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. ✨
👾 The Data 3.0 Landscape 2025
Expanding the Data 3.0 market map from Bessemer Venture Partners (S/O to Janelle Teng and Lauri J. Moore), we mapped 650+ startups rearchitecting data infrastructure for the lakehouse era — from ingestion and orchestration to metadata, governance, privacy, and AI-ready compute layers.
Specter Team
🍄 The Fungal Economy 2025
As an homage to Marc Violo's Fungi Industry Map, founder of MycoStories - using Specter we've mapped 290+ fast-growing fungi focused companies. This landscape identifies companies leading the charge across four pivotal categories: Food, Materials, Health, and Soil.
Specter Team
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Peter Lillywhite
Peter is a Melbourne-based cloud-infrastructure operator who grew Dilignet into top-tier Microsoft partner status, then re-branded the firm as Xello to focus on data-platform and IoT transformation work. He now co-founds a stealth AI venture working closely with Microsoft’s security & Copilot groups. Currently in stealth 👻
Brody Huval
Brody is a Silicon-Valley ML researcher who co-founded Drive.ai out of Stanford’s AI Lab in 2015, scaled R&D as CTO and board member, and oversaw its 2019 acquisition by Apple. Since leaving in 2019 he has been an advisor and occasional angel; now profile shows “Co-founder, Stealth” working on robotics-first foundation models. Currently in stealth 👻
Alexandre Messina
Alexandre is a São-Paulo–based serial founder and MIT Innovator Under 35 who exited his first no-code commerce start-up to Americanas. He lead Zaia, a no-code platform for AI customer-service agents, lectures on Gen-AI at IBMEC/Exame, and advised Brazil’s Rede Líderes Digitais. Now working on a new venture in stealth. Currently in stealth 👻
Hassan Bhatti
Hassan is a Canadian-Pakistani repeat founder who sold computer-vision start-up CN to Snowflake in 2021, then spent four years on Snowflake’s product team before resigning last year to build a new AI infrastructure company in stealth. He is also a founding partner at Convolution (seed fund) and an advisor to Nextwave. Currently in stealth 👻
Paul Kats
Los Angeles-based Paul is a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum best known for co-founding mobile video caller-ID app Vyng (>$25 m raised). He is currently “Founder, Stealth” after two exits and a stint as COO of Voice AI. Currently in stealth 👻
Existing Specter users: Access the full roster here.
New to Specter? Schedule a demo and activate your complimentary trial today.
🎱 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.
Yaniv Shemesh (🔥 featured 4×/90 days)
Seattle-based former Chief Architect at F5 Cloud Services who now leads a stealth AI-infrastructure startup. With decades of distributed-systems experience and patents on web-performance acceleration, Shemesh is quietly recruiting early engineers to tackle high-scale networking challenges. Currently in stealth 👻
Cofactory AI (🔥 featured 5×/90 days)
San-Francisco startup (founded 2023) building an agentic customer-acquisition platform that auto-generates conversion-optimised landing pages and Google Ads. Current founders Joey C. Miles and Ben M. raised a $0.6 M pre-seed round (Jan 1 2024) from AI Grant, Madrona and Principal VP, and are hiring founding engineers as they onboard design-partner SaaS customers.
InstaLILY AI (🔥 featured 4×/90 days)
New-York company (founded 2023) behind “Lily”, a vertical-AI agent platform that composes autonomous agents to automate complex B2B workflows across sales and service. Founded by former McKinsey exec Amit Shah (CEO) and Sumantro Das (COO), InstaLILY closed an undisclosed seed round (Oct 10 2024) and is expanding its engineering team to meet growing enterprise demand.
Spacewalk AI (🔥 featured 3×/90 days)
Spacewalk Security Inc. (Irvine, CA; founded 2024) is developing a SaaS incident-response platform that aims to “redefine cybersecurity.” With ~11-50 employees and leadership including CEO Tim Wenzlau and CPO Chris F., the firm recently sponsored RSA-adjacent security events while expanding engineering hiring.
Michelle Lim (🔥 featured 6×/90 days)
First engineer and former product/growth lead at Warp (Sequoia-backed modern terminal), now co-founder of a new stealth startup in San Francisco. Lim writes widely on startup career growth, angel-invests in infra companies, and is recruiting founding engineers for her next venture. Currently in stealth 👻
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.
Gradient Labs (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 48)
Gradient Labs’ autonomous AI agent resolves complex finance customer-service queries “end-to-end, guaranteeing quality, efficiency and compliance at every step.” Founded in London in 2023 by ex-Monzo leaders Dimitri Masin, Danai Antoniou and Neal Lathia, the 15-person team has raised $3.59m seed (Aug 20 2024).
Edge Delta (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1275)
Seattle-based Edge Delta provides “intelligent telemetry pipelines” that give DevOps & SecOps pre-index control over petabyte-scale logs, metrics and traces. Founded in 2018 by Microsoft vets Ozan Unlu & Fatih Yildiz, it has secured $82m to date, including a $63m series b on 3 May 2022 led by Quiet Capital. Gartner named it a 2023 Cool Vendor in Monitoring & Observability.
Cased (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2340)
Cased is building AI copilots for DevOps, automating IaC reviews, drift fixes and roll-backs across AWS, GitHub & Kubernetes. The San-Francisco startup was founded by GitHub alumni Ted Nyman (ex-VP Eng) and Ben Bleikamp, and is backed by Founders Fund, Sancus Ventures & Abstraction Capital. Public filings show $10.5m raised, with the last round closing $8.28m 30 Jun 2023. Recent open-source releases (Kit, Hypersonic) underpin its open-core growth.
Scrunch AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 4981)
Los-Angeles-based Scrunch AI lets brands monitor how they appear in ChatGPT, Gemini & Perplexity, surfacing share-of-voice gaps every three days. Founded in 2023 by Chris Andrew and Robert MacCloy, it raised $4m seed (Nov 14 2024). TechCrunch notes marketers already rely on Scrunch to “stand out in AI search.” The 10-person team is ramping enterprise sales hires.
Odyssey (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 6059)
Odyssey is developing Explorer, an AI engine that converts text prompts and photogrammetry into real-time, photorealistic 3-D worlds. Founded by self-driving veterans Oliver Cameron & Jeff Hawke, the Palo Alto startup has raised $27m, including an $18m series a (13 Nov 2024) led by EQT Ventures, GV & Air Street Capital. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull joined the board and invested in Dec 2024.
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.
