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 Biotechnology Landscape 2025
Inspired by b2venture’s early vision of the TechBio ecosystem (S/O to Marisa Krummrich), we’ve expanded the market map to identify 500+ startups building at the intersection of deep tech and next-generation biotechnology — from target discovery and protein design to clinical trial optimization, genomics, biomanufacturing, and scientific intelligence. Powered by Specter’s proprietary data platform.
Specter Team
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Eran Sandler
San Francisco Bay Area–based founder, operator, and hands-on technical leader—co-author of the OAuth standard, which underpins modern identity and access management. Co-founder and CTO of Peach Finance (2018–Jun 2025), he architected a fully configurable, API-first loan servicing platform that powers post-origination lending at scale. He sits on the boards of Seed Investor at Digger, Investor at Framework, and Seed Investor at autokitteh, and contributes code as a top volunteer at the Tor Project and Redash. Now Co-founder & CTO of a new stealth venture. Currently in stealth 👻
Ronen Daniel
Tel Aviv–based HR-tech entrepreneur, co-founded GoPerfect (2020–May 2025), raising $23m and scaling headcount to over 30 before departing in May 2025. GoPerfect built an AI-powered recruitment platform that accelerated hiring cycles for enterprise clients. Founded NOX Group Israel (2014–Present), Israel’s leading nightlife corporation, and CEO-exited WOJO Human Resource (2014–2020), a boutique tech-talent agency he built from scratch and sold in 2020. Now Co-Founder at a stealth startup. Currently in stealth 👻
Michael Fishman
Cyprus- and Tel Aviv-based DevOps veteran (Rapyd: 2018–2019 and SentinelOne: 2016–2018) turned serial founder. Since Aug 2019 served as CEO & Founder of InsightCat, a SaaS-based full-stack monitoring system that uses real-time ML to predict downtimes and detect anomalies in cloud and on-prem environments. In Nov 2023 he launched Kubeus, a Kubernetes automation SaaS platform that streamlines container deployment, scaling, and operations for enterprise customers. Now CEO & Founder of a new stealth startup. Currently in stealth 👻
Lisa Seacat DeLuca
Bozeman, Montana–based inventor and technology exec—most recently VP Engineering & Product at Unstoppable Domains, leading web3 identity and login, for NFT-based universal wallet addresses and password-less authentication. IBM Hall of Famer (600+ patents granted), MS in Technology Commercialization (UT McCombs), BS in Computer Science (CMU), and 3× #LinkedInTopVoices, TED speaker, and self-published author of two children’s tech books. Now CEO of a stealth AI startup. Currently in stealth 👻
Deepak Jhalani
South Orange, New Jersey–based CTO and engineer with 20 years of experience scaling SaaS platforms and driving startup exits. CTO of Lextegrity (acq. in Jan 2025 by Case IQ), grew revenue 4×. Earlier as CTO of Ravti (acq. Jan 2021 by Building Engines), he launched an IoT-based HVAC diagnostics device, led M&A technical diligence, and scaled the engineering team from zero to high performance. Now Co-Founder & CTO at Stealth Mode Labs. 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.
Keycard (🔥 featured 5x in 90 days)
Keycard Labs is redefining machine identity for the AI era with dynamic, identity-based credentials that replace static secrets—ensuring cryptographically verifiable trust across agents, services, and clouds. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, California, the early-stage startup is backed by Exceptional Capital and Tapestry VC.
TaskMaster AI (🔥 featured 4x in 90 days)
TaskMaster AI is an open-source Model Control Protocol (MCP) server created by Eyal Toledano in March 2025 to bring structure and context preservation to AI-powered IDE workflows. It ingests product requirements documents (PRDs) and developer prompts, breaking them into dependency-aware, logically sequenced tasks that AI agents (via the Anthropic and OpenAI APIs) can execute reliably within editors like Cursor AI, Windsurf, and Lovable.
InFlight (🔥 featured 2x in 90 days)
InFlight is a design-services marketplace offering instant, recorded 1-minute crits on work-in-progress. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, the privately held company (2–10 employees) is led by founder Kyle Barber. Raised a total funding amount of $3.98m.
Mechanize (🔥 featured 3x in 90 days)
Mechanize Inc. is building virtual work environments to fully automate software engineering—and ultimately the broader economy. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, California, this 2–10-person, privately held startup is backed by Daniel Gross, Dwarkesh Patel, Jeff Dean, Marcus Abramovitch, Nat Friedman, Patrick Collison, and Sholto Douglas.
Kinisi Robotics (🔥 featured 2x in 90 days)
Kinisi Robotics develops practical, wheeled-base humanoid robots powered by the latest LLM intelligence to tackle warehouse and fulfillment tasks. Co-founded by Bren Pierce and Ed Lando in 2024 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, the 11–50-person company has raised $2m to date.
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.
Vellum (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 75)
Prompt-engineering platform that lets enterprises build, test, and ship reliable AI workflows in hours. Total funding amount of $9.5m - latest round of $4m in July 2024 led by Formulate Ventures. past investors include Rebel Fund, Eastlink Capital, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, and angels after debuting at YC’s Winter ’23 Demo Day. Founder Akash Sharma (and co-founders Noa Flaherty and Sidd Seethepalli) have already amassed 40 paying customers with 25–30% month-over-month revenue growth. Based in New York, the team has leveraged its low-code SDK to save hundreds of engineering hours on prompt iteration, and Vellum remains a category pace-setter in enterprise AI prompting.
EvolutionaryScale (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 113)
Pioneering generative biology with ESM3, a 98 B-parameter LLM that simulates 500 million years of evolution to generate novel proteins for drug discovery and materials science. Founded by ex-Meta FAIR researchers (including Alex Rives) and based in New York City, the startup raised $142m on June 25, 2024 in a seed round led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, alongside participation from AWS and NVIDIA’s NVentures. Applications range from fluorescing proteins to plastic-digesting enzymes, positioning EvolutionaryScale for a “ChatGPT moment” in biotech.
Forfeit (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 129)
Habit-contract app that stakes users’ own money if they fail to submit photo, timelapse, or self-verify evidence of their commitments. Founded in 2022 by Josh Mitchell and Eddie Raven and backed by Y Combinator, the New York–based duo has secured $500k in pre-seed funding. The app has seen $4.7m staked across 371 k forfeits with a 94.2% success rate, driving strong web-traffic and app-download surges. Forfeit’s model blends GPT-4 Vision verification with human review, and it plans to expand integrations across Apple Health, RescueTime, GPS, and more.
Fibr AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 241)
Delivers 1:1 personalized landing pages at scale, matching ad creative to post-click experiences via its “LIV” personalization engine. Early pilots report a 28% average ROI lift, 75% of ads achieving an 8+ Google Quality Score, and CAC reductions up to 20%. Founded by Ankur Goyal and Pritam Roy in Bengaluru (Pre-seed/Seed), Fibr closed a $1.8m seed on July 19, 2024 from 2am VC, Accel, Sunil Kumar, Sprint VC, and Kunal Shah. Total amount raised $3.8m. The platform powers dynamic pages across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and more, requiring no developer resources to launch.
E2B (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 22310)
Open-source runtime for securely executing AI-generated code in isolated cloud sandboxes. Trusted by customers like Perplexity, Hugging Face, and Groq, E2B’s Apache-2.0 SDK has garnered 8.6 k+ GitHub stars. Founded by Tomas Valenta and Vasek Mlejnsky in San Francisco (seed), the startup raised $11.5m on October 18, 2024 from KAYA, Juraj Masar, Matej Turek, and Pareto Holding. Total amount raised $14m. Usage of E2B sandboxes jumped > 10× from 2024 to 2025, powering new long-running AI agent experiences on virtual desktops.
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.
