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. ✨
🩺 EU HealthTech Landscape 2025
Building on Albion VC’s and HLTH Europe foundational HealthTech map, we’ve expanded the scope with Specter’s proprietary data, creating one of the most comprehensive Digital Care Market Maps to date.
Specter Team
🔥 Hottest Startups - August 2025
We're delighted to share with our readers the hottest startups for August. Leveraging our Investor Signals product, we analyse which startups have garnered the highest interest from prominent investors over the past 90 days.
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.
Fluently hit $5m ARR
Fluently reached $5m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) as of the week of September 9, 2025, demonstrating rapid growth from $200 in revenue two years prior.
Kontigo hit $10m ARR
Kontigo surpassed $10m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and is on track to reach $100 million in revenue by year-end.
FyxerAI hit $17m ARR
Fyxer reported annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $17m, up from $1m in the past eight months, reflecting rapid growth.
Kashu hit $80m ARR
Kashu has surpassed $80m in revenue, reflecting strong market traction and ongoing 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.
Ari Jacoby
A New York–based serial founder, Ari most recently co-founded and led Deduce, which was acquired by CHEQ on January 30, 2025. He previously founded Newsletters.com (sold to MarketResearch.com), Voicestar (sold to Marchex), and Solve Media, with past stints at Google and Reed Elsevier documented in long-running bios. At Deduce he built an identity-risk graph used to combat account fraud—work CHEQ says it is integrating into its go-to-market security platform post-deal. Currently in stealth 👻
Charly Mwangi
An engineer-operator turned investor, Charly Mwangi has been a Partner at Eclipse Ventures since 2022, after serving as EVP of Manufacturing Engineering at Rivian from 2020–2022. Before that he held senior roles at Tesla and earlier engineering posts at Nissan/Toyota, bringing large-scale EV and automotive manufacturing experience to early-stage “physical AI” companies. Today he’s building in stealth in next-gen manufacturing while continuing to back and advise founders at the intersection of hardware, software, and advanced industrials. Currently in stealth 👻
John Daniels
Daniels co-founded NavTrac, an AI/computer-vision yard management platform that automates gate check-in and damage detection for logistics yards. NavTrac was acquired by Loadsmart on September 28, 2023, and now operates as “NavTrac powered by Loadsmart.” He was CEO/co-founder during the company’s growth phase prior to the acquisition. Now recruiting founding full-stack engineers for a stealth AI startup. Currently in stealth 👻
Belinda Mo
Mo co-founded and served as CEO of Viva Translate, a real-time translation platform spun from work with Stanford’s Legal Design Lab and later supported by Robin Hood’s Blue Ridge Labs. Viva offered live meeting translation and subtitles across languages, with a public website and Chrome extension documenting the product scope. In 2022 the company announced a $4m seed co-founded by Mo and Tony Hua; in 2024 parts of the codebase were open-sourced. She is now building again in stealth. Currently in stealth 👻
Debabrata Das
Das is an experienced engineering leader who previously headed Altimetrik’s Bengaluru Technology Centre, with earlier leadership roles that included Director of Engineering at Flipkart and VP Engineering at Relevance Lab. Now Co-Founder & CTO of an AI startup in stealth; details on the venture are not yet disclosed. 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.
Tembo (🔥 featured 5x in 90 days)
Tembo builds AI agents that plan, code, and review to handle engineering tasks such as error remediation and code reviews, evolving from its Postgres developer platform and the dba.ai agent that generated autonomous PRs. In July 2024 the company raised a $14m series a led by GreatPoint Ventures with Alumni Ventures, CincyTech, Cintrifuse Capital, Defined Capital, et al (total financing $20.5m). Part of UC’s 1819 Innovation Hub, rolling of its “AI engineer” for software throughput. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio. In Growth Stage, founded 2022.
Tai (🔥 featured 4x in 90 days)
Tai is building an AI necklace—positioned as “AI jewelry you’ll actually want to wear,” with a focus on making everyday moments more intentional and assisting users seamlessly. The site points to a “building in public” approach with a waitlist and official social handles for the founders, offering early community signals but few technical details at this stage. An AI device that looks like jewelry, signaling a pre-launch wearable form factor. Based in Stanford, California. In Early Stage, founded 2024 backed by A16Z SpeedRun.
Design Arena (🔥 featured 8x in 90 days)
Design Arena runs a crowdsourced benchmark where users vote on head-to-head outputs to rank AI models and builder tools across categories such as websites, game design, 3D, audio, and video. The platform exposes methodology pages and “Compare Models” workflows to test designs and surface leaderboards beyond marketing claims. The company is in YC’s Summer 2025 batch, positioning itself as the “world’s largest crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated design.” Launch coverage and community posts further underscore active user participation and recognition among S25 startups to watch. Based in San Francisco, California. In Early Stage, founded 2025 backed by Y Combinator. Total funding: $500k; Last round: $500k on July 1, 2025.
Aigency (🔥 featured 5x in 90 days)
Aigency is an early-stage effort branded “Agents for agents,” a meta-agent platform to coordinate or compose other agents. Founded by Jeff Bonforte and Itamar Weisbrod in 2024. Limited public materials - still in stealth / pre-launch. No external funding announcements. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel. In Early Stage, founded 2024.
Avala AI (🔥 featured 6x in 90 days)
Avala builds a human-powered data-annotation and dataset-ops platform with a large mobile workforce, distributing labeling tasks via its iOS/Android app to accelerate dataset creation. MaC Venture Capital’s launch note frames Avala as “people-first AI,” emphasizing a collaborative marketplace spanning datasets, labelers, and models; this aligns with an Auto.AI partner listing describing a San Francisco base and a “digital assembly line” for AV-class data. Based in San Francisco, California. In Early Stage, founded 2020 backed by at.inc/, Bossa Invest, Chip Hazard, Flybridge, MaC Venture Capital, Seeders, Wonder Ventures. Total funding: $5m and Last round: $850k on March 26, 2025.
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.
PlayerZero (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 6)
PlayerZero makes a predictive software-quality platform that uses agentic AI to learn a codebase and prevent failures before release. The company launched publicly on July 30, 2025, disclosing $20m total across a $15m series a led by Foundation Capital and a prior $5m seed led by Green Bay Ventures. Founder/CEO Animesh Koratana previously worked on data-intensive ML systems at Stanford’s DAWN lab (advised by Matei Zaharia). A coding agent that reasons across tickets, telemetry and architectural graphs to speed fixes and reduce escalations. Backers include WndrCo and angels such as Zaharia (Databricks), Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Dylan Field (Figma). Positioned as AI-era software quality infrastructure rather than traditional observability. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Marathon Fusion (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 26)
Marathon Fusion builds fuel-cycle technologies to help fusion plants scale, supported by ARPA-E/DOE INFUSE awards and Breakthrough Energy’s Fellows program. The startup raised a $5.9m seed in July 2024 (with additional grants bringing total to ~$6.9m), and continues hiring in San Francisco. Founders include Adam Rutkowski (SpaceX alum; Princeton plasma physics PhD track) and Kyle Schiller (Breakthrough Energy Fellow), who lead R&D and company strategy respectively. Positioned as fusion fuel-cycle & materials processing. Based in San Francisco, California, United States.
DataCalculus (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 36)
DataCalculus offers a no-code/low-code AI analytics platform with features like automated “Pattern Report” generation and a guided “Data Scientist AI” for onboarding and project scaffolding. Rapid analysis and explainability for business users. Pre-seed on September 13, 2021 undisclosed amount. Total funding $185k backed by DMZ Ventures, Alesco Ventures, Dan Lok Ventures, Horizon Europe, and Scale-up Champions. Founders: Saeed Talebzadeh and Raoof Mehrabani. Positioned as self-serve analytics & AI assistants for SMEs/enterprises. Based in Tallinn, Estonia.
Depot (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 43)
Depot provides cloud builds and remote caching for Docker/GitHub Actions, targeting faster CI/CD and lower flake rates. Product updates in June–August 2024 added GitHub Actions cache management and organization usage analytics, indicating focus on enterprise visibility and cost control. On August 22, 2024, Depot announced a $5.9m seed led by Felicis, with participation from Northzone and angel operators. No recent funding since. Founders: Kyle Galbraith and Jacob Gillespie. Based in Beaverton, Oregon, United States.
Pantomath (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 25)
Pantomath builds an AI-driven “DRE agent” that automates data-pipeline operations—combining real-time monitoring, traceability and incident resolution to reduce data downtime. On August 4, 2025, it raised a $30m series b led by General Catalyst, bringing total funding to ~$48m, following a $14m series a (Oct 2023) led by Sierra Ventures. Leadership includes Somesh Saxena (Founder/President; ex-GE Aerospace data/analytics) and Shashank Saxena (CEO/Chairman). GC highlights the move from “another tool” to autonomous work done by agents, reflecting a category shift from observability to automated data operations. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.
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.
