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. ✨
🕸️ New Feature: Network Tracking
If you work in venture, BD, or any role where conversations close deals, your LinkedIn graph is pure gold. Yet, most of that value remains locked inside static connection lists and endless profile hopping. Now, that changes. Network Tracking stitches your personal LinkedIn relationships together with every teammate’s, lighting up warm paths, hidden overlaps, and fresh signals right where you already work in Specter.
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🧠 Thiel Fellowship Unpacked
Data-packed deep dive into Thiel Fellowship alumni—key trends, standout founders & more, with a big downloadable list of 200+ fellows for further analysis.
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💸 AI x Fintech Landscape
We built on Antler’s AI x Fintech Market Map (S/O to Chris Millisits), using Specter’s platform to map 590+ AI-fintech startups—from fraud detection and underwriting to AI-native lending, agentic finance and beyond. This is the real-time, adaptive layer reshaping finance.
Specter Team
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Oneal Bhambani
Former Flutterwave & Kabbage finance lead builds again. Bhambani resigned as CFO of Flutterwave in November 2023 after just 18 months, amid the firm’s still-pending IPO plans. Earlier he spent three years as VP, CFO & Head of Capital Markets at Kabbage inside American Express, steering the $700m ABS programme that fuelled Kabbage’s SMB-lending book ahead of its 2020 sale to AmEx. A decade earlier he was an investor at TCW Group and Riverwood Capital, experience he now taps while angel-syndicating the pre-seed for his stable-coin remittance stealth startup. Currently in stealth 👻
Tushar Dadlani
Dadlani previously scaled Walmart’s autonomous-checkout R&D as Principal PM, shipping sensor-calibration systems now covered by US Patent 12,288,294 (2025). His first startup, Explorer.ai, was acquired by Standard Cognition in January 2019 to accelerate cashier-less retail roll-outs. The CMU computer-science alum still appears as inventor on multiple Standard Cognition patents for automated camera-placement and in-store mapping — work that underpins Walmart’s current Store Assistant pilots. Dadlani’s LinkedIn now lists only “Founder — Stealth”; no product details have surfaced. Currently in stealth 👻
Paul Petrick
Petrick leads Product & Growth at Panjaya.ai, the Gen-AI dubbing startup that landed a $9.5m seed round (Nov 2024). Earlier he co-founded MatchaTV, acquired by Apple in 2013 to bolster its streaming-recommendation stack. Panjaya now powers TED’s multilingual pilots, boosting average views 115% when talks are AI-dubbed. Petrick also writes for the Forbes Technology Council, where his April 2025 column argues that “hyper-realistic dubbing will shrink the time-to-global-audience to hours.” The venture he teases as “Coming Soon” remains undisclosed. Currently in stealth 👻
Mehul Nath Jindal
Jindal built embedded-credit startup BharatX, named to Forbes India 30-U-30 (2022), before its February 25 2025 acquisition by Flipkart-backed Super.money. YC (W22) records show BharatX raised a $4.5m seed in May 2022 with 8i Ventures, Soma Capital and Multiply Ventures. The product delivered white-label “Pay in 3” to 1,000+ brands, according to YC’s own profile. Since the exit Jindal’s LinkedIn headline reads “Testing a 9-year hypothesis in AI × Commerce (Stealth)”. Currently in stealth 👻
Brendan Browne
Browne spent 2010-2021 scaling LinkedIn’s recruiting engine as VP Global TA and fronting its video series Talent on Tap (100+ episodes). Everything since has been kept under wraps. Browne teased that new talent-tech AI agents should “handle requirements-gathering, build the process, comms & training, and roll out their tech themselves” — strongly hinting the stealth product sits at the intersection of AI agents and recruiting ops. Has Fortune 500 Experience, Hyper Connector, Industry Expert, Major Tech Experience, Influencer strengths based in San Francisco, CA (US). 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.
Cline (🔥 featured 4× in 90 days)
Cline is an open-source AI coding assistant for VS Code. Its dual Plan and Act modes let developers queue multi-step plans or grant fully autonomous execution—including file edits, terminal commands, and browser control—while remaining opt-in at every step. The project has gained 47 k★ and 6.2 k forks on GitHub.
ThirdLayer (🔥 featured 8× in 90 days)
ThirdLayer—founded in 2025 by Kevin Gu & Regina Lin—builds Dex, an AI “browser copilot” that embeds multimodal context capture and real-time voice/text prompting directly inside users’ tabs. Positioned as “where research meets product design,” the two-person team emerged from YC W25 and is hiring founding engineers to scale Dex’s adaptive interface layer for collaborative AI-native work.
Beyond Work (🔥 featured 7× in 90 days)
Beyond Work is building a “human-AI work platform” that lets enterprises compose no-code micro-applications which automate siloed processes across SaaS tools. Early design partners include Kühne + Nagel, Sanofi and Accenture.
The startup closed a $2.5m seed round led by Moonfire and MIT’s E14 Fund in Aug 2023; a total of US $3m raised to date when including pre-seed notes.
Aman Kishore (🔥 featured 4× in 90 days)
Aman Kishore is a generative-AI engineer who co-founded Mirage ML—an LLM-for-3D startup backed by Sequoia Arc—and served as its CTO until Mirage was acquired by legal-AI platform Harvey in April 2024. Post-acquisition, Kishore joined Harvey’s applied-research team, leveraging prior GPU-acceleration experience from NVIDIA to scale multi-modal model infra for legal workflows. Building something new in Pre-Launch stage, based in San Francisco. Currently in stealth 👻
Unlimited Industries (🔥 featured 5× in 90 days)
Unlimited aims to be an AI-native alternative to traditional EPC (engineering-procurement-construction) firms. Its Forge platform unifies engineering data into an integrated system, accelerating design iterations for factories, power plants and other cap-ex-heavy assets. The firm states it has “recently raised a large seed round from top-tier investors” but has not yet announced amounts or backers 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.
Distyl AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 129)
Distyl AI automates core operations for businesses using AI-native “Routines” through its Distillery platform, founded 2022 by Palantir alumni Arjun Prakash (CEO) and Derek Ho (COO). The Wall Street Journal lists Distyl among the top “integration-layer” GenAI startups helping Fortune 100 firms operationalise AI. The Distillery platform claims to deploy AI workflows “in weeks, not years,” driving $100m-plus impact for customers. In Early Stage, backed by Lightspeed VP, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital, Nat Friedman and others, with a total funding amount of $27m and last raised on September 2024 – series a led by Lightspeed and Khosla. Based in San Francisco, CA (USA).
Reflex (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 212)
Reflex is an open-source framework for building web apps in pure Python. Founded by Alek Petuskey, Nikhil Rao. Reflex re-branded from Pynecone in June 2023 and has since grown to 13 k+ GitHub stars. The latest releases add built-in authentication and data-table components, underscoring the team’s push toward production-grade hosting. In Pre-Seed/Seed, backed by Lux Capital, Abstract Ventures, YC, Box Group, Picus, Outset Capital, Jack Altman and others, with $5.5m total funding; last raise $5m seed in August 2023 led by Lux Capital. Based in San Francisco, CA (USA).
All Hands AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 562)
Building AI software-development agents for everyone, in the open. Founded by Bobby (Bob) Brennan. The OpenHands repo (formerly OpenDevin) has quickly exceeded 8 k stars and demonstrates local-LLM and CLI workflows for autonomous code generation. In Pre-Seed/Seed, backed by Menlo Ventures, Betaworks, Jeff Hammerbacher, Pillar VC, Rebellion Ventures, Thomas Wolf, Soumith Chintala; $5m total; last raise September 2024 – seed led by Menlo Ventures to expand its open-source OpenHands agents. Based in Champaign, IL (USA).
OpenPipe (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2127)
OpenPipe lets teams fine-tune smaller LLMs to match GPT-4 quality. Founded by brothers Kyle Corbitt, David Corbitt. Reported saving clients $3m+ in inference costs since late 2023. Seed-stage, backed by Costanoa Ventures, Y Combinator, Tom Preston-Werner, Logan Kilpatrick and others; $6.7m total; last raise March 2024 – seed led by Costanoa. Based in Bellevue/Seattle, WA (USA).
Portal Space Systems (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2664)
Developing Supernova, a 500 kg, payload-agnostic spacecraft bus with solar-thermal propulsion. Founded by CEO Jeff Thornburg, former SpaceX VP of Propulsion is opening a 50 000 ft² factory three miles from the current hub to ramp production. Seed-stage, backed by AlleyCorp, Mach33, FUSE, First In, TFX, Offline Ventures; $18.5m total; last raise June 2025 – seed to fund a full-scale demo of Supernova and propulsion testing due Q2 2025. Based in Bothell, WA (USA).
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.
