Adapty raised seed to become the growth layer for app subscriptions, not just A/B tests
Surface Ventures led Adapty's seed as the paywall-testing startup bet pooled cross-app data beats any single developer's data.
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300 RECENT CASES · REGULARLY UPDATED14.ai raised $3M to be an AI-native customer support agency, not a SaaS tool
Snips and Workwell's founders sell the whole support department — software plus staff — taking over tickets from email to TikTok within a day.
Read the caseNigerian neobank Yep! raised $1.5M pre-seed to turn an agent network into a super app
E-Settlement's PayCentre had 5 million customers transacting $2B through 100,000 merchants; Yep! bets a microfinance licence can bank them digitally.
Read the caseMusk rebuilds xAI from the foundations after co-founders head for the exits
Down to two of eleven co-founders, xAI is purging staff, rebooting its coding tools and folding Macrohard into Tesla to catch Anthropic and OpenAI.
Read the caseVimeo's B2B pivot hit indie creators with $3,000-a-year ultimatums
Told to pay custom rates or leave within days, top-bandwidth Patreon creators lost videos and subscribers — while Vimeo chased corporate clients.
Read the case98point6's Robbie Cape launches The Instrument to reimagine insurance for profit
After a nine-month search that nearly ended in a salaried healthcare job, Cape chose a trillion-dollar industry and said the quiet part out loud: money.
Read the caseSaltz raises €20M to digitise how European restaurants buy ingredients
Two brothers who sold Oberlo to Shopify came back with a cross-border food marketplace for professional kitchens — no middlemen, transparent prices.
Read the caseLoop raised $24M to cut freight invoice lag from 50 days to 3
Two Uber Freight builders found 20% of freight invoices have errors and payments take 50 days — then built payments infrastructure to fix both.
Read the caseHedgehog bets open-source Ethernet can run AI clouds without vendor lock-in (interview)
CEO Marc Austin says Hedgehog's open-source software turns GPU fabric setup from months of specialist work into hours of declared intent.
Read the caseValeria turned restaurant accounting into AI payroll for frontline workers (interview)
The Barcelona startup raised $2M betting AI-native payroll, wired into government systems, can crack high-turnover frontline industries.
Read the caseSpotify bought viral game Heardle, then shut it down nine months later
The Wordle-like music game peaked at 69 million monthly visits; after Spotify's in-app discovery redesign duplicated it, the plug was pulled.
Read the caseProtect AI's tuck-in acquisition bet ended in a $500M-plus Palo Alto exit (interview)
Ignoring investor worries, a three-time founder bought four small security teams to build full-stack AI security — then sold to Palo Alto Networks.
Read the caseOrigin raised $5M to plan workcations with machine learning and curators (interview)
Two tech veterans built an app where machine learning and human curators design personalized trips — with workcation hotel criteria down to the Wi-Fi speed.
Read the caseLula ran frugal through the 2021 peak, then raised $35.5M in weeks at 5x valuation
The 'Stripe for insurance' spent the frothy market cutting burn on purpose, so when the downturn hit it could raise a Series B fast, at 5x its 2021 valuation.
Read the caseLatch rebrands as Door.com under Ring's founder to bet on gig-worker platforms
A delisted smart-lock maker hires Ring's founder, buys his stealth startup, and bets its second act on gig workers keeping 100% of their fares.
Read the caseJoon Care sold teen teletherapy startup to peer Handspring after raising $9.5M
Six years of insurance-covered virtual therapy for teens ended in a sale to Handspring Health, a New York peer that raised nearly twice as much.
Read the caseJasper pivoted its cooking robots from B2B sales to in-building meal subscriptions
After corporate buyers never bit, the robotics startup moved its kitchens into apartment buildings and charged residents subscriptions for robot-cooked meals.
Read the caseEdera's $5M seed bets containers should run like virtual machines, not namespaces
Three founders left Chainguard to rebuild container isolation as virtualization — no shared kernel, Rust control plane — for Kubernetes and AI workloads.
Read the caseBalaji Telefilms resets around family-first Kutingg and films after ALTT ban (interview)
With its edgy OTT app ALTT blocked by India's government, Balaji Telefilms rebuilt around a family-friendly platform, a films pipeline and side businesses.
Read the caseArctic Wolf spent its war chest on Revelstoke to make security response turnkey
The Minnesota cybersecurity platform made good on a year-old promise to deploy M&A money, buying SOAR automation startup Revelstoke as its third acquisition.
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