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. ✨
🚀 AI x GTM Landscape 2025
Building on SignalFire’s work of mapping emerging AI x GTM (S/O Varun Ramakrishnan), we’ve mapped the ecosystem of startups embedding intelligence across the GTM stack — from outbound orchestration and buyer-intent tracking to full-funnel content generation, demo personalization, and customer success automation. 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.
Emergent hit $10M ARR in 2 months
Emergent has reached $10M ARR, seen 900,000+ apps built across 184 countries, and done it all without spending a dollar on paid marketing. A team of just 12 engineers is operating at the scale of a 100-person company.
Robot Payment hit $21.8m ARR
Robot Payment a subscription payment company, engages in the financial cloud and payment business in Japan hits a strong 2QFY25 just out.
Bitfarms hit $312m ARR
Bitfarms a digital infrastructure company that develops, owns, and operates high-performance data centers reports Q2 2025 revenue of $78M, up 87% YoY.
Sophiie AI hit $1m ARR
Sophiie AI an assistant for all things job management turns ONE year old and crosses $1m ARR.
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.
Bahul Arora
Delhi-based serial founder and operator. He co-founded mHire alongside Priyank Bakshi, building India’s first chat-based recruitment platform; mHire was acquired by Aasaanjobs in June 2017 in a cash-plus-stock deal. He also co-founded Instasolv with Aditya Singhal and Nishant Sinha—this doubt-solving app was acquired by Vedantu in February 2021. Currently, Bahul is leading a stealth venture, blending his deep-tech and product experience in recruitment and education. Currently in stealth 👻
Anish Deenadayalan
Sydney-based product leader and founder. He co-founded Frilp (aka Turing Research Labs) together with Shyam Anandaraman, Senthil Kanthasawamy, Raja Jayaraman, and Aravind Gopalan; Freshdesk (later Freshworks) acquired Frilp in October 2015. After the acquisition, Anish joined Freshworks as a product leader, then transitioned in 2019 to Atlassian as Senior Product Manager. Now founding a stealth AI startup. Currently in stealth 👻
Igor Zvezdakoski
Australia-based executive with a strong product and technical track record. He served as CTO at MessageMedia, which later rebranded under Sinch; he subsequently took the role of Chief Product Officer. MessageMedia was acquired by Sinch in a $1.3 billion deal announced June 9 2021 and closed later that year. Earlier, Igor reportedly co-founded Service Spot (as CTO). Currently in stealth mode. Currently in stealth 👻
David Keegan
U.S.-based product and health-tech strategist. He served as VP of Product at Healthy Together (2023–2025), after a pivotal stint at Acorns as one of the earliest employees (12th hire), scaling product experience to millions of paying users. Previously, he co-founded Max Travel, a loyalty-points platform that expanded to over 800,000 hotels; the startup was acquired in July 2025. Now leading a stealth health-tech company. Currently in stealth 👻
Garrett Serviss
San Francisco-based founder and CEO. He previously founded Colorfull, a consumer health and food startup blending generative AI; led it as CEO. The founding team includes Ben Garrard (Co‑founder & CTO), with additional early team/advisors (e.g., Vivek Patel). July 2025, Picnic announced expansion into Austin & Houston by onboarding Colorfull’s clients aka exited. Now working on another venture. 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.
Sourcegraph (🔥 featured 8× in 90 days)
Builds a code‑intelligence platform—Code Search plus AI assistant Cody / Amp—to help developers “Universal search, write, and understand” very large, multi‑repo codebases. Founded 2013 by Quinn Slack (CEO) and Beyang Liu (CTO). B2B SaaS with seat‑based pricing for Code Search (e.g., Enterprise Starter $19/user/month, with limits on seats/repos) and enterprise tiers; Amp (agentic coding) uses prepaid usage credits for teams. Designed specifically for very large codebases. Raised $150M Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz on July 13, 2021, valuing the company at $2.625B.
Gibran (🔥 featured 5× in 90 days)
AI research startup building “nature‑inspired, adaptive” or “scale‑free” AI systems that work with small datasets and aim at scientific discovery (incl. drug discovery). Founded by Govind Balakrishnan (ex‑CEO/co‑founder of Curio) and Srikant Chakravarti (Curio co‑founder), with Dr. Suzanne Sadedin (evolutionary biologist) and Dr. Edgar Duéñez‑Guzmán (ex‑DeepMind). Early‑stage R&D company. Moves beyond conventional LLM automation by fusing LLMs with principles from evolutionary biology & complex adaptive systems, enabling open‑ended, small‑data problem solving and hypothesis generation (e.g., in drug discovery). Raised $2.6M seed (announced July 14–15, 2025) led by Together Fund and Mercuri.
Opero Labs (🔥 featured 7× in 90 days)
R&D-focused AI company developing agentic web-browsing technology, spanning model, infrastructure, and application layers. Founded in 2025 by Ben Bowler (ex-CEO and co-founder of RightMessage, previously Growth Hacker at ConvertKit) and Raza Habib (former co-founder/CEO of Humanloop, acquired by Cohere in 2024). Both have extensive experience in AI-driven personalization and large-language-model tooling. Currently bootstrapped; positioned as a deep-tech R&D lab rather than a SaaS product company at launch. Opero aims to merge browsing automation with reasoning-capable agents, combining custom-trained models, orchestration infrastructure, and UI integrations for navigating the web in a goal-directed way without human micro-management.
DevRev (🔥 featured 6× in 90 days)
AI‑native “OneCRM” that unifies support, product, and growth around a conversational AI agent; the platform includes modules like PLuG (user/session observability) and a marketplace of integrations. Founded October 2020 by Dheeraj Pandey (CEO; ex‑co‑founder/CEO of Nutanix, took it public in 2016) and Manoj Agarwal (President; ex‑SVP Engineering at Nutanix). B2B SaaS for product‑led companies i.e. conversational support + product work + analytics. Customers self‑serve and scale to enterprise deployments. A single, AI‑first system of record tying end‑users, support, product, and engineering—so the same knowledge base and telemetry (e.g., session replays via PLuG) drive both customer interactions and developer/product workflows. $100.8M Series A announced Aug 8–9, 2024 at a $1.15B valuation (company blog; Reuters; VentureBeat). Prior to that, DevRev says it raised >$151M in seed funding from Khosla Ventures & Mayfield.
Syncere (🔥 featured 4× in 90 days)
Toronto-based robotics startup designing domestic robots to “serve quietly,” blending into home life without dominating attention — intended to feel like they’ve “always belonged” while complementing existing spaces.
Founded 2024 by University of Toronto alumni; Angus Fung, PhD (Robotics Ph.D) with Eric Xie (Engineering Science, BC Chess Champion, VEX Robotics Worlds Competitor, MLH SWE Fellow), Eric Mak (Mechanical Engineering at University of Waterloo), and Nathaniel Eichhorn (Robotics development). Early-stage hardware + software robotics company. A design philosophy prioritizing unobtrusive, ambient service — robots that operate quietly in the background, enhancing rather than disrupting the home environment. No funding announced yet.
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.
Freeplay (🌟 Specter ‑ Global Rank: 12)
AI product & agents platform to experiment, evaluate, and observe LLM features; launched a free tier and announced $5.6m new funding in June 2025 (Renegade Partners; prior backers include Conviction and Matchstick). Co‑founders Ian Cairns (ex‑Twitter API product lead; ex‑Gnip) and Eric Ryan (ex‑Twitter Sr. Eng Director; ex‑Gnip) worked together for a decade building developer/data platforms (Gnip acquired by Twitter). Early team includes founding engineers from Twitter’s ~$400M enterprise data business. SaaS platform for prompt management, automated evals, and LLM observability in one workflow—positioned to replace “vibe‑prompting” with measurable experimentation; used by teams from startups to Fortune 100.
Descope (🌟 Specter ‑ Global Rank: 18)
No/low‑code External IAM/CIAM for apps and APIs; launched Agentic Identity Hub (Apr 2025) to manage authZ/authN for AI agents and MCP servers. Seed $53M (Feb 2023) led by Lightspeed & GGV. Led by Slavik Markovich (ex‑CEO & co‑founder, Demisto) with eight co‑founders from the Demisto core team—Demisto was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for ~$560m (2019). Developer‑first authentication via drag‑and‑drop flows + SDKs/APIs; now extending identity to non‑human (agentic) identities, a gap as enterprises adopt AI agents—Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub is an early, standards‑based approach (OAuth, MCP, scopes/consent).
Union.ai (🌟 Specter – Global Rank: 278)
Commercial steward of Flyte (LF AI & Data), providing managed orchestration for data/ML workflows. $10M seed (Apr 2022) and $19.1M Series A (May 2023) (NEA, Nava). Founded by Ketan Umare and engineers who built Flyte at Lyft; team backgrounds at Lyft, Google, Facebook, PayPal. Umare previously held senior roles at Lyft, Oracle, Amazon. Enterprise OSS model (managed Flyte) akin to Databricks/Confluent—targeting reproducible, scalable pipelines with a large open‑source community and production deployments at major firms.
Monumental (🌟 Specter – Global Rank: 355)
Autonomous brick‑laying robots (Amsterdam). Raised $25M (Feb 2024) co‑led by Plural and Hummingbird to scale deployment. Co‑founders Salar al Khafaji (CEO) and Sebastiaan Visser (CTO) previously founded Silk (acquired by Palantir). Sells bricklaying as a service, charging per brick laid (mirrors European market norms); system uses a multi‑robot workflow that fits through doors and navigates uneven sites—differentiating vs. crane‑scale rivals.
Teleskope (🌟 Specter – Global Rank: 364)
Automated data protection platform (discovery → classification → remediation → prevention) across cloud/SaaS/code; $5M Seed (Apr 30, 2024) led by Primary; total funding reported around $7M including $2.2M pre‑seed (Jul 2023). Elizabeth (“Lizzy”) Nammour and Julie Trias — Airbnb security/data alumni; recognized by investors and press (Inc. Female Founders list). SaaS platform that blends DSPM + DLP with a hybrid ML pipeline and automated remediation (redaction/masking/encryption; consent & DSAR automation; AI governance). Available via AWS Marketplace.
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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.
