Lunair bets prompts replace explainer-video studios: solo founder, PH #1, $100k
Guy Manzur's Lunair turns one prompt into studio-quality explainer videos; PH #1 (515 votes), $100k in 60 days
Lire le casstartups.centerUNE ARCHIVE CASESTUDIES.CHAT
Chaque entreprise
a un début.
Comment les entreprises ont démarré, trouvé leur place et affronté la suite.
Toutes les archives, dans l’appLes articles sont disponibles en anglais et en chinois simplifié. Les titres et textes conservent leur langue de publication.
Cas publiés
2,000 CAS PUBLIÉS · MIS À JOUR RÉGULIÈREMENTC2i Genomics bets a whole-genome blood test beats biopsy-based monitoring, raises $100M
A cancer survivor built a whole-genome blood test 100x more sensitive than rivals, then raised $100M to scale past six trial sites.
Lire le casAira bets monthly-fee heat pumps can take Europe off gas; raises €150M more in 2025
Vargas's Aira sells heat pumps on monthly plans, targeting 5M European homes; a €145M Series B in 2024 and €150M in 2025 back the rollout.
Lire le casCOFE App's Gulf coffee-marketplace bet: a $178M pre-IPO pivot into AI procurement SaaS
Kuwait's coffee-ordering app, a top-10 download in Saudi Arabia, rebranded as AI procurement SaaS and raised at a $178M valuation in 2026.
Lire le casLiblibAI's model-supermarket bet: $130M B round, 4M DAU — China's top AI-app raise of 2025
LiblibAI (哩布哩布) bet Chinese creators want an open-model 'supermarket' with LoRA training and community, not closed tools; it reached 4M DAU and raised $130M.
Lire le casPrincipia bets owning tuition billing cuts both defaults and dropout in Brazil
Brazilian platform that takes over tuition billing and collections for schools, guaranteeing cash flow while AI-run payment talks keep students enrolled.
Lire le casPennylane's accountant-channel bet: from €40M unicorn round to €175M Series E at $4.25B
Pennylane bet France's expert-comptables would pull their SME clients onto one accounting-banking-payments platform; five years in it passed €100M ARR.
Lire le casAsimov's human-data bet: crowdsourced videos train humanoids; YC W26 standout
YC W26 startup pays people to film everyday tasks and sells the footage as humanoid training data - 5,000+ contributors, TechCrunch standout.
Lire le casPanic self-funds a crank handheld, Playdate, and sells 70,000+ units
Mac software maker Panic spent four years and zero VC on Playdate, a $179 crank-handheld; it sold 70,000+ units and kept going.
Lire le casYodawy bets Egypt's paper prescriptions go digital end-to-end; $16M Series B
Yodawy digitizes Egypt's prescription chain — doctors' e-prescriptions, insurers' approvals, pharmacy delivery — and raised $16M after 4M processed scripts.
Lire le casTruKKer raised $196M betting software could organize the Gulf's fragmented trucking
A marketplace matching shippers with 60,000 small Gulf carriers raised $196M in 2022 — and now finances growth through a $300M murabaha facility.
Lire le casZed bets the AI-era editor must be rebuilt from scratch; 1.0 lands, Sequoia-backed
Ex-Atom founders rebuilt a Rust, GPU-native, multiplayer editor and waited out the hype: 1.0 on 2026-04-29, PH #2, $42M+ raised.
Lire le casBoson AI bets open Higgs voice models beat cloud giants; $70M, 7.5K-star repo
Ex-AWS scientists Smola and Li Mu open-source Higgs TTS to seed a voice-AI stack; $70M raised as Higgs RealTime prepares to challenge OpenAI and Meta.
Lire le casImpossible Foods raises $75M to race its plant burger into grocery stores
Impossible Foods raised $75M led by Temasek in August 2017 — nearly $300M total — to scale its plant burger and beat Beyond Meat into grocery stores.
Lire le casOxford PV: perovskite-silicon tandems move from record cells to shipped panels
A University of Oxford spin-out shipped the world's first commercial perovskite tandem panels, then licensed its patents to Trina Solar for China.
Lire le casZyg's agentic-commerce bet: $58M seed, then $60M at $500M two months after stealth
After selling their ad-tech company, ironSource's founders bet AI agents can run an entire DTC brand — and raised $118M in eight weeks to prove it.
Lire le casPocket FM bets India will pay per audio episode; $103M round, $400M ARR by 2026
Pocket FM bet India's listeners pay per audio episode via coins, not subscriptions: $103M Series D, then $400M ARR and cash-flow positive by 2026.
Lire le casEdukoya's record $3.5M pre-seed for online K-12 tutoring ended in a 2025 shutdown
Nigeria's biggest pre-seed went to a freemium online exam-prep platform; free users never paid enough, and Edukoya shut down in 2025.
Lire le casTrueLayer's open-banking bet lands: eBay invests and adds Pay by Bank at checkout
Founded in 2016 on UK open banking rails, TrueLayer has eBay investing and taking Pay by Bank at checkout as 2024 revenue hit £20.3M.
Lire le casRegent flies first crewed Seaglider, then raises $240M for production
Regent bets ground-effect Seagliders, not eVTOLs, win coastal routes; on 2026-09-02 the 12-passenger Viceroy made its first crewed flight after ~$340M raised.
Lire le cas