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. ✨
🍊 1000+ YC Requested Startups Fall 2025
Y Combinator’s Fall RFS urges founders to solve challenges in; i) Retraining Workers for the AI Economy, ii) Video Generation as a Primitive, iii) The First 10-person, $100bn Company, iv) Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems, v) AI Native vi) Using LLMs Instead of Government Consulting. We’ve mapped over 1000+ standout companies driving innovation in these frontier spaces. Here’s what we found 👇
Specter Team
🧬 Bio-Infra Landscape 2025
Building on the foundation laid by Ada Ventures’ Bio-Infrastructure thesis (S/O Francesca (Check) Warner and Mills & Reeve), we the landscape using Specter — mapping 500+ companies powering the underlying stack for next-generation healthcare. Check it out here ⬇️
Specter Team
💸 Revenue Signals of the Week
Specter tracks private-company revenue and profitability as it’s reported across social posts, news, podcasts, and public filings.
Arist hit $5M ARR
Arist has surpassed $5m in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and is growing at more than 2x year-over-year.
Spheron ABU hit $15M ARR
Spheron is approaching $15m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), reflecting strong business traction and value transacted on its platform.
OGTool hit $252K ARR
OGTool rejected by Y Combinator - now tripling its monthly recurring revenue from $7k to $21k.
Zovo hit $384K ARR
Zovo reached $32k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) within seven months of launch, demonstrating rapid early-stage growth.
Get in touch to learn more.
🔮 Stealth Opportunities of the Week
Specter monitors real-time global talent movements to spot investment opportunities before anyone else.
Roy Ng
Roy is a San-Francisco-based enterprise-software operator and fintech founder. He co-founded Bond, the banking-as-a-service platform that raised $42 M and was acquired by FIS in June 2023; he then became EVP & Chief Business Officer, Platform & Enterprise at FIS. Earlier he led hyper-growth at Mapbox as President & COO and was Twilio’s first COO, helping the company scale ARR from $65m to $275m ahead of its 2016 IPO. A former Goldman Sachs TMT banker, Roy remains an active angel investor. Now building in stealth, hiring founding engineers. Currently in stealth 👻
Dilip Rajan
Dilip is a Brooklyn-based product builder and creative technologist. He co-founded Jumpcut, an AI-driven workflow platform for Hollywood that automates script coverage; Jumpcut was acquired by Cinelytic in 2025. Before that he led BuzzFeed’s quizzes and UGC products to billions of views. Today, Dilip is ideating his next venture in stealth. Currently in stealth 👻
Steve Koshansky
Steve is a serial founder focusing on frontier biotech and defense. He previously co-founded Plex Labs (acquired by MoonPay) and was a founding partner at digital-asset manager Hashdex. In 2025 he surfaced as founder of an unnamed stealth-biotech venture developing novel bio-/defense IP. Currently in stealth 👻
Lucas Dickey
Lucas is a Seattle-area product leader turned repeat founder. He earlier co-founded furniture-subscription start-up Fernish (2017, backed by Techstars) and, in 2023, launched DeepCast, an AI platform for podcast discovery and monetisation, which raised seed funding from Automattic and others. As of July 2025 Lucas lists himself as CEO of a new stealth startup. Until the stealth reveal, he continues side projects like A-OK Shop, an AI “nerd-wear” brand. Currently in stealth 👻
Kishore Jalleda
Kishore is a veteran SRE leader (Microsoft, Yahoo, Zynga, IMVU) now building tools to tame incident management and, in his words, “Organisational Neural Networks”. A regular speaker at SRECon and Monitorama, he champions customer-centric DevOps and alert-fatigue reduction. 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.
Puffer AI (🔥 featured 9× in 90 days)
Puffer AI is an MIT-spun-out, Cambridge-based studio that maintains PufferLib, an open-source RL stack whose latest release (v3.0, June 2025) trains small models at ≥1 M steps per second and ships one-line wrappers for dozens of simulators. Founded in 2023, the effort is led by Joseph Suarez (MIT PhD, creator of Neural MMO), who describes himself publicly as founder of PufferAI and “builder of sane open-source RL tools.” Venture remains bootstrapped with no external capital disclosed.
Shiro (🔥 featured 3× in 90 days)
Shiro markets itself as “your AI on-call engineer”, promising to auto-diagnose production alerts and generate the corresponding GitHub fixes; its live splash page positions the bot as waking before the dev team to patch incidents. A companion microsite shows a Slack → GitHub workflow, where tagging @Shiro in a Slack thread yields a fully-scaffolded pull request, reinforcing the product’s focus on hands-off code contributions. Public launch traces to a Show HN post (June 2025) linking back to @DevvMandal’s X thread, strongly indicating that Bengaluru-based engineer Dev Mandal spearheaded the project; no corporate filings or venture databases list external capital.
Ponder (🔥 featured 4× in 90 days)
Building what it calls the world’s first fully AI-powered video editor, able to turn raw footage into a “rough cut in seconds” and accept plain-English edits like “remove pauses” or “insert intro.” The company was co-founded in 2025 by filmmaker Timothy Wang and engineer Tim Tan and operates from a Midtown Manhattan studio. July 2025 Ponder disclosed a $2.5m pre-seed round led by angels Matt Hartman, Emery Wells, and Box CEO Aaron Levie, among other creators and institutional backers. A public job post notes 25,000 + creatives on the wait-list and open roles for founding engineers and designers as the team (currently <10 people) prepares its beta launch.
Smithery (🔥 featured 6× in 90 days)
Smithery is an open-source “AI gateway” that now lists 5,700 + MCP skills and extensions, letting LLM agents plug-and-play everything from Twitter posting to Google Drive file ops. Its public GitHub org hosts a CLI installer, TypeScript SDK, and >900 repos and describes the mission as “help developers find and ship language-model extensions compatible with the Model Context Protocol Specification.” Founded in 2024 by Henry Mao (ex-Jenni.ai CTO, X handle @Calclavia) and engineer Anirudh Kamath; raised a pre-seed.
Ato (🔥 featured 4 × in 90 days)
Ato is building an AI-powered tabletop companion for seniors; the device chats, reminds users to hydrate and to call family, and is currently offered at US $99 for an “early-prototype” run that ships to the US, Canada and Mexico. Led by Juan Cereigido (Founder & CEO), Gaspi Habif (Founder & CTO) and founding engineer Sebi Itokazu; the trio moved to San Francisco after being accepted into Founders Inc’s in-person accelerator. Cereigido’s X profile highlights his prior win with RecordAI (#2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt), and a recent tweet logs “10 Ato devices shipping across the US today,” evidence that small-batch pilot distribution is under way while the venture remains self-funded.
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.
Digantara (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 6)
Digantara, founded by Anirudh Sharma, Tanveer Ahmed and Rahul Rawat, closed an additional $1.8m Series A extension on 27 Feb 2024, bringing its total funding to $14m. Backers in the round included Aditya Birla Ventures and SIDBI Venture Capital, adding to earlier $10m led by Peak XV Partners. The Bengaluru-based space-situational-awareness startup’s Space MAP platform tracks <1 cm debris, positioning it as India’s commercial answer to LeoLabs. ET reports Reliance Industries is now in advanced talks to lead a $50m Series B (Aug 2025).
Refine (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 9)
Open-source React meta-framework Refine (YC S23) is emerging as an “open-source Retool for enterprise”. After a $1m seed (Jun 2022) led by 500 Istanbul, the team closed a $2.8m seed extension (May 2024), taking total funding to $3.8m. Founders Civan Ozseyhan (CEO), Omer Aplak and Eren Erkalkan now oversee a 10-person, San Francisco-based distributed team. GitHub’s April 2025 low-code index lists Refine among the top-15 fastest-growing OSS projects, reflecting strong community traction.
Phonely (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 73)
YC S24 graduate Phonely turns past call recordings into a Zapier-style AI receptionist that routes, books and escalates on-call requests. The startup secured $500k seed (Jun 2024) from Y Combinator in July 2025 profile listing two rounds / $500k total. Founder-CEO Will Bodewes, an ex-University-of-Melbourne AI researcher, is hiring for ML engineering roles as call-minute volume scales. Australian tech press touts the product’s “never-put-on-hold” promise after YC’s global launch.
c/side (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 187)
Browser-supply-chain-security startup c/side closed a $6m seed (Sep 2024) led by Uncork Capital, lifting total funding to $7.7m after a $1.7m pre-seed just six months earlier. CEO-founder Simon Wijckmans positions c/side’s AI-fuelled scanner as “Chrome DevTools for third-party scripts,” earning a slot at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 2024. With regulatory pressure around PCI DSS v4, the team is targeting e-commerce SOC teams and claims 30 % script-load improvement alongside full CSP reporting.
Hatchet (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 188)
Hatchet (YC W24) offers a Postgres-backed distributed task queue competing with Celery & BullMQ. Its open-source repo has >5k ⭐ on GitHub and the commercial Hatchet Cloud adds observability dashboards and concurrency keys. Founders Alexander Belanger (CEO) and Gabriel Ruttner raised $500k pre-seed (Apr 2024) from Y Combinator. The June 2024 “Launch HN” post outlined roadmap items—multi-language SDKs and dead-letter-queues—that shipped in the 2025-04 release.
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.
