Andrew Boryk

🚀 Startup Spotlight: Ideate & Rahmi Halaby We’re excited to shine a light on Ideate Better, a Philadelphia-based startup reimagining how creative teams work — focusing not just on the outcome, but on the process behind the scenes. At its core, Ideate Better is built for designers, agencies, and creative studios who spend too much time grappling with the operational burden of design: managing feedback, creating mock-ups, building presentations, and switching between tools. Their mission? Give creative teams back their time to just design. With products like Moodboard Studio, Ideate Better automates routine tasks, streamlines workflows, and consolidates tools into one unified workspace — enabling designers to spend fewer hours on busy-work and more on breakthroughs. For founders, this story is especially relevant: Innovation doesn’t always mean inventing something entirely new — sometimes it’s about making the essential work simpler. Ideate Better reminds us that when you reduce friction and enable focus, creativity flourishes. 💭 As Founders, We Alley — because building means giving space for ideas to breathe. Ideate Better is helping creative teams reclaim that space and build with intention. #FoundersAlley #StartupSpotlight #FoundersRow #CreativeTech #SaaS #DesignOps #BuildBetter #AsFoundersWeAlley

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What does it take for a fintech startup to go from Y Combinator to 126 million monthly API requests with a small team? We sat down with the co-founder of Alinea Invest, a next-generation investing app with over two million downloads, to talk about how they built their platform and why they chose Massive as their data provider from the start. Instead of stitching together multiple market data feeds and hiring data engineers to maintain them, Alinea built on Massive's normalized, real-time data from day one. That decision removed an entire layer of infrastructure complexity and let the team focus on what mattered most: building a personalized investing experience their users trust. Four years later, they've scaled to 126M+ monthly requests without ever needing to redesign their data layer or renegotiate pricing. No rate limits, no usage quotas, just a flat recurring charge that allowed their product to scale exponentially. In the full conversation, we cover: → How Alinea avoided building a market data operation from scratch → Why reliable data was critical for launching features like thematic portfolios and AI-driven insights → Where they're headed next, including crypto, retirement accounts, and deeper personalization Check out the full video and blog below.

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Plaid is built to make it easier for businesses to build and scale financial products that people trust. That trust starts with knowing who you’re working with. As Plaid helps platforms onboard and support millions of businesses, verifying business identity accurately and efficiently is foundational. That’s why Plaid partners with Middesk to automate business verification during onboarding — confirming core business details, reducing manual review, and helping teams make confident risk decisions without slowing down the customer experience. Together, we help Plaid deliver faster onboarding, stronger compliance, and a more durable foundation for growth across the financial ecosystem they power. We’re proud to support Plaid as they help teams move fast while maintaining trust at scale. #KYB #KYC #AML #BEV #businessverification #financialservices #onboarding #compliance #smallbusiness #SMBs

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A lot of studios are popping up to focus on “unsexy businesses.” For example, Dan Magnuszewski is building Radial Ventures in Buffalo, and one of the smartest things they’re doing is leaning into overlooked industries most tech hubs ignore. Think logistics, compliance, insurance ops, field labor workflows. “How many people still do this this way?” is often the billion-dollar question. Dan’s team looks for companies where growth is constrained by labor, training, or process, and asks: Can AI fix that? It’s a tactical lens more studios should be applying, especially in cities where local advantage = legacy industry.

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New partnership alert!! Excited to announce that Black Flag is partnering with xAI to give founders free credits and direct access to Grok - xAI’s family of powerful, multi-modal, real-time models. Across essentially any end product you're applying to Black Flag with, Grok will deliver: - Deep reasoning across text, code, and context - Faster inference and improved function calling - CUI: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth just announced that Grok is being adopted for handling Controlled Unclassified Information If you're building in critical technology areas important to the West - space, energy, autonomy, cyber - the next generation of secure software will be built with Grok and you can now get a head start through Black Flag. Only 18 days left to apply to Black Flag’s January batch - apply at the link in the comments!

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The Mobile-First Company Raises $12M Seed Round The Mobile-First Company, a Miami, Florida-based startup that builds an integrated suite of mobile apps for small teams, has raised a $12 million Seed round. #AI #AIPhoneSystem #SmallBusinessMobileApps #BusinessAutomation #ProductivityTools #SeedRound #Funding https://lnkd.in/geBzJdKc

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