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. ✨
🤖 AI x Robotics Startups 2025
Explore 490+ startup map merging AI with robotics—autonomous machines reshaping sectors from agriculture to defense. Built on KFund’s work and our Specter platform, it highlights data-trained, intelligent agents transforming the physical world.
Specter Team
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Daniel Avital
Daniel is a Tel Aviv–based operator and founder who previously served as Chief Strategy Officer at CHEQ (a cybersecurity scale-up) before co-founding his stealth AI venture. He’s a prior VC-backed executive with major tech experience, spearheading growth at CHEQ and now building a platform “to end AI coding chaos.” He holds a degree from IDC Herzliya. Currently in stealth 👻
Deniz Binay
Deniz is a New York City–based product leader and serial FAANG alumnus. After pioneering Google Assistant and advancing Gemini at DeepMind, he left Google in May 2025 to co-found Stealth Mode. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.Sc. from EPFL. Currently in stealth 👻
Luka Ivicevic
Luka is a New York City–based healthcare-tech entrepreneur. He co-founded Index Health, a personalized-medicine startup he led for nearly four years—culminating in closing operations in January 2025 after serving its last patients. Prior to Index Health, he founded Penta, one of Europe’s first digital banks, and was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30. He holds a degree from the American University of Paris. Currently in stealth 👻
Gnanavelkandan Kathirvel
Kandan is a Palo Alto–based product and business leader now building a stealth AI-infrastructure startup. At Google Cloud he led Distributed Cloud and contributed to the open-source Nephio project. He’s served on AT&T’s AI board and technical committees, and holds executive education credentials from MIT Sloan and Stanford GSB. Currently in stealth 👻
Rohan Sharma
Rohan is a San Francisco–based engineer and entrepreneur building an undisclosed stealth venture. He advised at Ribbit Capital and previously led data teams at Fifth Wall, founded Kosmos Energy, and was a software engineer at Google. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Princeton University. 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.
Stanislav Fort (🔥 featured 4 x in 90 days)
Stanislav is building a stealth AI and security startup, pre-launch, founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, California. A PhD in AI/ML from Stanford and former research scientist at Google DeepMind, he previously led LLM security work at Stability AI and contributed on Anthropic’s Alignment team. He now serves as Founder & Chief Scientist of his stealth venture focused on adversarial robustness and interpretability. No external funding has been publicly disclosed to date.
John Yan (🔥 featured 2 x in 90 days)
John Yan co-founded a stealth startup in early 2025, headquartered in San Francisco, California. Formerly a Research Engineer at Anthropic and SWE at Facebook, Yan holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Stanford University and has deep expertise in signal integrity and ML systems. His stealth project remains in pre-launch with no disclosed funding rounds yet.
Reinforce Labs (🔥 featured 4 x in 90 days)
Reinforce Labs is an AI startup founded in 2025 and based in Palo Alto, California. The company automates adversarial red-teaming and quality assurance by pairing “bad-actor” AI models with defensive AI systems to proactively identify product failure modes. Co-led by Anish Das Sarma (CEO) and Lukas Tencer (CTO), the team is currently in private beta and has not publicly raised external capital.
SpecStory (🔥 featured 6 x in 90 days)
SpecStory builds intent-driven development tools that surface human “intent” alongside AI-generated code. Founded in 2024 by Jake Levirne (CEO), Sean Johnson (CTO), and Greg Ceccarelli (CPO), the Boston-based startup (“intent is the new source code”) is in early stage and backed by NP-Hard Ventures as of December 1, 2024. They’re onboarding design partners for their AI-native spec-driven workflow platform.
Codegen (🔥 featured 5 x in 90 days)
Codegen, Inc. is a San Francisco-based AI platform founded in 2023 that automates repetitive software engineering workflows—everything from code reviews to bug fixes—via AI agents integrated with Slack and GitHub. Backed by Adam D’Angelo, Angel Collective, Opportunity Fund, and Thrive Capital, Codegen raised $16.2m in seed on November 16, 2023 for a total disclosed funding of $32.4m.
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.
Entro Security (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 3)
Entro Security provides Non-Human Identity (NHI) and Secrets Security management. Founded in 2022 by Itzik Alvas (CEO) and Adam Cheriki (CTO), the Boston-based startup automates the full NHI lifecycle—from discovery and inventory to detection and response—across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments. In June 2024 closed $18m Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital with Hyperwise Ventures, StageOne Ventures, and angels like Mickey Boodaei. In April 2025, Entro unveiled industry-first generative AI capabilities for NHI scanning and a partnership with Wiz for DSPM integration. The company reports a 90% reduction in secrets exposure and 80% faster remediation for abnormal NHI behavior, protecting customers such as Booking.com and Elastic. Entro’s goal is to solidify its leadership in the emerging NHIDR market.
Reflex Robotics (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 10)
Reflex Robotics, founded in 2022 by MIT-trained engineers, builds low-cost, wheeled humanoid robots to automate repetitive industrial tasks. Based in Brooklyn, NY, the lean team has raised an undiscolsed series a by Julian Capital and $7m in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures with Dropbox and Cruise co-founders. Their robots, priced below $50k, use teleoperation for 1.5× speed improvements in packing, palletizing, cutting, and box closing, with over 16 hours of battery life. Reflex’s unique human-in-the-loop architecture plus gradual autonomy roadmap positions it as a breakthrough in affordable warehouse automation.
Expanso (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1822)
Founded in 2023 and HQ in Seattle, Expanso flips the distributed computing model by bringing compute to where data lives—on-prem, edge, or cloud—using its open-source Bacalhau engine. Led by CEO David Aronchick (ex-Azure/Kubeflow) and CTO Walid Baruni (ex-AWS), Expanso cut data and AI infrastructure costs by 40–80% without replatforming. Its June 2025 introduced cost-optimization features targeting annual savings of $8–10m for large customers. Expanso integrates natively with Snowflake, Databricks, and Google Cloud, and is backed by Plug and Play Tech Center, Hetz Ventures, General Catalyst, Protocol Labs, Array Ventures, and Samsung NEXT.
Altera (Fundamental Research Labs) (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 53877)
Altera, now operating as Fundamental Research Labs, is an AI research lab building “digital humans”—autonomous, socially intelligent agents that learn and grow alongside users. Founded in 2023 by Robert Yang (ex-MIT), Andrew Ahn, Nico Christie, and Shuying Luo, the Menlo Park team comes from MIT EECS, Stanford NLP, Google X, and Citadel. Its flagship “Fairies” Minecraft agents have engaged over one million users. After a $2m pre-seed from a16z SPEEDRUN, the company raised $9m in seed funding led by First Spark (Eric Schmidt’s fund) and Patron in May 2024. Latest $31m series a round in Jan 2025 backed by MiH Ventures, Prosus Ventures, et al. to hire researchers and expand its PIANO architecture for long-term autonomy with GPT-4o.
Factory (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 317278)
Factory, founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes (ex-Hugging Face, Microsoft), is an AI platform that automates the entire software development lifecycle via autonomous “Droids” for coding, code review, testing, documentation, and on-call incident resolution. Based in San Francisco backed by Sequoia Capital ($15m series a in June 2024) and Lux ($5m seed in Nov 2023), Factory went general access on May 28, 2025 with Droids for every SDLC stage. Integrations include GitHub, Slack, Linear, and Notion, and early customers report a 35% reduction in time spent on non-coding tasks. Factory is positioning itself as the “autonomy layer” on top of existing CI/CD toolchains.
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.
