5 New Startups That Explain AI's Most Important Trends
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, five new startups that show off some of the most important themes and trends in AI. Before that in the headlines, an AI that actually asks you to think. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. ♪

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with Anthropic, who have launched a specialized version of Claude aimed at education. The appropriately named Claude for education is designed to provide an AI-enhanced learning experience for college students. And basically what Anthropic's going for here, and their key insight really, is that while students are flocking to AI as an educational tool, simply reading AI output isn't actually necessarily a great way to learn.

Instead, this new learning mode is going to position Claude as a Socratic partner that engages in dialogue and encourages critical thinking.

Benjerbeet writes, this approach directly addresses what many educators consider the central risk of AI in education, that tools like ChatGPT encourage shortcut thinking rather than deeper understanding. By designing an AI that deliberately withholds answers in favor of guided reasoning, Anthropic has created something closer to a digital tutor than an answer engine. Now, Claude for Education is currently rolling out in pilot programs across Northeastern University, the London School of Economics, and Champlain College.

The Northeastern pilot is especially ambitious, with the tool being provided across their 13 global campuses serving 50,000 students and faculty. The school had already committed to put itself at the forefront of AI-enhanced education with their 2025 academic plan, which makes sense as their university president, Joseph E. Aoun, recently published a book on the impact of AI in education.

Anthropic wrote, This is about as classic as it gets. Andrew Allen writes, Now, of course, ultimately, a huge amount of this is going to be up to the students. Are they going to take the time to actually try to engage, or are they just going to use the shortcut?

But ultimately, the models can't solve that, just as educators can't ultimately solve that. So I think it's great to see these types of experiments and approaches that can actually help people who are willing to put in the time.

Next up, a fundraising story. Text-to-app platform Replit is in talks to raise at a $3 billion valuation. Bloomberg reports the company is looking to raise around $200 million in a round that would triple their current valuation. If the round closes, this would be a big validation that vibe coding tools are one of the hottest verticals in AI, which, by the way, a little preview is something we talk about extensively in today's main episode. Replit last raised in April of 2023, with the Series B bringing in $97 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion.

AnySphere, the creator of rival platform Cursor, is also fundraising at the moment and is reportedly looking for a $10 billion valuation. Honestly, with the current pace of growth for coding assistants, neither company should have any trouble hitting their marks. In A16Z's recent survey of AI apps, they found that coding platforms are going absolutely parabolic in terms of traffic. Replit CEO Amjad Massad recently confirmed this wave of new users are converting into paying customers, posting an image of active paid deployments on Reddit and saying, "...one of the smoothest exponential curves I've ever seen."

Data labeling service Scale.ai expects to double their revenue this year, speaking of AI business. According to Bloomberg, the company achieved $870 million in revenue in 2024 and ramped that to an annualized rate of $1.5 billion by the end of the year. They expect growth to continue, forecasting $2 billion of revenue for this year. They are also currently in talks for a tender offer that would value the company at $25 billion, which would be an 80% bump for their valuation during their last round, which closed in May of last year. The company is styled as something of an Uber for AI training.

They maintain a massive team of contractors to complete labeling tasks for companies like Microsoft and OpenAI.

Finally today, something interesting from Google. The reshuffling in their AI division continues as the leader of Notebook LM is taking over the Gemini product. Semaphore reports that Sissy Hsiao, who led Google's chatbot program since it was still called Bard, will step down immediately. Google Labs head Josh Woodward will step into her place. Woodward oversaw the launch of Notebook LM, which of course became Google's first breakout hit of the AI era. In a memo to staff, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that the move would, quote, sharpen our focus on the next evolution of the Gemini app.

Now, this seems ultimately to be a continuation of Google's consolidation of AI at both the organization and product level. Last month, audio overviews were integrated as a basic feature of Gemini, helping that flagship assistant become a unified interface for Google's AI products. Over the last six months, Google has also folded the Gemini app team and the AI Studio platform into the DeepMind division, bringing all of AI product under the same umbrella as their research unit.

Look, as someone who loves the Notebook LM product, I'm certainly enthusiastic about the leadership there being moved into positions of broader authority. So let's see what they can build. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent and our friends at Lindy.

You've heard me talk about Lindy a couple times over the past few weeks. They are an agent builder platform that can help you build agents to automate a huge variety of functions, workflows, services, from data entry to lead generation to customer service. They're basically a platform for building all of the agents that you might want in the future.

We had previously had an offer where for AI Daily Brief listeners, if you email us at agent at bsuper.ai with the word Lindy in the title, we'll connect you to the Lindy team who can help you build a specific custom agent in a matter of days or weeks for less than $20,000 a year. It's a great way to dive in and just get your feet wet with agents. Today, however, Lindy announced something very cool, specifically agent swarms. If you've heard my Dr. Strange theory of AI agent work, this is basically that brought to life.

Instead of an agent doing research on sales leads one at a time, you could spin up a swarm of 200 Lindy agents all doing different research and writing custom emails so that in a matter of seconds, you could be sitting on 200 custom emails ready to go for each of those different leads. We've been playing around with swarms for research, for content production, for sales.

and it is very much a glimpse of the future. So again, if you are interested in Linde, send us a note at [email protected], put Linde in the title, and we will get right back to you.

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For a limited time, this audience gets $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash nlw. That's v-a-n-t-a dot com slash nlw for $1,000 off. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Every day it feels like a million new cool AI startups launch. So much so that it's actually pretty rare that we dig deep and cover brand new companies on this show.

And yet, over the past couple of days, I've seen a handful of companies that are on the one hand just very impressive and interesting and seemingly high potential, and additionally, really reflect and tell the story of key trends shaping AI right now. So what we're going to do today is look at these five or so new companies, all of which have been announced literally over the last 48 hours or so, talk about them or their new products that have been announced, but then also put them in the larger context.

First up, we have General Agents. CEO Sergio Lojer, formerly of Tesla and Google DeepMind, writes, Today I'm launching my new company, General Agents, and our first product. Introducing Ace, the first real-time computer autopilot. Ace is not a chatbot. Ace performs tasks for you, on your computer, using your mouse and keyboard, at superhuman speeds.

Now, by the way, this is a show that's going to be much better if you watch it because there's lots of examples going on. You should be able to watch it in the Spotify app or on YouTube. But Shergil goes on, Ace can use all the tools on your computer. And the video shared shows it grabbing images, dropping them into Google Drive, and generally doing the types of things that a human would do.

Their preview videos also show the method of interaction. In Premiere Pro, it shows a user using the Ace bar to, for example, slow the video clip down to 50%, split the clip once with the Cut tool, and then export it. And again, you're using verbal instructions and then letting Ace actually do the work. They point out that this can be really helpful, not just for increasing your speed and efficiency, but also for tools that you're still learning how to use.

There's a bunch of other things about Ace as well, but the big thing that they're hammering is that it's fast. In fact, they claim 20 times faster than competing agents, making it, as they say, more practical for everyday use. Speed is definitely what caught people's attention with this. Replit CEO Amjad Massad said, "'Insane speed. Computer use models have not seen major commercial breakthrough because they're slow and expensive. This is a huge unlock.'"

William Guss, a former research scientist at OpenAI, who's now at General Agents as well, writes, When someone asked, how does it work? William responded, In other words, it's doing full screenshot image processing extremely quickly.

Now, in terms of the discussion around this outside of it just being fast, some people pointed out that advances coming from startups like this mean that it's not just the big labs that are going to have all the fun in the new era. F. Schumann on Twitter also pointed out that the expansion of human creativity to go with a theme from yesterday's show is one of the byproducts of this type of computer use tool, where as he puts it, anyone can now operate software without even knowing how to operate it. That is a huge breakthrough and certainly wasn't on my bingo card for this year.

So there are obviously a lot of themes that I think this startup represents. Broadly speaking, of course, agents, the most important, most dominant category of AI advancements right now. But more specifically, this idea of expanding agent capabilities through computer use. This is something that we started to see inklings of at the end of last year, and this appears to be a major jump forward on that.

Obviously, if you listened to yesterday's show about the five fast-changing AI transformations that'll keep you up at night, you'll have heard me talk about the expansion of human creativity. And as we just heard, being able to talk at software and have your agent do it with you does absolutely expand which software tools a person can use. Lastly, the fact that the speed of computer use is now exceeding humans, I think gives us a glimpse into the future where AI and agents aren't just as performant as people but are actually better at things.

Now, obviously, AI is better at many things already, but this is a highly visual example of that.

Another theme which it's a little too early to explore is whether US state-of-the-art agent capabilities can drive as much virality as recent releases from China like Manus. We might be a little constrained in this case because General Agents is only available as a research preview, not as a full product, but still that's something that I'll be watching. Next up we have Lindy, and of course while Lindy isn't new, its new Swarms feature is. I won't spend a ton of time on this because I got into it yesterday, but I think co-founder Lindy Drope actually does a great job explaining this.

She writes,

It just sent 370 impossible-to-ignore personalized emails in seconds versus an entire day of manual work. We're building AI employees that run entire companies autonomously.

What about someone outside the company? Michael Raspuzzi writes, first test using Lindy Loops, trying out a series of custom deep research agents using perplexity and anthropic. Context, we're prepping for our next AI and health hack, so I want a quick update across different non-invasive imaging modalities. I texted it LFUS, FNIRS, and ultrasound, and it cooked. What would have taken one to two hours manually, 25 minutes with AI tools, took two minutes with Lindy AI.

One more test from Alex Carson. They write, agent swarms let AI agents duplicate themselves to tackle hundreds of tasks simultaneously. The new capability immediately scales what's possible with AI automation by allowing agents to divide and conquer across large datasets without complex coding or custom API connections. You provide a list of tasks and Lindy automatically spawns duplicate agents to handle each item concurrently.

Testing this feature with the YouTube to blog post workflow showed the impressive potential. I created a simple flow that triggers when new URLs are added to a spreadsheet, creates a loop that processes each URL simultaneously, transcribes each video and generates a professionally formatted blog post, and then returns all completed posts and chat messages. And so what's the theme here? It's not just agents. Obviously, we've already covered agents as the big dominant theme. No, what's interesting to me is this is effectively my Doctor Strange theory of AI agent work come to life.

This is not a one-to-one replacement for existing work. This is the very early innings of what you can do if you were able to hire hundreds of people instead of just one for a particular task. Those 370 personalized emails that Lindy sent is an example of how you would apply this to sales. I think we are going to see so much more of this in the next few months, and it's actually going to take the new capabilities being available before people can even come close to figuring out how to actually take full advantage.

Startup number three is called Paid, and a very appropriate name it is.

Manny Medina writes,

With just a few lines of code, AI builders can focus on creating amazing agents while we handle the business engine behind them.

Summing it up even more clearly, their website calls this the business engine for AI agents. To me, this is reflective of the fact that agents are now officially shifting from interesting toys and novelties to actual production-ready tools that are going to go in and change how we do work. Paid is an example of the critical infrastructure that is being built to enable agents to live up to their full potential. Effectively, everything that human employees do now, every service that we have around them, is going to have some proximate version in the agent world.

This is going to be an incredibly rich vein for startups in the coming years. And as you can see, it's already happening with Gusto right now. Next up, we're moving on from agents, at least sort of, to another huge theme of the moment, which is, of course, vibe coding. And for that, we turn to the company called, yes, VibeCode.

They write, in order for billions of people to vibe code, we need a tool with the power of cursor and the simplicity of chat GPT. That, they argue, is the new app that they've built, VibeCode. Now, this comes from Riley Brown and his co-founders. Riley was and is, I think, the world's biggest AI TikToker. But over the past six months or so has really gone all in on vibe coding.

He's been building things for himself, using content to come up with new theories of how creators are going to code things in the future. And this is the app that he and some friends basically built for himself to do what he wanted to do.

One of the examples he showed off was vibe coding a mobile video game in a single prompt. And what's cool about this, if you've used something like lovable and bolt is that this is a native mobile interface. Instead of focusing on web applications, vibe code is starting with a focus on mobile applications. And when excited users started posting on the announcement thread that signup wasn't working, vibe code basically said that they were already full up.

So in terms of the themes here, obviously vibe coding in general is a big one, but the mobile integration is really fascinating as well. As Eddie Yoon points out, right now the average interaction with vibe coding is still via text, but imagine vibe coding with voice. Funny enough, when Andrej Karpathy originally talked about vibe coding, he talked about how he was using Whisper to talk to his computer to do it. So in some ways, this would be an actual instantiation of where the whole thing started. Vibe code Zanjananda writes, the best feeling in the world is when you build something and others can use it.

With vibe code, we hope to enable anyone get that feeling. And of course, that is the big resonance of vibe coding with people is this expansion of human creativity and creative capacity. And that was not the only example. One of the challenges for vibe coders is that there are a whole bunch of pieces beyond just writing the code. And

And some of those things remain outside of people's technical capacities. Now, of course, you can use vibe coding tools or separate LLMs to get help with those things. And all of the vibe coding tools have some version of a single button push to publish. Still, Andrej Karpathy summed up a lot of people's feelings when he tweeted about a week ago, "...the reality of building web apps in 2025 is that it's a bit like assembling IKEA furniture. There's no full-stack product with batteries included. You have to piece together and configure many individual services."

front-end and back-end, hosting, database, authentication, blob storage, email, payments, background jobs, analytics, monitoring, dev tools, secrets, etc. He continues, I'm relatively new to modern web dev and find the above a bit overwhelming. EG, I'm embarrassed to share it took me three hours the other day to create and configure a Supabase with a Vercel app and resolve a few errors. The second you stray just slightly from the getting started tutorial in the docs, you're suddenly in the wilderness.

It's not even code, it's configurations, plumbing, orchestration, workflows, best practices. A lot of glory will go to whoever figures out how to make it accessible and just work out of the box, for both humans and increasingly and especially AIs. Now a lot of the vibe coding platforms showed up in the comments saying keep an eye out. Anton from Lovable said, exactly what we're building at Lovable. One of the respondents though was Nicholas Charrière who wrote, this is exactly our vision for Mocha. Not glued together developer tools all made slightly easier, but a fully integrated one-stop shop.

And this company, Mocha, was also just announced a couple of days ago.

Nicholas writes, He continues, He continues,

just one. We take a highly opinionated approach based on our experience building top web products like Pinterest and Nextdoor. You describe outcomes, Mocha handles the rest. They even gave an example of what you could do. Nicholas calls out Tom, a small business owner in Texas who operates an HVAC servicing company. Tom used Mocha to build custom-tailored web apps for each customer with personalized branding and functionality, which he said increased deal conversion, customer satisfaction, and velocity by 200%.

And indeed, he sums up our theme here at the end, we're entering an era where everyone, not just engineers, can build personal software. The era of idea people and personal software. We couldn't be more excited.

Now, I haven't had a chance to dig into Mocha yet, but in terms of us looking at startups both as very cool things on their own, but also as reflective of trends, it is so clear that this is where vibe coding is heading. This is absolutely the next frontier, the thing for people who are trying to push things beyond just prototyping and into production. I think it is no mean feat to actually integrate this entire experience end to end, but I also think that this is going to be completely table stakes for these companies.

It is going to be an absolute onslaught race between Bolt and Lovable and Mocha. And the big beneficiary is all of us who get to build things that were never possible before.

So that is the list, five startups that have come out in the past week that reflect some of AI's most important trends. Again, we had General Agents, who released Ace, the real-time computer autopilot. Lindy, who announced their agent swarms. Basically, if you ever wanted your own army of employees, now you can have it. Paid, which is building agent infrastructure, making it easier for agents to actually interact with financial rails.

Vibe Code, which is taking the vibe coding world onto mobile, and Mocha, which is advancing vibe coding entirely by moving towards an end-to-end experience. AI remains the most interesting and exciting space in the world, and I'm thrilled to be able to share it with you every day. For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace.