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. ✨
🧑⚖️ Legal AI Landscape
Explore 400+ startups shaping the modern Legal AI Tech Stack—built on the foundations laid out by leading investors like Dawn Capital (S/O to Evgenia Plotnikova, Shamillah Bankiya, Zoe Qin, Andrea Guariglia) and Battery Ventures (S/O Neeraj Agrawal, Brandon Gleklen, Hailey Wilcox). From research and contract drafting to litigation support, see who’s leading across every layer. Get the full Legal AI Landscape now!
Specter Team
🆕 Something New From Specter: Revenue Signals of the Week
Specter tracks private-company revenue and profitability as it’s reported across social posts, news, podcasts, and public filings.
Quartr hit $8M ARR
Quartr reached an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of 80 MSEK in 2025 and is targeting 100 MSEK ARR by year-end, reflecting a 3x year-over-year growth rate.
SalesForge reached $3M ARR in under 12 months
Salesforge.ai reached $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in under 12 months, leveraging AI-driven sales engagement without a dedicated sales team.
Exein achieved €20m ARR
Exein achieved €20 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and announced a €70 million Series C funding round.
Briq is approaching $25M ARR
Briq reached nearly $25 million in annual recurring revenue projected for 2025 and achieved cash flow breakeven at the end of 2023.
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🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Sohaib Zahid
Mississauga-based serial fintech founder Sohaib turned two prior exits—including the sale of smart-bike startup Vanhawks in 2016—into Railz, the accounting-data-API that has raised $15m and partners with hundreds of banks. He recently stepped back from Railz and joined Menlo Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. A frequent speaker at Elevate and CIX, Zahid advocates for open financial data in Canada’s fintech ecosystem. Currently in stealth 👻
Zain Jaffer
Zain Jaffer is a Bay-Area operator-turned-investor best known for co-founding mobile-ad platform Vungle and leading its $780m all-cash sale to Blackstone in 2019. He then launched Zain Ventures (family office) to back 50+ tech and real-estate deals worldwide and became a partner at Blue Field Capital. Jaffer now teases a new stealth startup aimed at “another billion-dollar outcome” in recent LinkedIn posts. Currently in stealth 👻
Nadav Hollander
Crypto engineer Nadav Hollander founded Dharma Labs in 2017, pioneering mobile DeFi wallets, and sold it to OpenSea in January 2022 for an estimated $110–130m, stepping in as Chief Technology Officer. Under his technical leadership OpenSea launched the OS2 overhaul in 2025, driving a 44% spike in user activity. Hollander continues to angel-invest via projects like Stack and NiftyApes, leveraging his early-Ethereum network. Currently in stealth 👻
Philipp Berner
Seasoned product-builder Philipp Berner founded remote-work communication tool Closer, which ClickUp acquired in late 2024. He then served as Director of Product Management at ClickUp, steering the launch of ClickUp Chat. Having completed his earn-out, Berner is now in “discovery mode,” exploring AI-assisted productivity ideas—a theme he hints at in recent posts. Currently in stealth 👻
Gwen Chen
Gwen Chen spent five years at AWS, rising to Senior Generative-AI Product Marketing Manager and leading global go-to-market for Amazon Bedrock. She co-authored technical Bedrock and MLflow content on the AWS ML Blog. In June 2025 she announced her departure—“Day 1 #1143”—and is now building in stealth. 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.
Deniz Binay (🔥 featured 4× in 90 days)
Repeat founder (exited a B2B2C startup), former Google product-manager who helped launch Google Assistant from 0 → 100m+ users, and most recently worked on the Gemini multimodal model at DeepMind, Binay has moved back to New York and is building a stealth AI-and-consumer-health startup. Two weeks ago he publicly announced co-founder Onur Tekdas (also ex-Google AI agents) and is now recruiting early engineers; no financing has yet been announced. Currently in stealth 👻
Liran Akavia (🔥 featured 3× in 90 days)
Co-founder and former COO of industrial-AI platform Seebo where he raised ≈ $40m, earned World Economic Forum “Tech Pioneer”, and existed to Augury for ≈$100–200m in 2022. Now, Akavia left his VP role at Augury this year and is now listed as a stealth founder in Tel Aviv focused on AI-driven manufacturing optimisation. Currently in stealth 👻
Cofactory AI (🔥 featured 8× in 90 days)
Cofactory turns a company’s website into a continuously-learning sales agent: its AI agents ingest site copy, run paid-ad experiments and generate personalised landing pages that optimise conversions without human intervention. Founded by Stanford AI researchers, it has raised a pre-seed/seed cheque in the low-six-figure range from AI-specialist funds including AI Grant; At the moment the firm is “funded” with Neo-backing.
mcp-use (🔥 featured 6× in 90 days)
YC S25 startup mcp-use provides open-source developer tools and a managed platform around the Model Context Protocol (MCP) so engineering teams can deploy secure AI agents that integrate external tools. Its SDK recently cleared 100k downloads and 4.8k GitHub stars. Founders Luigi Pederzani (former 150 k-subscriber YouTuber and Politecnico di Milano alum) and Pietro Zullo (creator of the Browser-Use MCP server) focus on OSS community growth while courting enterprise pilots at NVIDIA, NASA and SAP.
Magic Patterns (🔥 featured 9× in 90 days)
Magic Patterns (YC W23) is an AI-first prototyping platform that lets product teams turn plain-language prompts into Figma-exportable UI and production-ready React code in seconds. Founded by ex-Canopy engineers Alex Danilowicz (first employee at YC-backed Canopy) and Teddy Ni (YC W23), the platform is used by design teams at Yelp, Assurant and others, and has so far raised a $500k seed round backed by YC, Goodwater Capital and Coughdrop Capital.
Existing Specter users: Access the full list here.
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🍒 Company Opportunities of the Week
Specter tracks the performance of millions of companies and identifies the ones who are likely to increase in valuation.
Wherobots Inc. (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 70)
Wherobots provides a cloud-native Spatial Intelligence Cloud that lets enterprises run geospatial workloads up to 20× faster than conventional data-warehouse engines. Founded in 2022 by Jia Yu and Mo Sarwat—the academics behind the widely-adopted open-source framework Apache Sedona—the startup sits in Early Stage and is backed by Felicis, Wing VC, Clear Ventures, JetBlue Ventures and P7 Ventures. It has raised $27m to date, closing a $21.5m series a on Nov 26 2024 to scale its platform across climate- and mapping-intensive industries. The November round accelerated hiring for a Bay Area go-to-market team and a “Sedona-as-a-Service” beta that targets Overture Maps contributors.
DeepJudge (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 73)
DeepJudge turns every law-firm document management system into an instant knowledge base with an RAG-powered “Knowledge Assistant.” ETH-Zurich spin-out founders Paulina Grnarova, Yannic Kilcher and Kevin Roth closed an $10.7m oversubscribed seed on 18 Jun 2024 led by Coatue + angels (Gokul Rajaram, Michele Catasta), bringing total funding to ≈ $11m. The new capital is earmarked for US expansion and GPU infrastructure. Featured among WIRED’s “Hottest Zurich Startups 2024,” the company doubled ARR and is hiring search-relevance engineers.
D5 Render (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 89)
D5 Render offers a real-time path-tracing engine for architects and 3D artists. Version 2.7 (Apr 2024) introduced AI Ultra-HD textures, a Text-to-3D beta and a procedural vegetation tool “D5 Scatter,” pushing render speeds 45% faster and adding 35 new features. Founded in 2015, the firm lists a series a on 5 Dec 2016 with backers including Sequoia Capital, Source Code and Chuxin Capital; cumulative funding around $15.8m. Claiming 2M+ users and expanding “D5 for Teams” collaboration suite.
Orb (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 92)
Orb builds a usage-based billing platform trusted by Vercel, Pinecone and Perplexity. Ex-Asana engineers Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover closed a $25m series b on Sep 2024 led by Mayfield with Menlo, Greylock, Basecase, South Park Commons, Scribble, and Uncorrelated, lifting total funding to $49m and fuelling development of an AI-driven pricing advisor. Customer base and revenue each tripled in 2024, and the SF-based team is hiring 15 more roles across product & GTM.
Castle (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 142)
Castle’s behavioral-analytics engine blocks bots and fraud “without CAPTCHAs.” Its latest release—Castle for Cloudflare (15 May 2025)—pushes detection to the network edge via a no-code Worker, giving startups enterprise-grade risk scoring in minutes. The company has raised $18.2m from Index Ventures alongside YC, First Round, and F-Prime. Most recently raised in 2021 for an undisclosed amount. Founders Johan Brissmyr and Sebastian Wallin continue to scale partnerships (e.g., Canva, Rockstar Games) and are hiring edge-security engineers.
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.
