Tech and startups: 9th September 2025

• Global venture funding fell to $17B in August, the lowest monthly total in eight years, as seed and late-stage investors pulled back and U.S. deal activity slowed.

• U.S. and Indian VCs formed the India Deep Tech Investment Alliance, pledging $1B+ over 5–10 years to back India’s deep-tech startups.

• More than ten European startups joined the unicorn club this year, with additions like IQM, Framer, Isar Aerospace and others pushing regional scale-up momentum.

• OpenAI acquired Statsig for $1.1B to bring experimentation, A/B testing, and real-time decisioning in-house and installed Statsig’s CEO in a new leadership role.

• VCs are pouring money into AI customer-service tools while funding also rises for AI screening, gig platforms, and recruiting/productivity startups, signaling strong investor interest in workflow automation for teams.

• AI-generated media is accelerating—with Synthesia making avatars more expressive—and OpenAI moving into feature filmmaking with an AI-driven animated film, highlighting new product opportunities in generative content.

• Phasecraft raised $34M to deliver hardware-agnostic quantum algorithms for materials, chemistry, energy networks, and logistics, underscoring VC appetite for practical quantum software.

• [Identity and app-security tooling advanced]: Vouched raised $17M to build AI identity-verification tools, and Detectify expanded its AppSec platform with AI-driven API scanning.

A New Ranking Framework for Better Notification Quality on Instagram (engineering​.fb​.com). Diversity-aware notification ranking using multiplicative demotion, MM R-based similarity across content, author, type, and product surface, with adjustable weights and potential for LLM integration

Building Sustainable Enterprise AI Adoption: Cultural Strategies That Achieved 95% Developer Engagement (engineering​.salesforce​.com). Salesforce shares how to scale AI adoption beyond code generation, tackling monolithic codebases, modular loading, and enterprise-wide cultural change

Spec-driven development with AI: Get started with a new open source toolkit (github​.blog). Spec Kit enables spec-driven development with GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Gemini CLI to turn specs into executable artifacts

Welcome EmbeddingGemma, Google's new efficient embedding model (huggingface​.co). EmbeddingGemma: Google's 308M multilingual on-device text embeddings, MMTEB/MMTEB v2 benchmarks, MRl truncation, 2K context, on‑device RAG, Sentence Transformers, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, txtai, TEI, ONNX, FAISS

Simplifying book discovery with ML-powered visual autocomplete suggestions (amazon​.science). Audible's DeepPLTR and Amazon's two-stage models enable visual autocomplete with covers, real-time personalization, and cross-entity links

Statsig and OpenAI: A New Chapter for Product Experimentation (sequoiacap​.com). Statsig and OpenAI collaborate on product experimentation; OpenAI to acquire Statsig; Vijaye Raji to become OpenAI CTO of Applications

Stuff costs money (benn​.substack​.com). Explores open source pricing, open core, acquisitions, and data strategies in AI/software, with examples like Tobiko, Fivetran, dbt, Statsig, and OpenAI

From $100M Offers to AI Misfires: Notes on Value, Hype, and Human Blind Spots (dr-knz​.net). Notes on value, hype, and human blind spots in AI, with insights from Hormozi, MIT/Stanford studies, AI dehumanization, emergent misalignment, and market dynamics

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Moat (thebootstrappedfounder​.com). AI-enabled customer discovery, integration marketplaces, and the Expertise-as-a-Service shift for bootstrapped founders

Why We Invested In Vector (tylerhogge​.com). Pelion leads Vector Series A to modernize US defense with product and services model, founder stories, DC visit, and Vector Hammer launch

Vercel: The Red Hat of the frontend (ianv​.substack​.com). How Vercel emulates Red Hat by monetizing an enterprise-focused open source frontend stack around Next.js and Turbopack, OpenAI AI layers, and hosting services

The Bubble is Bursting (casarthakahuja​.substack​.com). Discussion on startup finance, valuations, deal terms, and the Bubble in AI investments and ChatGPT usage

GeoCities, Angelfire, and the Lost Art of Building Ugly First (brajeshwar​.com). Ugly-first web nostalgia: GeoCities, Angelfire, hacking culture, rapid iteration, brutalist design, and learning by shipping

Building a $5K ARR Side Project While Managing 9 Engineers (newsletter​.manager​.dev). Taylor scaled Delly to 30+ paying customers and $5K ARR while managing 9 engineers at CoverMyMeds, building an MVP with Python/Ruby backend and SvelteKit frontend

The Observability Trap: Why I Built Lapsoss to Break Vendor Chains (seuros​.com). Founder builds Liberation Stack and Lapsoss to escape vendor lock-in, advocating open, standardized error tracking across SDKs

The Story Behind Maps Address Book (cleverthinkingsoftware​.com). How Maps Address Book evolved from a simple idea into a complex app using Swift 6, CloudKit, UI design, localization, and AI-assisted workflows

The Most Important Advice For Creators in 2025 (Nathan Barry Q&A) | 093 (nathanbarry​.com). Nathan Barry and Haley discuss solo SaaS ideas, no-code to vibe coding, audience growth, blue oceans, creator pods, and early hires

[RP] Letter #20: John Carter and Sherman Fairchild (1957) (aletteraday​.substack​.com). Fairchild Semiconductor’s 1957 setup after the Traitorous Eight; transistor basics, team insight, startup economics and growth of Silicon Valley icons

Taking Buildkite from a Side Project to a Global Company (valleyofdoubt​.com). Keith Pitt discusses Buildkite's side-project origins, funding, three-founder dynamics, product voice, sales shift, cash flow, and Unreasonable Magic

Meet Picnic from the Netherlands, Europe’s Most Advanced Grocery Delivery Tech (relocateme​.substack​.com). Picnic, Netherlands-based grocery delivery tech, 2024 €355M Series E, 80 nationalities, 4,400 EVs, in-house tech stack

How to Use AI to Improve Teamwork in Engineering Teams (newsletter​.eng-leadership​.com). How to leverage AI to enhance teamwork in engineering through shared context, a 'shared brain', and a six-step approach

A RedMonk Conversation: Tales from Agency Life (with Emily Winck and Jess Burns) (redmonk​.com). Women in engineering at Nebo and CallRail: gender balance, remote work, bootcamps, AI impact, mentoring, and SaaS vs agency culture

How AI Tools Are Reshaping Software Development Team Responsibilities (leehanchung​.github​.io). AI tools democratize coding and design across PMs, SWE, MLEs, and UI/UX, while demanding clear RACI ownership

AI Agents for PMs in 69 Minutes — Masterclass with IBM VP (news​.aakashg​.com). Masterclass with IBM VP Armand Ruiz explores AI agents, RAG, vision RAG, Langflow, and four-building-block framework for PMs

AI Raises the Bar: PMs Must Show, Not Just Tell (productify​.substack​.com). PMs must demo and prototype with AI, using vibe coding tools to accelerate alignment while preserving design and engineering ownership

Beyond Vibe Coding (simonwillison​.net). Simon Willison discusses vibe coding, adds critique of AI-assisted development terms, and highlights Addy Osmani's book rebranding to Beyond Vibe Coding: From Coder to AI-Era Developer

You’re absolutely right: Lessons learned vibe coding our asset management system (dannorris​.me). Vibe coding with Replit: building an asset management web app using AI agents, exploring costs, limits, and developer disruption

The Rise of Remote Agentic Environments (aviator​.co). Remote Agentic Environments enable AI agents to run in cloud Dev environments, orchestrated by runbooks, for OAuth 2.1 migration and scalable developer work

About that Gig Fixing Vibe Code Slop (slater​.dev). How AI-generated code becomes legacy, when to take on gigs fixing it, and a rubric comparing James' fix-it project with Susan's VC-backed app

The Golden Rules of Full Stack Vibe Coding (darrencoxon​.substack​.com). Practical guide to vibe coding with Claude Code, Cursor/VS Code, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase/Neon/Railway, Clerk for auth, and BMAD/PRD planning

Word of the week: Vibe coding (fritinancy​.substack​.com). Vibe coding described as AI-generated code from natural language prompts, with hype, critiques, and safety/security concerns

You don't want to hire "the best engineers" (otherbranch​.com). Hiring for “the best engineers” misses midlevel fits and comp trade-offs; prioritize speed, flexibility, and practical traits over perfection

Accelerate, successful teams, and destroying software 💡 (refactoring​.fm). Explores Accelerate vs. DORA metrics, culture, CI/CD, continuous deployment, and critique of over-engineering by Salvatore Sanfilippo, plus three practices for successful teams

A roundtable with front line managers at IEEE-TEMS (skmurphy​.com). Insights from a roundtable of IEEE-TEMS front-line managers on trust, empathy, metrics, AI, and balancing project value vs. scope

When Great Products Become a Curse: The Non-Technical Leadership Paradox (guptadeepak​.com). Technical excellence becomes a liability when non-technical leaders misjudge architecture, security, and scalability in enterprise software and AI platforms

My Quarterly System Health Check-in: Beyond The Dashboard (blog​.nilenso​.com). Quarterly health check for engineering: Pareto-focused quality across reliability, performance, cost, delivery, security, and social structures

The Lack of Tech Excellence in Agile Development (florian-kraemer​.net). Critique of agile misapplication; emphasizes technical excellence, feedback cycles, small increments, culture, and autonomy

Intern to Microsoft Distinguished Engineer in 11 Promotions (Career Story) (developing​.dev). David Fowler advances from intern to Microsoft Distinguished Engineer across 11 promotions, detailing NuGet, SignalR, and XP with Satya’s culture shifts

Operating Principles That Guided Me to Staff Engineer (Part 1: Driving Impact) (read​.highgrowthengineer​.com). Staff engineer principles: find problems, take extreme ownership, bias for action, pragmatic iteration, and investing in self

Choosing the Right Path (dylanbeattie​.net). Career paths in tech: startup vs enterprise, longevity, remote vs in-person, annual tenure guidance, and personal branding

Settling In (chriswiegman​.com). Two weeks into Fingerprint role, settling in, addressing tech debt, prioritizing backlog, and building cross-team relationships

Why your career playbook expired: The new rules for 2025 job transitions (theskip​.substack​.com). Four career dilemmas in 2025: Super ICs, premium IC roles, step-backs to retool, and elite middle growth firms amid AI-driven change

30/60/90 into the new job (shortdiv​.com). 90 days into a Local-First startup role: infra unification with Nomad, ingress fixes, OpenTelemetry to Grafana, Pulumi provisioning, and CI improvements

Career Leverage as a Developer (perrotta​.dev). Focus on undifferentiated scary problems for career leverage; avoid being fungible by differentiating and building valuable relationships

“Why would anybody start a website?” (daverupert​.com). Nilay Patel & Kevin Scott discuss NLWeb, local LLM-style indexers, and the shift from centralized search to site-owned indexes

Why sync (adamwiggins​.com). Sync enables full local-first copies, cross-device sharing, off-the-shelf engines (Zero, Electric, Jazz, LiveStore), and AI-assisted coding with agentic apps

The Magic Secrets of System Design (janmeppe​.com). Concise exploration of system design principles inspired by John Oosterhout, with links to a YouTube talk on magic secrets and related software architecture topics

Seeing like a software company (seangoedecke​.com). Legibility vs illegibility in software: backchannels, tiger teams, Jira, OKRs, and enterprise Deals

Why I’m Building Basekick (And What Comes Next) (cduser​.com). Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck outlines Basekick’s mission for data-driven and AI-first solutions, plus governance, security, and citizen-centric infra

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