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. ✨
🌱 Giant Ventures: Decoding the Impact VC of Tomorrow
Discover how Giant Ventures wields Specter—and $250M in fresh capital—to spot and scale climate, health & fintech disruptors ahead of the pack.
Specter Team
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Xia Hua, Ph.D.
Xia is a San-Francisco-based distributed-systems engineer and former Director of Engineering at Commvault, where she co-invented several 2024-25 patents on cloud-backup for serverless workloads. An MIT-trained applied-mathematics PhD, Xia couples theoretical depth with hands-on execution. In early 2025 she left following the Clumio-to-Commvault IP assignment to co-found a stealth AI-infrastructure start-up building resilient data pipelines for generative-AI workloads—now quietly hiring founding engineers. Currently in stealth. 👻
Aviv Nahum
Aviv is a Tel-Aviv-based serial entrepreneur at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. After co-founding Ctrl—the AI workspace platform that raised a US$9 million seed round in 2023—he guided the product through its acquisition by Swedish learning-platform Sana in October 2024, remaining to head AI & Integrations. Earlier this year he exited Sana and is now quietly building a new stealth company focused on AI-driven security tooling, sharing early thinking in public posts such as “AI in security: from nice-to-have to budgeted infrastructure.” Currently in stealth. 👻
Chris Massey
Based in Washington DC, Chris is a veteran tech-policy operator. For four years he was Operating Partner for Policy & Public Affairs at David Sacks’s Craft Ventures, advising the fund’s 300-plus founders on regulatory strategy. Before Craft he led government-relations teams at Chime, Lyft and Square, experience he now channels as a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. Two weeks ago Chris stepped out of the VC world to found a stealth company. Currently in stealth. 👻
Max Shand
Max is a London-based music-tech founder best known for Serenade, the Web3 collectibles marketplace he launched in 2020 after an early stint as one of Afterpay’s first employees. Serenade raised US$7 million and produced NFT/NFC drops for 200+ artists before being acquired by ASX-listed Vinyl Group in September 2024; Max stayed on to hit growth milestones under the Vinyl umbrella. Having integrated the platform, he is now working on a new stealth venture exploring AI-powered fan engagement. Currently in stealth. 👻
Anant Misra
Anant is a San-Francisco-based security-infrastructure founder and repeat CTO. In 2020 he co-founded ArmorCode, the application-security-posture-management (ASPM) platform that now protects workloads at dozens of Global 2000s. As CTO he scaled the product from prototype to a $65 million Series B and 120-plus staff, turning ArmorCode into one of the fastest-growing players in DevSecOps tooling. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, Anant has become a go-to mentor for IIT and Cal alumni cohorts run by Foundation Capital, where he coaches first-time founders on product-market-fit and U.S. go-to-market strategy. Anant resurfaced this spring as co-founder of a stealth AI start-up. Currently in stealth. 👻
Existing Specter users: Access the full roster here.
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🎱 Investor Signals of the Week
Specter analyzes the online and social activity of leading investors and industry insiders to predict upcoming funding rounds and acquisitions.
Eugenia Kuyda (🔥 featured 3 × in 90 days)
Russian-born, San-Francisco–based founder of Replika (Luka Inc.) and now, per her Twitter bio, “building something new.” Replika has raised ≈ $11 M (Sherpa Capital, Khosla Ventures, Phil Libin, Richard Socher) and faces intensifying scrutiny: Italy’s data-protection agency fined its developer €5 M on 19 May 2025 for privacy breaches. Kuyda now hints at a GUI-driven, next-gen companion architecture beyond pure chat—“Where is generative GUI?” (21 Mar 2025)—suggesting a forthcoming spin-out or major Replika overhaul. Overall signal: seasoned consumer-AI operator doubling down on human-centric experiences while prepping her next act.
Warp (🔥 featured 3 × / 90 days)
Warp is re-imagining the command-line as a Rust-built, AI-assisted “coding coworker.” Founded in 2020 by ex-Google engineer Zach Lloyd, Warp has raised $73.6 m to date, including a $50 m Series B led by Sequoia in June 2023; angels include Sam Altman and Dylan Field. Warp is positioning itself as the place where devs both write and run AI-generated code—a direct challenge to IDE incumbents and Copilot-CLI’s early moves. With Windows support now live and preview builds shipping weekly, watch for paid‐tier conversion and enterprise security features as the next revenue milestones.
Marker (🔥 featured 4 × / 90 days)
Marker is a 2025-founded London startup in ultra-stealth, teasing only that it’s “building the future of writing.” The bare-bones landing page solicits wait-list e-mails while a newly minted Twitter handle (@writewithmarker) sits dormant. Signals point to an early-seed team exploring AI-first document workflows, possibly a collaborative word-processor with agentic editing. Funding details haven’t surfaced; treat this as an early watch-list item.
Mirror Mirror AI (🔥 featured 3 × / 90 days)
Founded in 2024 by PhD computer-scientist Yusan Lin (ex-model, fashion researcher) and product strategist Leanne Luce, San-Francisco-based Mirror Mirror AI turns generative models into “personalised fashion editorials,” letting retailers render on-brand images that look like their customers. The startup is pre-seed but already part of Nvidia’s Inception Program and courting marquee fashion houses for pilots.
Light Robotics (🔥 featured 5 × / 90 days)
Ex-OpenAI engineer Roger Jiang incorporated Light Robotics in Singapore (Aug 2024) to pursue general-purpose companion robots; offices span Singapore, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The firm is hiring RL-HF and mechatronics talent while courting seed backers across Southeast Asia and China’s hardware ecosystem. With national AI-robotics policy tailwinds in both regions, Light Robotics could become a strategic bridge between U.S. frontier-model know-how and Asia’s robotics supply chain.
Existing Specter users: Access the full list here.
New to Specter? Schedule a demo and activate your complimentary trial today.
🍒 Company Opportunities of the Week
Specter tracks the performance of millions of companies and identifies the ones who are likely to increase in valuation.
Relay (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 602)
The workflow-automation newcomer launched publicly on 11 Oct 2023 with one-click AI assistance, human-in-the-loop approvals and real-time multiplayer playbooks. Early customers include Ramp and Skyflow. The company has raised $3.1 M seed (a16z-led) and now totals $8.1 M; To date, 25 employees and recent releases include native Notion file-upload actions, DeepSeek R1 support that makes reasoning 25 × cheaper, auto-generated structured-output schemas, and a Certified-Partner marketplace. Relay is hiring across the US, Canada & EU as it scales integration coverage.
Eventual (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1073)
Eventual builds a data-warehouse platform optimised for multimodal AI/ML workloads around its open-source Rust-plus-Python engine Daft. Founded by Jay Chia and Sammy Sidhu. In Pre-seed / Seed stage, backed by Caffeinated Capital, Array VC, The House Fund and Y Combinator with a total raise of ≈ $2.5 M and a last round on 22 Mar 2022 – Seed. Highlights include a fast-growing open-source community, weekly “Data for AI” meet-ups, and marquee users such as Amazon citing 24 % compute savings on petabyte-scale ETL jobs. Based in San Francisco, USA.
Lyzr (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 3511)
Lyzr is a low-code “Agent Studio” that lets enterprises spin up private, on-prem AI agents in minutes. Founded by Siva Surendira, Jithin George & Shashi Raina, it sits in the pre-seed / seed tier with ≈ $2.7 M raised (angels plus Artha 99, ZenithCrest) and a last round in Sept 2024 — Pre-Seed. Highlights include becoming a launch partner for Google’s new Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol at Google I/O 2025, “Google Cloud Ready – BigQuery” certification, and an AWS Bedrock/Nova reference build that can assemble a full AI-SDR in under 10 minutes. Lyzr ships agents for HR, retail-banking and fintech, and recently joined the FinTech Innovation Lab NY 2025 cohort. Based in Jersey City, NJ (HQ) with a Bangalore engineering hub.
Cargo (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 6664)
Founded 2023 by Aurée Aubert and Maxence de Villepion (YC S23). The first “revenue-architecture” platform built for modern GTM teams, Cargo lets RevOps and GTM Engineers stitch together data, vector search and AI agents to segment, score and route leads, enrich CRM records, trigger multi-channel outreach and keep pipeline data clean—all from a headless, low-code canvas. Customers such as Ramp, Veriff and Zilla Security report double-digit lifts in lead-to-opportunity conversion and hours of manual research saved every week. In Seed stage backed by Y Combinator, latest capital raised $ 500k pre-seed round (6 Oct 2023). Based in San Francisco, CA.
Dirac (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 136 486)
Founded in 2022 by former Palantir engineer Filip Aronshtein, Dirac is building BuildOS—a model-based manufacturing “operating system” that converts a CAD file into interactive, version-controlled digital work instructions in minutes. Aerospace and defense suppliers such as Ancra Aircraft report 95 % faster instruction creation and significant quality gains after adopting the platform. Now SOC 2-, ISO 27001- and ITAR-compliant (AWS GovCloud), the startup is in Seed stage with single-digit-million backing from industry-focused funds including Silent Ventures, 8VC and fellow members of the New American Industrial Alliance. Dirac is headquartered in New York City (Empire State Building) with engineering in El Segundo, CA.
Existing Specter users: Access the real-time startup feed here.
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That’s all for this edition of Specter Monitor!
Stay tuned for the next updates and feel free to share with your friends.
