networks, working for you in the background.
🔸 Set up custom AI workflows without writing code
🔸 Agents take on tasks like cleaning files, reading PDFs, and crunching data
🔸 Handles everything from accounting to market research
🔸 Use cases include: sorting downloads, processing lab results, parsing CSVs for finance
🔸 Feels like Zapier meets AutoGPT — but actually usable
This isn’t just another AI toy — it’s a quiet power-up for anyone drowning in digital busywork.
🧠 Qwen rolls out new reasoning-focused open model
Qwen just released Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 — a new medium-sized open model optimized for logical reasoning across math, science, and code.
🔸 Strong performance on logic-heavy tasks
🔸 Comparable output quality to top competitors
🔸 Supports 256K tokens of native context — expandable to 1M
🔸 Available now via chat.qwen.ai (select the “Thinking” mode)
Qwen continues to quietly raise the bar for open-source LLMs — with serious context and reasoning firepower.
🧠 Y Combinator shares fresh ideas for AI-first startups
Ahead of its fall batch, Y Combinator revealed new directions it’s excited to fund — all rooted in the belief that modern startups should treat AI not as a feature, but as the foundation.
Here’s what YC wants to see 👇
🔸 AI-powered training for skilled trades
Think plumbers and electricians trained via VR, with AI tutors giving live feedback and adapting lessons in real time.
🔸 Generative video as a building block
Not final product, but part of the stack — from no-code game creation to virtual clothing try-ons and AI “calls” with digital versions of deceased relatives.
🔸 Infrastructure for multi-agent systems
Startups that can help developers manage huge webs of AI agents — prompt routing, context reliability, debugging at scale.
🔸 AI-native enterprise software
A new Salesforce or ServiceNow, but built for the AI era — tools that actually assist teams, not just log data.
🔸 Ultra-lean, AI-leveraged startups
YC believes a 10-person team can now build a $100B company — if it uses AI to move fast and stay small.
🔸 AI replacing legacy govtech
$100B/year goes to old software in the US government. YC wants startups like Caucus or Archon that cut this cost with modern, AI-native tools.
Applications for the fall batch close August 4.
And yes, they still offer $500K for 7% — plus another slice after your next raise.
The message is clear: build with AI at the core — or get left behind.
📈 Figma stock pops on IPO debut, hits $47B market cap
Figma finally went public—and Wall Street couldn’t get enough. The design platform opened at $33, surged to $124, and closed at $115.50, ending the day with a $47B market cap.
🔸 IPO demand was so high, trading was briefly halted due to volatility
🔸 Retail buyers joked online about being allocated just 1 share
🔸 Market cap doubled Adobe’s failed $20B acquisition offer from 2023
🔸 After-hours trading stayed hot, with continued price action
Figma didn’t just rebound from a blocked deal—it sprinted past it.
🚀 Australia's first orbital rocket lasted just 14 seconds in the air
Eris, the 30-ton rocket from Gilmour Space, launched from Bowen Spaceport — and promptly crashed. But the company is calling it a win.
🔸 First Australian-made rocket to launch from local soil
🔸 Flew for 14 seconds, with 23 seconds of engine burn
🔸 Crash caused no injuries or environmental harm
🔸 Valuable flight data collected for next test
🔸 Prior attempts were delayed by power surges and high winds
🔸 CEO: "Getting off the pad is a huge step forward"
💡Even failure is a milestone when you're building a space industry from scratch. Australia's now officially in the orbital launch game — and they’re just getting started.
🫂How small teams build big revenue
A new report from Growth Unhinged breaks down how early-stage SaaS startups structure their teams.
The takeaway?
You don’t need a huge headcount to hit $1M ARR.
Startups under $1M typically run lean — with just 7 people.
That’s your classic "two-pizza team."
Here’s what that usually looks like:
🔸 3 engineers
🔸 1 product/design
🔸 1 sales
🔸 1 support
🔸 1 admin/ops
Some skip marketing hires early on — founders often handle GTM themselves. Others outsource one-off tasks instead of hiring full-time.
The key is not just who you hire, but how clearly each role maps to revenue. If a founder understands that every teammate should drive profit, not just burn cash — investors will notice.
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🔑 30 Key Terms Every Founder Should Know
Project management isn’t just for PMs — every startup founder runs dozens of micro-projects every week.
This cheat sheet covers 30 must-know terms: from backlog and scope creep to MVP, burn rate, and milestone tracking.
A great refresher or onboarding tool for early team members.
💰OpenAI-backed health AI hits $1B+ valuation
Ambience Healthcare, a startup building AI tools to eliminate doctors’ admin work, has raised $243M at a valuation above $1B.
The round was led by a16z and Oak HC/FT, with support from the OpenAI Startup Fund and others.
🔸 The product uses OpenAI models to transcribe visits, prep records, and generate billing codes
🔸 Clients include Cleveland Clinic, Houston Methodist, and St. Luke’s
🔸 CEO says goal is to “fully offload paperwork” so doctors focus only on care
🔸 OpenAI’s deeper push into biotech includes Chai-1, Retro Biosciences, and more
A quiet reminder: OpenAI isn’t just building AGI — it’s building billion-dollar verticals.
🎬 “Bolt for video”: AI video editing by text command
Tailored Labs won the $1M Bolt hackathon with a tool that turns video editing into a conversation.
Built on the Bolt platform, it lets users edit videos just by describing changes in plain English — no timeline dragging or manual cuts.
🔸 One-Shot Generation: creates a finished video from raw clips in minutes
🔸 Chat-to-Edit: instantly applies text-based commands to the timeline
🔸 Smart Media Library: uses AI to find takes, trim footage, and sort scenes
🔸 Professional Timeline: supports multi-track editing and transitions
🔸 Cloud Rendering: renders high-quality videos via Remotion, no fan noise
More winners from the hackathon 👉 here
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