BOND bets founders will hand an AI Chief of Staff their day: PH #1 day
BOND's Donna reads Slack, Jira and 20+ tools, then sends CEOs a daily Presidential Brief; the June 11 PH launch took #1 with 665 upvotes.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDRetro Biosciences drugs aging itself — Sam Altman's $180M seed reaches first human trial
Sam Altman's $180M-backed Retro Biosciences bets aging is a drug target; by Dec 2025 its autophagy drug RTR242 was in a first-in-human Phase 1 trial.
Read the caseX-energy bets Amazon's AI power hunger makes TRISO-fueled SMRs real
Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund put $500M into X-energy, betting Xe-100 SMRs plus TRISO fuel can power AI data centers; the startup IPOs at $1B+ in April 2026.
Read the caseShotgun: rave-scene ticketing that outgrew France's ticketing giants
Born as a listings app for Paris's underground raves, its ~10%-commission marketplace hit €200M volume, turned profitable, and now ranks #9 free in France.
Read the caseJagat bets map social plus cash hunts can win Gen Z; 20M+ users, #1 in Indonesia
Zenly-style location social app from Singapore/Indonesia: 1M DAU in a month, 10M users by Dec 2023, then 2025 Coin Hunt hit #1 in Indonesia.
Read the caseImagi bets schools pay a safety layer to teach vibe coding: $4.5M seed
Stockholm-born imagi wraps OpenAI and Lovable AI in a COPPA-safe classroom layer; $4.5M oversubscribed seed led by Brighteye and Day One.
Read the caseGoCardless bets UK VRP mandate makes bank payments default: £160.9M FY25, Mollie deal
GoCardless bet the UK's VRP open-banking mandate would make bank payments a default; FY25 revenue £160.9M, Mollie acquisition agreed 2025
Read the caseQuip Network bets idle quantum compute becomes a spot market; 11.6k GitHub stars
Casper startup Postquant Labs builds a blockchain spot market for idle quantum compute plus post-quantum wallets; testnet live, repo at 11.6k stars.
Read the caseAxelspace bet cheap microsatellites could make space ordinary; IPO doubled in a day
Tokyo startup Axelspace bet everyday Earth imagery could fund its own satellite fleet; its TSE Growth debut opened at double the offer price.
Read the caseAnt Afu: Ant Group's AI health app tops China's App Store free chart
Ant Group's AI health assistant Ant Afu hit #1 on China's App Store free chart on 2026-02-14 and passed 100M users by May 2026.
Read the caseExotec's climbing-robot bet: Skypod density wins Decathlon, $2B valuation
French warehouse robots that climb the racks to multiply storage density; Decathlon doubled orders to 114,000 per site, and Gap and Uniqlo signed on.
Read the caseOndsel's FreeCAD collaboration bet: ~100 interviews, no PMF, shut down Nov 2024
Ondsel bet pros would pay for cloud collaboration on FreeCAD; after ~2 years, ~100 interviews, no PMF, it shut down and open-sourced Lens.
Read the caseJasper bet a branded GPT-3 wrapper could win 'AI writing' search demand
Bootstrapped, it rode SEO to $45M revenue and a $1.5B valuation — then ChatGPT commoditized the wrapper, forcing layoffs and a 20% internal valuation cut.
Read the caseEli Lilly bet up to $7B that Kelonia's in vivo gene therapy beats cell-by-cell CAR-T
Lilly agreed to acquire Kelonia for up to $7B, the largest venture-backed private biotech deal in a decade, betting on off-the-shelf in vivo gene therapy.
Read the caseSyntetica bets one-step chemistry can recycle mixed nylon at scale
Syntetica's patented process recycles nylon 6 and 6.6 together from unsorted textile waste; $30M Series A funds its first French demo plant.
Read the caseAlerzo's B2B-distribution bet ends: ₦4.38bn debt, frozen accounts, fleet sale
Nigeria's Alerzo raised ~$20M to deliver FMCG to corner shops; a ₦5bn Moniepoint loan and court freeze left it selling its fleet by 2026.
Read the caseBeReal's authenticity bet: #1 US App Store in 2022, €500M Voodoo exit in 2024
BeReal bet one unfiltered dual-camera post a day could beat curated feeds; it hit #1 in the US App Store, then plateaued and sold to Voodoo for €500M.
Read the caseZenius' 20-year video-learning bet ends in a January 2024 shutdown
Zenius bet recorded lessons teaching fundamentals would make online learning Indonesia's default; classrooms reopening emptied it and it halted in Jan 2024.
Read the caseSalmon's AI-credit bet: licensed bank, record $100M round for underbanked Filipinos
Philippine fintech Salmon bets AI scoring can lend to the ~90% of Filipinos without credit cards; bank license in 2023, $100M raised by April 2026.
Read the caseRideFlux bets paid trucking is L4's first revenue; Korea's first AV software IPO
Ex-LG engineers' full-stack L4 software startup runs Korea's first paid autonomous freight with Hanjin, then files for KOSDAQ.
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