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. ✨
🇪🇺 Euro Seed 50 by Creandum
By Creandum with top early-stage investors across Europe, the Euro Seed 50 highlights the continent’s most ambitious seed-stage startups. Selected for standout teams, early traction, and bold visions for underserved markets - we expanded on this and dove into the full Specter landscape to see the metrics behind every company.
Specter Team
🔥 Hottest Startups - June 2025
Delighted to share with our readers the hottest startups for June. 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.
Gilad Golan
Toronto-based product-strategy operator and two-time venture-backed founder. Most recent corp. role was Chief Strategy Officer at TealBook, the AI-driven supplier-data platform used by Fortune 100 procurement teams. Co-founded and led InterMatch, an Israel-focused dating-technology for academics and professionals - acquired. Gilad operating in stealth as a “Founder-in-Residence,” exploring Buy-to-Automate (BTA) AI plays that tackle systemic operational inefficiencies. ~20 years of operating experience. Currently in stealth 👻
Glen Balliet
Phoenix-based software-platform and manufacturing-systems. Spent five years at American Express, rising to Engineering Director of loyalty platforms; he is quoted in the Go language case study on modernising Amex’s high-throughput payment stack. Served as Director, Manufacturing Systems at Rivian, oversaw factory software that underpins EV production; role earned him a “Top 10 Manufacturing Directors 2024” nod from The Manufacturing Outlook. Also Lead Application Engineer on Nike.com, contributing full-stack code for the brand’s e-commerce platform. ~20 years of fortune-500 and major-tech experience. Currently in stealth 👻
Roger Carter IV
Merritt Island-based advanced-manufacturing leader. Spent four years at Amazon, rising to Senior Manufacturing Engineering Manager in the space-hardware division. Held principal architect and engineering roles at Staples E-commerce and other Fortune 500 supply-chain operations, building user-experience and factory-automation platforms. Dual B.S. and M.S. degrees in Manufacturing Engineering Technology from Arizona State University. Now heading “Special Projects” at a stealth hardware start-up. Currently in stealth 👻
Ildar Iskhakov
London-based open-source observability engineer and repeat founder. Co-founded Amixr Inc. in 2018, an incident-management tool later re-branded to “Grafana OnCall” when acquired by Grafana Labs (open-sourced product year later). Joined Grafana Labs as Principal Software Engineer on the OnCall team, shaping the commercial and OSS roadmap. Also spent three years as a Software Engineer at Cisco. Left Grafana and relocated to London to co-found a new stealth start-up alongside long-time collaborator Matvey Kukuy (second venture together). Currently in stealth 👻
Anirudh Sanga
London-based AI and product-growth operator. Spent past 7 years spearheading Palantir’s retail vertical. Public voice on how advanced AI is transforming retail — guesting Lowe’s/Palantir webinars for AIP-driven solutions regarding inventory and workforce optimisation. Alos ex-analyst at Morgan Stanley. Holds BASc in Electrical & Computer Engineering plus Business from the University of Toronto. Left Palantir now in building more. 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.
Dan Reuter (🔥 featured 7× in the past 90 days)
Cupertino-based hardware veteran with a product-and-robotics background. Staff Product Manager, Technical, at Amazon-owned autonomous-vehicle company Zoox, where he led hardware prototyping programmes from Cupertino through early 2024. Before Zoox, founded and served as CEO of Electric Movement, a robotics-engineering studio that partnered with Udacity to launch the original Robotics Nanodegree in 2017 and frequently spoke at Silicon Valley Robotics events. Dan Reuter is currently in stealth mode after more than a decade at the intersection of robotics, EVs and autonomous systems. Currently in stealth 👻
Peek (🔥 featured 9× in the past 90 days)
AI-powered personal-finance platform that lets users track, manage and grow their net-worth through chat-style “vibe checks” and auto-generated to-dos. It sits in the Early-stage bracket, was founded in 2024, and is headquartered in Singapore. Backers include Iterative, which led the (undisclosed) seed round on 18 Mar 2025. Peek’s co-founders Sherry Jiang (ex-Google) and Jeff Min graduated from Iterative’s Winter 2025 cohort and have since rolled out an iOS app plus a new “to-do list” feature to make money management more actionable. Their near-term focus is expanding Gen-Z adoption and enriching conversational budgeting insights.
Permanence (🔥 featured 6× in the past 90 days)
New-York startup Permanence is building Permanence Coder, pitched as “the world’s most accurate AI coding agent” that automatically remediates security flaws for large-enterprise codebases. Founder & CEO Joseph Hackman leads the effort. Permanence showcased research at NeurIPS 2024 and later hosted an “AI Research Year-In-Review” at Company Ventures’ Flatiron HQ—underlining close ties to their pre-seed backer. Permanence’s messaging emphasises relieving Fortune-100 engineering teams. Early pilots with design partners.
Aravind Kalaiah (🔥 featured 3× in the past 90 days)
San-Francisco-based researcher-turned-founder Dr Aravind Kalaiah is quietly assembling a new deep-tech startup after leaving OpenAI, where he was an engineering-management lead. Prior to OpenAI, Director of Machine Learning at photonic-AI-chip company Lightmatter, and earlier led video-understanding accelerator projects at Meta (Facebook); both roles centred on HW/SW co-design for large-scale inference. Also wafer-scale compute at Cerebras Systems, distributed training at Intel-acquired Nervana, and co-founding two earlier startups (SureField & Forespire). PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and in stealth. Currently in stealth 👻
Eric Liu (🔥 featured 4× in the past 90 days)
San-Francisco-based “builder, investor & advisor”. Liu first came to prominence in 2014 when he co-founded Y-Combinator-backed nonprofit Bayes Impact, which applies data science to public-sector problems; he remains a board member today. Then spent three years as a VC at Thomvest Ventures, backing data-science and fintech companies. Former Forbes 30 under 30 and MBA grad at Stanford GSB. Hosts the #AGIBuilders meetup series while recruiting a founding engineering team. His social feed (@ helloericsf) hints that the venture focuses on agentic AI tooling for enterprise developers. 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.
Zed Industries (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 138)
An open-source, GPU-accelerated code editor engineered for low-latency, multiplayer collaboration and now featuring native AI “agentic editing” tools. Co-founders Nathan Sobo, Max Brunsfeld and Antonio Scandurra spun company out of their work on GitHub’s Atom and Tree-sitter projects. Went open-source on 24 Jan 2024, catalysing >60 k GitHub stars and thousands of pull-requests. March 2023 secured a $12.5m Series A led by Redpoint Ventures. HQ in SF, scaling real-time collaboration and forthcoming Windows support ahead of the planned “Zed 1.0” release in Fall 2025.
Dust (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 214)
Dust is building the AI operating system for fast-moving teams: a platform where multiple, job-specific agents tap directly into a company’s data and tools. Co-founders Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu (ex-Stripe, OpenAI) have scaled the Paris-based team to ~40 and landed marquee customers like Qonto and Alan, pushing ARR past $1 M—and reportedly to $6 M by mid-2025. Backed by Sequoia (seed €5 M, Series A $16 M) and Connect Ventures, Dust is doubling down on enterprise integrations, shipping new CRM connectors and workflow-chaining features.
Mem0 (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 225)
The “memory layer for AI apps,” letting LLM agents remember user context instead of starting from 0. 50k+ developers worldwide. Open-source repo has 36.3k ⭐ on GitHub. New OpenMemory Chrome Extension syncs memories across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok. Co-founded in 2023 by Taranjeet Singh (CEO) and Deshraj Yadav (ex-Tesla Autopilot AI). Raised between $0.5m (YC pre-seed) and $3.8m.
Greptile (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 228)
AI-driven reviewer plugs into GitHub and GitLab, scanning an entire repo to flag bugs and architectural issues—helping teams merge pull-requests 4× faster while catching 3× more defects. SF startup founded in 2023 by Daksh Gupta, Soohoon Choi and Vaishant Kameswaran. $3.8m seed round led by Initialized Capital in June 2024. Recent posts highlight aggressive hiring—e.g. a Founding Technical AE—to accelerate GTM, while product updates tout deeper context windows and multi-repo analysis.
Kumo.AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 899)
Turns raw warehouse tables into predictions: its newly-unveiled KumoRFM foundation model (May 20 2025) promises 20× faster results and ≤50 % higher accuracy—all via natural-language “Predictive Query Language” and zero ML pipelines. Mountain View startup was founded by former Airbnb/Pinterest CTO Vanja Josifovski, Stanford professor Jure Leskovec and ex-LinkedIn exec Hema Raghavan. Raised ≈$37 M backed by Sequoia, A Capital and SV Angel, including an $18 M Series B September 2022.
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.
