Specter Monitor is a data-driven newsletter for investors interested in learning about the latest market trends, signals, and opportunities. Our audience includes some of the most legendary VC investors in the world. We’ll work hard to bring you actionable insights into what’s happening in today’s markets while celebrating data-driven wins and predictions. ✨
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Specter Team
🔮 Talents of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
🪄 Predicted: Dar Mehta (US, 2024): Co-Founder & CEO at Causal Labs
Advantage on Latest Funding Round: 418 Days
Description: Causal Labs provides AI physics models to predict and control the weather.
Prev. Experience: Dar Mehta brings deep technical expertise in production ML systems with specialization in perception and physics-based modeling. Prior to co-founding Causal Labs (raising $6M seed led by Kindred Ventures), Dar was a Staff ML Engineer at Cruise where he tech-led perception-wide safety initiatives and pioneered deep learning-based object tracking systems critical for autonomous vehicle deployment at scale. His autonomous mobility credentials include engineering roles at Waymo, where he contributed to their core perception stack. Notably, Dar previously demonstrated founder acumen as CEO of Kiyo Robotics (YC S20), applying his University of Waterloo technical foundation to robotics applications. His trajectory from perception engineering in safety-critical AV systems to developing novel physics foundation models reflects his ability to translate cutting-edge ML research into deployable systems that address fundamental AI limitations around causal reasoning and first-principles physics.
Total Funding: $6M / $6M Latest Seed on 03-2025.
Notable Investors: Kindred Ventures, Factorial Capital, Refactor, BoxGroup, Karman Ventures.
👻 Opportunity: Timur Starobinets (US, 2025): Co-Founder & CEO at Stealth Startup (ex-Desktop Metal)
Desktop Metal
Prev. Experience: Timur Starobinets brings exceptional hardware engineering leadership with cross-domain expertise spanning additive manufacturing, consumer electronics, and aerospace systems. Prior to launching his stealth startup, he spent over 8 years at Desktop Metal, progressing rapidly from Senior Electrical Engineer to Engineering Manager, where he directed critical electrical architecture development for industrial 3D printing platforms. His technical foundation includes 4+ years at Apple as a Design Engineer, where he architected system-level electrical designs for flagship consumer products including Apple TV and Airport Extreme. Earlier in his career, Timur contributed to mission-critical avionics systems for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, demonstrating his versatility across hardware complexity spectrums. A Stanford-educated electrical engineer with summa cum laude undergraduate credentials, Timur represents the rare combination of deep technical expertise, leadership capability, and experience scaling hardware systems from concept to commercial deployment across multiple industry verticals.
🎱 Strategic Signals
Specter analyzes the online and social activity of leading investors and industry insiders to predict upcoming funding rounds and acquisitions.
🪄 Predicted: Vincent Molina (EU, 2024): Co-Founder and CEO at pyannote AI
Advantage on Latest Funding Round: 168 Days
Description: pyannote AI offers state-of-the-art speaker diarization technology for efficient audio analysis.
Prev. Experience: Vincent Molina brings extensive product leadership experience across conversational AI, fintech, and healthcare sectors. As co-founder and CEO of pyannoteAI, he recently secured ~$9M in funding to build the first Speaker Intelligence Platform, leveraging technology already adopted by 100,000+ developers worldwide to solve fundamental speaker identification challenges in voice applications. Prior to founding pyannoteAI, Vincent established Pao, delivering Product Management as a Service to various sectors including investment funds and media companies, demonstrating his consultative approach to product strategy. His product leadership extends to the healthcare domain where he spearheaded a Multiple Sclerosis patient application at Biogen that scaled to 16 countries with over 1 million downloads. With a foundation in business strategy from EDHEC Business School and a proven track record of bringing innovative voice AI solutions to market, Vincent exemplifies the rare combination of product vision and technical execution capability needed to pioneer foundation models for the next generation of conversational interfaces.
Total Funding: $8.8M / $8.8M Amount Latest Seed on 04-2025.
Notable Investors: Crane Venture Partners, Serena, Jean-Louis Quéguiner, Kima Ventures, Julien Chaumond, Pareto Holdings, Alexis Conneau, Motier Ventures, Laura Modiano.
👻 Opportunity: Mira Murati (US, 2024): Co-Founder and CEO at Thinking Machines Lab
Description: Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company.
Prev. Experience: Mira Murati brings unparalleled AI product leadership experience as the former CTO of OpenAI, where she shepherded the development of groundbreaking systems that defined the generative AI era. During her nearly 7-year tenure at OpenAI, she spearheaded the teams behind ChatGPT, DALL-E, GPT-4, and other frontier AI systems that fundamentally transformed human-computer interaction. Prior to her meteoric rise in AI, Murati built her technical foundation at Tesla, where she served as Senior Product Manager for Model X and gained critical experience with Autopilot systems that informed her later AI work. Her hardware and spatial computing expertise was further developed at Leap Motion as VP of Product & Engineering, working alongside Midjourney founder David Holz. A Dartmouth-educated mechanical engineer who began in aerospace, Murati exemplifies the cross-disciplinary thinking essential for today's AI leadership. Her newly launched Thinking Machines Lab, backed by a team of 30 researchers predominantly from OpenAI, aims to create AI systems that better encode human values and democratize frontier AI capabilities.
🍒 Cherry-Picked Companies
Specter tracks the performance of millions of companies and identifies the ones who are likely to increase in valuation.
🪄 Predicted: Víctor Perez (US, 2022): Co-Founder and CEO at KREA
6 Months Growth: Web: 4.0%; Team: 59.0%; Social: 39.2%
Description: KREA enables intuitive image and video generation using powerful AI tools for free.
Total Funding: $83M / $47M Latest Series B on 04-2025.
Notable Investors: Gradient, Abstract, Pebblebed, Bain Capital Ventures, A*, HF0 Residency, Andreessen Horowitz.
👻 Opportunity: Val Agostino (US, 2019): Co-Founder at Monarch Money
6 Months Growth: Web: 24.5%; Team: 60.4%; Social: 29.8%
Description: Monarch Money is a personal finance platform that helps users track expenses and manage budgets effectively.
Total Funding: $19.8M / $15M Latest Series A on 02-2022.
Notable Investors: Adam Marchick, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Page One Ventures, SignalFire, Accel, Tom Williams;,Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, Menlo Ventures.
That’s all for this edition of Specter Monitor!
Stay tuned for the next updates and feel free to share with your friends.
