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. ✨
🫎 Silicon Valhalla 2025
Explore 1000+ Startups in Silicon Valhalla tackling CleanTech, FinTech, Cybersecurity, Quantum, and Fashion. Discover real builders reshaping money, automation, intelligence, and infrastructure — not just hype. Get full landscape bellow.
Specter Team
🔥 Hottest Startups - May 2025
We're delighted to share with our readers the hottest startups for May. Leveraging our Investor Signals product, we analyse which startups have garnered the highest interest from prominent investors over the past 90 days.
Specter Team
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Nati Hazut
Tel Aviv-based cyber-security founder and angel investor. Co-founded Sam Seamless Network and later Polyrize, a SaaS-security startup bought by Varonis Systems on 26 Oct 2020. Served as Senior Director of Cloud at Varonis. Today he is co-founder & CEO of a stealth security venture focused on securing AI-native SaaS stacks. Currently in stealth 👻
Haishan Qian
Toronto-based product builder and designer. Co-founded Clew.ai (YC S20), a unified workplace-search tool; Dropbox acquired Clew on 27 Apr 2022. Inside Dropbox she worked in the Office of the CEO, shipping new AI-product experiments. As of early 2025 she’s “building something new” in stealth around knowledge-management agents. Currently in stealth 👻
Gilad Penn
NYC-based full-stack hacker/designer with repeat founder track-record (Bauhaus Labs, Osterus). Currently a “Builder” at a stealth startup exploring web3-enabled infra for creators. Active in hackathons and open-source (over 20 public projects). Earlier built consumer-apps showcased at SXSW and Columbia University spin-outs. Currently in stealth 👻
Dmitry Stavisky
SF-based EdTech and growth veteran. Helped build two unicorns as an early exec: Evernote and SightPath (acq. Cisco). Co-founded Buddy.ai (YC W18), an AI-tutor for children. Now prototyping AI-native productivity tools for educators & knowledge-workers. Currently in stealth 👻
Tom Linford
Jersey-based. Spent a decade as backend engineer & manager at Robinhood (2014–2024) owning brokerage-scale infra. Left last year to found an AI-powered software-services platform for the 300 k U.S. financial advisors, now pre-launch. Writes publicly on developer-velocity trade-offs and regulatory AI policy for fintech. 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.
OpenGradient (🔥 featured 5 x in 90 days)
OpenGradient is building a decentralized, on-chain AI infrastructure layer that lets developers host, verify and scale open-source models with cryptographic proofs. The New-York-based company closed an $8.5m seed round (Oct 9 2024) led by a16z CSX with participation from SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures and high-profile angels such as Balaji Srinivasan and Illia Polosukhin. CEO Matthew Wang says the funds will expand its heterogeneous AI compute architecture (HACA) and developer tooling for sovereign AI.
Fastview (🔥 featured 6 x in 90 days)
Fastview is an AI-native analytics canvas where humans and autonomous agents collaborate on an infinite workspace to model data, surface patterns and build interactive data apps in minutes. Founded in 2024 in San Francisco, it is still in private beta; the only public capital so far is participation in an incubator/accelerator, with no standalone equity round disclosed.
Anders Hammarbäck (🔥 featured 3 x in 90 days)
The former General Partner who helped make Antler the world’s most active seed investor has shifted to a part-time Venture Partner role while “building something new” in data/AI from Stockholm. No details or funding have been announced for the stealth project. Currently in stealth 👻
Saurabh Sharma (🔥 featured 7 x in 90 days)
San-Francisco engineer-founder currently “building something new.” He previously co-founded and served as CTO of developer-commerce platform Rye.com and was an early engineer on Reddit’s growth & infrastructure teams. He stepped back from Rye in spring 2025 to explore a new AI venture. Currently in stealth 👻
spawn.co (🔥 featured 4 x in 90 days)
spawn.co gives founders a team of AI agents that design, code and polish full apps and games from a plain-English prompt. The 2024 San Francisco startup raised an undisclosed amount, opportunistically recruiting founding engineers and showcasing early demos on X and YouTube while its closed alpha evolves.
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.
Amie (🌟 Specter - Rank 2331)
Amie has morphed from a “joyful” calendar into an AI-first time-management hub. Sharp AI meeting-note summaries, daily-improving chat commands, and support for 84 languages, turning recordings into automated workflows. Live on macOS, Windows, web and iOS, with an Android beta marked “coming soon”. Berlin-based founder Dennis Müller has secured an $7m seed backed by Creandum’s Peter Specht and prominent angels. Career pages list open mobile and product-design roles as Amie prepares its first Android release.
Langfuse (🌟 Specter - Rank 3392)
YC-W23 alum Langfuse is fast becoming the open-source control-tower for LLM apps. “Launch Week #3” (19-24 May 2025) shipped nine features—custom dashboards, an evaluator library, OTEL-based SDKs and more—extending a brisk weekly release cadence. Seed-funded with $4.1m from Lightspeed, La Famiglia and YC, the Berlin team counts Samsara and Khan Academy among users. Hiring across backend, SRE and GTM roles.
Bedrock Security (🌟 Specter - Rank 6145)
Bedrock positions its “metadata lake” as a single pane for data discovery and protection. A $10m Greylock-led seed (Mar 2024) laid the groundwork. At RSA 2025 the company unveiled the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server—a gateway that audits agentic AI traffic—and summarised conference trends around scalable, context-rich data security. New postings for full-stack and ML engineers hint at head-count growth ahead of MCP’s Q2 rollout.
K-Scale Labs (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 9862)
The YC S24 spin-out wants to be “the Linux of humanoids”. A demo video two weeks ago shows the 19-person crew having built six robots in their first year, and the firm just announced K-Bot—a sub-$9k open-source humanoid shipping July 2025. Raised an initial $0.5m pre-seed. YC’s job board lists ML, firmware and electrical-engineering roles in Palo Alto.
Trustwise AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 29990)
Austin-based Trustwise closed a $4m seed (Jun 2024, Hitachi Ventures) to launch Optimize:ai, an API that red-teams and cost-optimises generative-AI workloads.In Apr 2025 it announced an NYU collaboration that boosts reliability and speed for RAG pipelines, targeting the “trust gap” enterprises face when deploying LLMs.The firm’s latest blog posts detail “trust-as-code” SDKs plus purple-team modules rolling out this quarter.
Existing Specter users: Access the real-time startup feed here.
New to Specter? Schedule a demo and activate your complimentary trial today.
That’s all for this edition of Specter Monitor!
Stay tuned for the next updates and feel free to share with your friends.
