Tech and startups: 2nd September 2025

• More than 10 European startups became unicorns this year, including Lovable, Fuse Energy, Mubi, and Isar Aerospace, signaling strong growth in the European tech ecosystem.

• Healthcare AI startup Assort Health raised $50M Series B at a $750M valuation to automate patient phone calls for specialty practices, while TransBnk secured $25M to digitize India's corporate banking infrastructure.

• Maisa AI raised $25M specifically to address enterprise AI's reported 95% failure rate through their HALP platform and agentic automation solutions.

• Meta is experiencing significant AI talent exodus from its Superintelligence Labs as the company burns billions pursuing AGI and shifts focus from metaverse to artificial intelligence.

• Early agentic AI platforms are gaining traction across customer support, sales, and enterprise workflows, with companies like Sendbird, MavenAGI, and Moveworks leading the charge.

• Rec Room laid off half its staff in a major shakeup affecting engineering, product, and operations teams at the Seattle-based VR startup.

• Uniphore acquired both Orby AI and Autonom8 to extend its AI-driven automation capabilities with RAG data access and low-code workflow tools.

• AI agents remain science fiction according to critics, with deployment gaps persisting despite advances from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major players in the space.

What the interns have wrought, 2025 edition (blog​.janestreet​.com). Intern projects include Faster (J)SQL evaluation with JSQL, better Torch bindings via OxCaml, Memtrace memory leaks, and ref-counted shared memory with OxCaml modes

Moving ahead faster with fallbacks (booking​.ai). Fallbacks in ranking service enable fast experimentation, reliability, and ML-induced innovation without outages

Breaking AI Testing Barriers: Dynamic Assertions and AI Automation Deliver 1000%+ Productivity Gains (engineering​.salesforce​.com). AI quality testing, dynamic semantic assertions, AI evaluation pipelines, N-minus-one validation, LiveKit audio virtualization, prompt engineering, Gemini LLM prompts, Agentforce/Prompt Builder/Data Cloud integration

Rediscovering joy in learning: Jason Lengstorf on the state of development (github​.blog). Jason Lengstorf on learning with curiosity, AI as a multiplier, open source sustainment, MCP, Zod, and the evolving JS/CSS landscape

Engineering stories behind the Medium Daily Digest Algorithm: Part 1 (medium​.engineering). How Apple Mail Privacy Protection and filtering adjustments boosted digest quality and engagement through adjusted filtering rules and A/B testing

An Open Letter to Everyone I've Butted Heads With (andrewkelley​.me). Open reflection on Zig project, creator empathy, and handling negative interactions in open-source governance and community

Intern projects that outlived the internship (blog​.trailofbits​.com). Two AI-powered tools: a podcast workflow saving 1,250 hours annually and a Slack Exporter enabling enterprise knowledge retrieval

I tell you what I want, what I really, really want (bell​.bz). Andy Bell seeks iPhone/Mac app ideas; OpenVibe critique; UI preferences; Set Studio and Piccalilli founder profile

The Art of Saying “No” to Shiny New Tools (brajeshwar​.com). Critique of chasing shiny tools; advocates depth, discipline, and Stoic discernment over rapid adoption of new frameworks, APIs, and tech hype

How an EM’s Side Project Reached 1,800 GitHub Stars (newsletter​.manager​.dev). EM builds Logdy, gains 1,800+ GitHub stars; weekend prototype to open-source tool; monetization, hiring AI, on-prem version, copilots, open source

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work (seangoedecke​.com). Advocate for YAGNI-driven, Unix-lean designs: prefer in-memory solutions, Unicorn, edge proxy configs, and incremental scaling over premature infrastructure like Redis

Introducing CapitalStack by Thesis Driven (thesisdriven​.com). CapitalStack builds a searchable 2,000+ investor database with profiles, matchmaking, and founder community for real estate capital raising

The real dilemmas of cybersecurity startup ideation, discovery, and validation (ventureinsecurity​.net). Contrarian startup ideation in cybersecurity: break the echo chamber, talk to diverse end users, and pursue deep tech moats over AI hype

What It Really Takes to Build an Inc. 5000 Company Without a Dime of VC (stacker​.com). Bootstrapping to Inc. 5000: hiring without funding, advisors via 2% equity, revenue-first strategy, interns as leverage, advisory board insights

A Business Model for AI (bayesianinvestor​.com). AI-managed startups, incubator model, compute limits, safety testing, trade secrets, VC profits, nanotech, hedge funds, Drexler, 2028-2033 horizon

Building Something Big (allenpike​.com). Indie vs. venture-scale paths, Forestwalk, LLM evals product pivot, runway concepts, VC-style metrics, and attracting world-class teams

Stockholm and ambition (louiscb​.com). Founder quitting job, Stockholm startup scene, Paul Graham reference, unicorns, summer work culture, 60–70 hour weeks, Dealroom ranking, embargoed summer shutdown

Launching Arena (forwardthinking​.substack​.com). Arena ranks founders on fundability via weekly scores, AMAs with tech titans, fundraising workshops, and investor introductions

Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership (daemonology​.net). Amazon's leadership, multi-AZ resilience, Paxos avoidance, internal building blocks, bar raisers, and cross-team trust issues at AWS and FreeBSD experience

Stripe CTO on What Grew His Career, Hiring Without Leetcode, Coding as a Leader (Career Story) (developing​.dev). Stripe CTO discusses career growth, hiring without Leetcode, engineering leadership, Google tenure, Android Wear, engineer-acation, PM vs EM, TLM, Apollo Translate, and culture

The Making of a Decision - Part 1 (roundcrisis​.com). Decision-making, power structures, knowledge access, authority, charisma, information hoarding, and organisational dynamics in software teams

Using AI to Reduce the Burden of Status Reporting (code​.dblock​.org). AI-driven status summaries from GitHub, Slack, and other channels; GSD approach; hierarchy critique; emphasis on hiring, strategy, and deep work

Reflecting on Complexity Theory and my Problem of Practice (justinribeiro​.com). Reflecting on complexity theory, wicked problems, leadership, self-organization, and interviews in software teams via Grint, Rittel & Webber, Klieb et al, Ramalingam & Jones, Houchin & MacLean

Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development (martinfowler​.com). LLMs as auto-complete vs direct code reading; future of programming; AI bubble; hallucinations as feature; testing, non-determinism, and security risks in agentic browsers

Side Projects and AI (josem​.co). AI tools like Claude Code shrink software creation; shifts in job market; emphasizes selling, customers, and non-technical skills

Hitting the Wall with Vibe Coding (512pixels​.net). AI-assisted iOS podcast client attempts fail, highlighting issues with vacuumed UI changes and build errors using GPT-5 and Claude

Are You Ready for AI Coding? (everything​.intellectronica​.net). Self-assessment for AI coding; explores AI-assisted development, workflows, mindset shifts, and career impact

The $20/Month Software Revolution (tomtunguz​.com). AI coding tools like Cursor and Lovable enable non-technical founders to prototype apps in hours for $20/month, disrupting traditional dev workflows

Thoughts on AI in Engineering (alt​.management). Hypothetical AI rollout in engineering; critical, reflective, personal journey; hype, FOMO, deadlines, therapy, alt.management

Roadmap: Developer Tooling for Software 3.0 (nextbigteng​.substack​.com). From Hello, World to Hello, AI: AI-native development, memory management, MCP, agent experience, and prompts-as-programs shaping Software 3.0

I Managed a Swarm of 20 AI Agents for a Week and Built a Product. Here Are the 8 Rules I Learned. (zachwills​.net). Building a production-ready app with ~20 AI agents, a parallelization tool, sub-agent memory management, Playwright/Neon MCPs, and an autonomous loop approach

How to turn meeting notes into prototypes that your sales team can immediately demo to customers | Anjan Panneer Selvam (Acolyte Health) (lennysnewsletter​.com). Transform meeting notes into interactive prototypes with ChatGPT, Lovable, Gamma, Perplexity, ChatPRD, Rork, and more for sales demos

How PMs Build Fintech Prototypes with Replit + Plaid (blog​.replit​.com). PMs prototype Plaid-powered fintech integrations with Replit in minutes for demos, validation, and stakeholder buy-in

Suchita Kaundin on our Market Exploration Bootcamp (skmurphy​.com). Suchita Kaundin praises SKMurphy Market Exploration Bootcamp; highlights ongoing mentorship, top-of-funnel guidance, and actionable feedback for early-stage startups

Building an app that no one uses is useless (suramya​.com). Startup failures: a 300k patient-management app for doctors with flawless tech but poor workflow fit; importance of user-centric design and product-team collaboration

Good Work Attracts Good Work (craigjamieson​.com). Good work as a differentiator: prioritizing outcomes, budgets, timelines, user experience, and market validation over flashy deliverables

Malleable Software: code → low-code → no-code (mdubakov​.me). Malleable software layers: code, low-code, no-code; tools like Cursor, Lovable, Retool, Airtable, Notion, Fibery; AI-enabled paradigms for internal tools

Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone (news​.ycombinator​.com). Bitrig enables building native Swift iOS apps directly on iPhone using Claude Sonnet 4.0, a Swift interpreter, on-device previews, and optional server-side App Store distribution

Discussing 10 years of orchestration challenges with Erik Munson, founding engineer at Day AI, ex-HubSpot, and Netflix Engineer (inngest​.com). Erik Munson discusses HubSpot, Netflix, and Day AI: real-time processing, Kafka, Redis, Spinnaker, Temporal, Inngest, and Lambda-driven orchestration at scale

I'm Still Here! Let's Catch Up. (materializedview​.io). Updates on Designing Data-Intensive Applications, SlateDB, ZeroFS, SSI, IVM, AI tooling, and Materialized View Capital portfolio

Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult (inessential​.com). Frontier-era scripting, hash-table persistence, frictionless iteration, and a call for a modern DSL to simplify Mac/iOS app development

Alphabet Inc. (acquired​.fm). Alphabet Inc. history, Google product growth 1998–2011, Google 2.0, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, Photos, Google Plus failure, Alphabet transformation, AI revolution

Stream Work Note (rob​.crabapples​.net). Rob Fahrni chronicles Sunday coding sessions on Stream, beta release 1.6.0, subscriptions UI ideas, SwiftUI vs AppKit on Mac, and future feed recommendations

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