Ariel Michaeli

This is truly the best time to build. Ben Broca proves you can build anything you can imagine with just 1 person. - New companies should be at least 80% driven by AI (marketing, ops, engineering) to move as fast as possible. - The last 20% is all taste/creativity/direction: you're still selling to humans even if AI drives the company. You still need to delight them - When you believe there's something you can't do, try solving it with AI even if it seems hard so you can learn and automate most of the processes. - Limitations: models will become more generalist but still need to have narrow scope to perform well today. Polsia itself has agents that report bugs/feature requests when talking with customers, then a PM agent that decides priorities, then an engineering agent that builds it. No excuses. Time to lock in. Awesome podcast Julian Weisser Solo Founders

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Welcome to The Advertising Forum! Angel Suarez, Founder and CEO of PIXEL & PLUME, shares how smaller agencies compete with larger players using flexible tech stacks, strategic partnerships, and AI-driven tools. He also discusses w/ us the importance of trust, customization, and prioritizing quality over scale in building strong client relationships. This is episode 2 of our "Open Garden Series" sponsored by AI Digital. Speed is a competitive advantage for small agencies and open ecosystems enable flexibility. Thank you for popping on w/ ATG and me, Angel!

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Revenue is the result. Process is the variable⚙️ You can’t optimize based on the outcome alone; you need metrics describing the process itself. The Problem: Measuring only eCPM (The Finish Line)🏁 The Solution: Measuring auction mechanics - bid responses and latency⏱️ To stop revenue leakage, you must monitor timeouts for both Prebid Client and Prebid Server. If you aren't tracking bid drop-offs, you're just guessing. Find your "revenue sweetspot" 🎯 Read more: https://lnkd.in/diVzgA7T #AdOps #Programmatic #HeaderBidding #Setupad

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Deal of the Week https://lnkd.in/dbwycUFN Augmented Intelligence Inc. — $20M at $750M valuation https://aui.io Investors: eGateway Ventures (lead), New Era Capital investor group, strategic partners AUI's Stealth Play for the Post-Transformer Era AUI continues to operate under deep stealth while charting a bold path beyond the transformer paradigm — a contrarian stance in an AI landscape dominated by compute-heavy scaling wars led by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The company's recently closed $20M bridge SAFE at a $750M valuation cap underscores deep investor conviction that the next wave of AI breakthroughs won't come from bigger GPUs, but from smarter architectures. While the broader market remains fixated on model size and synthetic data pipelines, AUI's research focus lies in neuro-symbolic reasoning, blending the statistical power of deep learning with the logical rigor of symbolic systems. This hybrid approach promises greater reasoning reliability, interpretability, and energy efficiency — three attributes that address growing skepticism around current foundation models' opacity and cost of scaling. The raise brings AUI's total capital to nearly $60M, fueling the quiet development of its Apollo-1 reasoning engine, rumored to be a foundation-model architecture that fuses symbolic logic modules with dynamic neural representations. Insiders describe Apollo-1 as a potential step-change in "grounded AI" — one capable of multi-hop reasoning and factual traceability without massive compute budgets. Within New York's fast-emerging AI corridor, AUI is becoming one of the most closely watched under-the-radar companies, blending research sophistication with enterprise-grade product discipline. Its investor syndicate — composed largely of deep-tech and frontier-AI specialists — sees this as an early bet on the post-transformer paradigm: leaner, more explainable AI that could redefine how intelligence is modeled, trained, and deployed. Deal Significance AUI's bridge round reflects a broader inflection point in AI investing — where capital is shifting from pure scale bets to architecture differentiation and reasoning fidelity. The company represents a hedge against the saturation of transformer economics, where model improvements deliver diminishing returns on exponentially higher costs. If Apollo-1 delivers on its promise of interpretable, low-energy reasoning, it could position AUI as a strategic acquisition target for hyperscalers seeking new compute-efficient architectures, or as the foundation for a new class of hybrid AI platforms capable of combining symbolic logic with generative fluency. For investors, this deal underscores rising conviction that the next "OpenAI-moment" may emerge not from scale, but from structure — and AUI's stealth trajectory gives it the mystique and momentum to be one of the few serious contenders for that title.

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The pitch deck FLORA AI used to raise a massive $42M Series A from Redpoint Ventures and attract founders of Vercel, Frame io, and fal 🔥 FLORA just closed a $42M Series A (bringing total funding to $52M) led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Emery Wells (Frame io), and the founders of fal. But here’s the real reason this deck stands out: It doesn’t sell AI tools. It sells a new creative default. The deck is a masterclass in how to pitch an AI platform without competing on models. Here’s what founders will learn from reading it: - How to frame AI as a workflow shift, not a feature upgrade - How to position yourself above models instead of being replaced by them - How to use interface and product screenshots to communicate strategy - How to pitch enterprise credibility without overexplaining - How to make your product feel inevitable in a world where models commoditize If you’re building in AI, creative tools, or infrastructure, this is one of the cleanest Series A decks you’ll see this year. Comment “FLORA” and I’ll send you the link 🌱

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At Vibe Capital, we believe the venture landscape is bifurcating. The reason is simple: reality is full of drunk cats. "Drunk Cats" are the emergent, second-order effects that arise from simple rules. They can tank a product, entire system, or an entire country. The ability to see -and master - these drunk cats reveals the true split in startups today. It is no longer between software and hardware, but between "impressionistic" founders who map the world as it is, and "mechanistic" founders who can reverse-engineer reality from first principles. My latest Dave's Quick Hits newsletter provides the playbook for identifying and funding these mechanistic architects. It is about a fundamental shift from describing effects to mastering cause. I break down the three core stages of the Mechanistic Playbook: 1. See the System: Identifying the hidden rules and emergent flaws in any complex system, from software to biology. 2. Debug the System: Using technology to patch the legacy "bugs" of a previous industrial paradigm. 3. Architect a New System: Building with true primitives, like DNA, to program matter itself. The next trillion-dollar companies won't be built by operators chasing surface-level trends. They'll be built by system-thinkers who can see, debug, and architect reality’s source code. You can read the full analysis and the investment theses here: https://lnkd.in/dkhkBUwh #VentureCapital #DeepTech #FrontierTech #Investing #Strategy #Biotechnology #Nanotechnology #vibecap #vibecapital #drunkcats

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Team8 and Battery Ventures are excited to lead Koi's $38M A-Round, joining seed investors Picture Capital, NFX and Cerca Partners for a total of $48M in funding. Huge shoutout to founders Amit Assaraf 🎏, Itay Kruk 🎏 and Idan Dardikman 🎏 for pioneering the next wave of endpoint security, covering the blind spots that traditional EDRs and MDMs were never built to protect! [Coming full circle and partnering again with Itay and Idan from Sygnia, a Team8 portfolio company! Amit, you chose well!] From packages and containers to extensions, AI models, and MCPs, Koi delivers visibility, AI-driven risk analysis, and automated enforcement to secure the software perimeter of today’s enterprises. Already protecting over 500,000 endpoints worldwide, Koi’s platform is helping some of the world’s largest companies govern self-installed and unmanaged software. By giving security teams control without slowing innovation, Koi is defining a new category in cybersecurity. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ewtqE4Pk Ori Barzilay, Sarit Firon, Amir Zilberstein, Assaf Mischari, Ori Yankelev, Asaf Azulay, Eyal Eliakim, Uri Shamay, Rakesh K. Loonkar, Dan Amiga, Mickey Boodaei, Barak Schoster Goihman, Dharmesh Thakker, Gigi Levy-Weiss

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