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. ✨
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🥞 Restaurant Tech Landscape
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🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Yves Lostanlen
Yves is a Paris-based AI operator, academic and board-level advisor. He led Element AI’s European expansion as Managing Director, EMEA (2017-2020) before the Montréal unicorn was acquired by ServiceNow in January 2021. Post-exit founded SenseiAdvisory, counselling Global 2000 CEOs on responsible-AI strategy, and remains an Adjunct Professor in the University of Toronto’s ECE Department, publishing on wireless propagation and AI. Yves holds an MBA from MIT Sloan alongside his engineering doctorates. Since June 2025 has been CEO of a stealth AI venture building scientific-grade foundation models. Currently in stealth 👻
Ari Choudhury
2 years leading Asana’s applied-AI team (2023-mid-2025), shipping Gen-AI features to >140k paying teams. At AWS DynamoDB (2019-2023), owned global availability launches, giving him deep distributed-systems cred. Left Asana July 2025 to found Arka Analytics, an AI-native analytics platform that lets users “just talk to their data” — combining agentic query generation with connectors to any warehouse. The move and product vision are documented in Ari’s LinkedIn launch post (1 week ago). Ari describes it publicly only as “re-thinking how teams learn from data.” Out of Stealth 🚀
Redouane Ramdani
Santa Monica-based entrepreneur best known for co-founding Snipfeed at UC Berkeley in 2018. Scaled Snipfeed to >300 000 creators and $100m GMV before its sale, having raised €4.2 M (~$4.6m) in VC funding in 2021. In April 2024 Snipfeed’s storefront product was acquired by Planoly to form a combined creator-commerce suite. Post-exit, served as advisor to Web3 rewards platform P00LS (2021-present) and named Forbes 30 Under 30 (Social Media) class of 2022. Emerged from stealth on 15 July 2025 building Atorie (ShopAtorie), an AI-powered marketplace connecting luxury manufacturers directly with consumers. FashionWeek Online describes Atorie as using an image-first shopping experience to make luxury more accessible and sustainable. Out of Stealth 🚀
Fabio Penzo
Washington-based serial hardware- and health-tech operator. 2013 he co-founded 2045Tech and launched Floome, the world’s first smartphone breathalyzer, scaling to ~20,000 users in 40+ countries before a 2019 exit. After joined the eye-care supplement brand Eyetamins as co-founder, steering the company to another exit to Scope Health on Oct 2024. Since 2022 he has led global sales & top-tier partnerships at Arduino Pro, broadening the open-hardware firm’s enterprise reach. In July 2025 Fabio began “bootstrapping” a new stealth venture, details undisclosed. Currently in stealth 👻
Suhas Sreehari
Knoxville-based applied mathematician and AI scientist. Wells Fargo (2017-2021), as Assistant Vice President of Quantitative Analytics in SF, built explainable-AI models for fraud and credit-risk detection. From 2021-2025 joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National Security Sciences Directorate as Staff Research Scientist, working on computational imaging and generative-AI safety; ORNL later profiled his work on the algebraic foundations of LLMs. Joint faculty, University of Tennessee EECS (2023-2025). Held an Assistant-Professor appointment alongside ORNL duties, focusing on computational-imaging curricula. Now building a stealth AI venture; no public name or product yet, but posts hint at computational-imaging-first foundation models. 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.
Corridor (🔥 featured 8× in 90 days)
AI-powered “secure-by-design” development platform that scans and fixes vulnerabilities in both human- and AI-generated code before it ships. Founded 2025 and HQ in SF, the 2-person startup is led by co-founders Jack Cable (former CISA Senior Technical Advisor) and Ashwin Ramaswami (ex-federal cybersecurity specialist and 2023 Georgia State Senate candidate). Recently demoed product at Vanta’s Demo Day and announced that Corridor is now SOC 2 compliant, signalling early traction with security-minded design partners. Currently bootstrapped, Corridor is inviting organisations to join its private wait-list via the company site.
Brendan Falk (🔥 featured 5× in 90 days)
Brendan Falk is the founder & CEO of Zeus, a stealth-stage platform that “builds high-ROI GenAI automations for large enterprises.” Incorporated in 2025 and HQ in SF —remains privately funded but is actively hiring full-stack product engineers and GenAI strategists ahead of a private-beta launch. Prior to Zeus, Falk co-founded Fig, a YC-backed terminal productivity tool whose technology and team were acquired by Amazon Web Services on Aug 2023. Australian-born and a Harvard Econ/CS ’20 graduate. Currently in stealth 👻
Giga ML (🔥 featured 6× in 90 days)
Allows enterprises to deploy and fine-tune large-language models on-premise so that customer data never leaves their servers. Its “X1” model family—built atop Meta’s Llama 2—claims an MT-Bench score of 8.1, beating Claude 2 in internal tests and supporting ultra-low-latency retrieval-augmented generation. Co-founded by CEO Varun Vummadi and CTO Esha Manideep Dinne, both IIT Kharagpur alumni, entered Y Combinator’s S23 batch before incorporating in 2024. October 2023 raised $3.6m seed led by Nexus Venture Partners, with YC, Liquid 2 Ventures, 8vdx and Garry Tan. Now 8-person SF team hiring forward-deployed engineers and a founding designer as it rolls out its X1 on-prem models to early design partners in finance, healthcare and hospitality.
Highlight (🔥 featured 9× in 90 days)
Cross-platform, contextual desktop AI assistant that captures your screen or in a voice note, then lets you query an LLM about that live context. Began as a research project within Medal TV in 2024. October 2024 the project spun out as a solo company and raised $10m seed led by General Catalyst with Valor, SV Angel and Conviction Embed; Medal added $3m from its own July 2024 raise. Medal co-founder Pim de Witte remains connecting founder and Haris Butt (ex-ClickUp VP Design), Josh Lipson (Medal co-founder) and Mark Bond (Medal’s first head of growth) in leading product and go-to-market. Highlight positions itself as “the universal capture layer for LLMs,” aiming to reduce context-switching across any desktop workflow by 90%.
Atman Labs (🔥 featured 7× in 90 days)
London-based applied-AI research & product studio building software that emulates proactive human experts across domains—from e-commerce shopping concierges to healthcare coaches. Co-founded by CEO Shravan Nageswaran (ex-Worldcoin ops lead) and Sumon Sadhu, both repeat founders in frontier tech. Founded 2023, Atman raised $1.94m seed Nov 2023, led by FJ Labs with participation from angel investors Fabrice Grinda and Alex Macdonald. Atman hiring founding engineers in AI products, reinforcement learning, knowledge representation and generative algorithms. The research combines hierarchical reinforcement learning, large-scale knowledge graphs and multimodal generative models to deliver “benevolent human counterparts” that learn expert reasoning over long horizons.
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.
Polo (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 36)
Builds an “iPhone-easy” point-of-sale and payments suite for LATAM cafés and restaurants, bundling inventory management and QR-enabled table ordering under one roof. The Mexico-City startup reports 7.2m orders processed yearly across 200+ venues in 36 + cities. Founded 2022 by Aldo Piaggio (CEO), Andrés Richardson (COO) and Juan Chomali (CTO) — alumni of YC W23 — Polo raised $500k seed (Sep 2024) backed by Y Combinator and Plug & Play. With rapid venue adoption and strong Specter growth signals on head-count and web traffic, Polo is emerging as a leading restaurant-tech platform in LATAM.
Codédex (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 295)
Turns learning to code into a gamified RPG-style “adventure” through Python, HTML/CSS, JavaScript and AI modules. Founder & “Chief Vibes Officer” Sonny Li launched Brooklyn-based platform in 2022 and has grown it to 900k + learners across 192 countries. Raised a $1m pre-seed on Nov 2023 led by NP-Hard Ventures with Goodwater Capital, Hustle Fund, New York Ventures, Transcend Network, Worklife and Z Fellows joining. With strong community buzz on Product Hunt reviews and steadily rising web-traffic/head-count metrics flagged by Specter, Codédex is positioning itself as the Gen-Z-friendly alternative to Codecademy.
Tiptap (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 520)
Open-source, headless rich-text-editor framework with 31.6k GitHub stars and customers ranging from LinkedIn and GitLab to Axios and Anthropic. Founded 2022 by Philip Isik (CEO), Sven Adlung, Nick Hirche and Timo Isik. Berlin-based YC S23 startup raised $2.6m seed (Oct 2023) led by Expa with Y Combinator, Radu Spineanu and Liz Wessel— total funding $3.1m. July 2025’s “AI Agent” launch on Launch YC lets devs embed an LLM-powered collaborator that reads, edits and formats documents inside any Tiptap instance, cutting integration from “weeks to minutes.” Experiencing head-count and web-traffic surges, and YC lists a 15-person team hiring full-stack engineers - momentum that positions Tiptap as the go-to editor infrastructure for next-gen “Notion-style” apps.
Gitpod (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 546)
Provides open-source Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) that spin up pre-configured workspaces from any repo. The platform counts 750k+ registered developers and its core repo tops 13.4k GitHub stars. Founded in Kiel in 2019 by Sven Efftinge, Johannes Landgraf, Jan Köhnlein and Moritz Eysholdt, Gitpod has raised $41m across three rounds, most recently a $25m series a in Nov 2022 led by Tom Preston-Werner with General Catalyst, Speedinvest and Vertex. “Gitpod Classic” SaaS sunsets in Sep 2025 as users migrate to the re-architected platform (formerly “Flex”) announced in May 2025. With open-source mind-share and an enterprise-first architecture rolling out before the Classic sunset, Gitpod remains the OSS anchor in the growing CDE market versus GitHub Codespaces and JetBrains IDEA-Cloud.
Pathway (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1112)
Powers AI applications with live data and real-time processing. Its open-source Live AI™ framework sits on a core repo that has 29 k GitHub stars and a developer community in 100 + countries. Founded in 2020 by Zuzanna Stamirowska (CEO), Jan Chorowski (CTO), Adrian Kosowski (CSO) and Claire Nouet (COO), the company raised a $4.5m pre-seed (Dec 2022) and a $10m seed (Dec 2 2024) led by TQ Ventures with Kadmos, Inovo, Market One and id4. The move of its HQ to Menlo Park, CA while keeping R&D in Paris marks its U.S. expansion push.
Existing Specter users: Access the real-time startup feed here.
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That’s all for this edition of Specter Monitor!
Stay tuned for the next updates and feel free to share with your friends.