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 Gaming x AI Landscape 2025
Inspired by Lightspeed Venture Partners’ “Gaming x AI” market map (S/O Moritz Baier-Lentz, Kishen Patel, Alex Taussig, Bejul Somaia, Nnamdi Iregbulem, and Raviraj Jain), we expanded that vision to 530+ startups redefining AI NPCs, Game Infrastructure, UGC Tools, Web3 Gaming, In-Game Monetization, Esports, Game Discovery, and more. 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.
Sajid Mehmood
New-York-based VP of Engineering at Datadog. Sajid helped launch Toto, Datadog’s first time-series foundation model, and regularly headlines DASH and AWS/Datadog AI events. Sajid is now advertising for “founding engineers” to spin up the next wave of agent-driven software tooling, hinting at a new venture incubated out of Datadog R&D. Currently in stealth 👻
Greg Chrystall
Stockholm-based engineering leader turned founder. As VP Engineering he built EQT’s Motherbrain AI deal-sourcing platform before stepping away to focus on AI-agent start-ups. Earlier, he ran engineering at gaming giant King and held senior roles at Cisco. Greg is now in stealth, recruiting ML and product talent to commercialise LLM-powered agent workflows. Currently in stealth 👻
Oleksii Sidorov
San-Francisco-based deep-tech founder. He created Slise, a Web3 ad-exchange acquired in 2024, and is a Y Combinator W22 alum. Previously Oleksii researched AI at Meta AI and Oxford and now angel-invests while building AI-native tools for developers, sharing progress on X under @acecreamu. Currently in stealth 👻
Bjarne Christiansen
Copenhagen-based serial entrepreneur. Co-founded Realm, the mobile database acquired by MongoDB, and will join climate-focused travel scale-up Goodwings as Chief Technology & Experience Officer in Jan 2025. Realm’s YC-backed tech now runs on billions of devices; Bjarne brings three decades of IoT and deep-tech experience back home after a decade in Silicon Valley. Currently in stealth 👻
Tony Coleman
London-based Chief Technology & Innovation Officer at Temenos, steering the core-banking platform’s cloud and AI roadmap. A 30-year Temenos veteran, he was named a Temenos Fellow in 2022 and CTO-of-the-Year by FSTech 2023. Tony is incubating a stealth fintech spin-out exploring autonomous banking infrastructure. 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.
Cotool (🔥 featured 3× in 90 days)
Building “composable AI agents” for security teams. The three-person, San-Francisco-based YC S25 startup was founded in 2025 by Logan Carmody, Eddie Conk and Max Pollard and has raised $0.5m pre-seed from Y Combinator to date.
Supermemory (🔥 featured 6× in 90 days)
Provides a “universal memory API” that adds long-term context to LLM applications. Founded in 2024 by 19-year-old developer Dhravya Shah, the privately-held firm (team ≈ 5, remote-first) announced a pre-seed round on 01 April 2024 backed by Embedding VC (amount undisclosed).
Intempus (🔥 featured 4× in 90 days)
A robotics startup retrofitting existing bots with kinetic “emotional” expressions so humans can better predict robot behaviour. Founded in Sep 2024 by Teddy Warner (age 19), the company operates from San Francisco and recently joined the 2025 Thiel Fellowship, securing $200k in non-dilutive funding and letters-of-intent from seven robotics partners.
Tadata (🔥 featured 7× in 90 days)
Offers “MCP-as-a-Service”, letting software teams expose Model-Context-Protocol tools with minimal code. The Tel-Aviv startup, launched in 2024 by a small (≤10) engineering team, is privately held and has attracted seed backing from Rackhouse Venture Capital in April 2025; no funding amounts have been disclosed.
Freda (🔥 featured 5× in 90 days)
A Stockholm-based venture (founded 2025) developing fully-autonomous AI compliance systems for heavily-regulated industries. The stealth team (2-10 people, ex-unicorn founders) is currently hiring AI/ML, backend and legal talent; funding details have not yet been announced publicly.
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.
Standard Bots (🌟 Specter Rank 22)
RO1—Standard Bots’ six-axis robot arm—aims to make advanced factory automation “unreal[ly] simple.” Founder & CEO Evan Beard just announced a $63m series b led by General Catalyst, with Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next joining. The fresh capital supports a 30 kg-payload model and a Long-Island production expansion slated for 2025. Standard Bots is pitching “teach-by-demo” AI so operators can show, not code, tasks—positioning it against rivals who still require specialist programming. With U.S. re-shoring tailwinds and a headline slot at AWS Summit NYC next month, hiring is focused on controls, perception, and GTM roles.
Pylon (🌟 Specter Rank 22)
The first CS platform built for B2B vendors, bundling Slack / Teams channels, email, chat-widget, ticketing, knowledge-base and AI automations in a single stack. SF team raised $17m series a on 28 Aug 2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz, lifting total funding to just over $20m with General Catalyst, Y Combinator and others continuing to back the company. Since May 2025 500 + paying customers i.e. Hightouch, Applied Intuition, et al. and ≈30 employees.
Adaptive ML (🌟 Specter Rank 116)
Paris- & NY-based Adaptive ML—spun out by engineers behind the open-source Falcon LLM—closed a $20m seed led by Index Ventures with ICONIQ, Databricks Ventures and others. The platform lets enterprises keep LLMs learning continuously from real user interactions rather than static RLHF datasets. First pilots in customer support and dev-tools show >25 % intent-match uplift (per press release). Funds are earmarked for preference-tuning R&D and doubling the 18-person research team in 2025.
Nango (🌟 Specter Rank 183)
YC W23 alum Nango has evolved from an open-source OAuth handler to a 400-API integration platform boasting 600+ pre-built connectors. Founders Robin Guldener and Bastien Beurier report 300+ production customers, 4 k GitHub stars and $3m seed to date; the team of 6 is fully remote between SF and Paris. Developers can mix ready-made connectors with “integration-as-code,” while an “AI co-pilot” (March 2025 launch) suggests pagination, retries and rate-limit logic automatically—cutting average build time from days to hours.
Digger (🌟 Specter Rank 714)
Digger, the open-source CI/CD orchestrator for Terraform & OpenTofu, landed a $3.6 M seed (June 16 2025) led by Initialized Capital. Founders Igor Zalutski, Mohamed Habib and Utpal Nadiger are now positioning Digger as an AI-native DevOps agent that writes and reviews infra configs straight from GitHub pull requests. Half-million OSS downloads and 300+ enterprise installs proved demand; the new “Infrabase” agent targets the surge of AI-generated app code needing automated, policy-aware deployment.
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.
