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
Read the casestartups.centerA CASESTUDIES.CHAT ARCHIVE
Every company
starts somewhere.
How businesses began, found their footing and faced what came next.
The full archive, in the appPublished cases
2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDC2i 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.
Read the caseAira 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.
Read the caseCOFE 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.
Read the caseLiblibAI'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.
Read the casePrincipia 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.
Read the casePennylane'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.
Read the caseAsimov'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.
Read the casePanic 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.
Read the caseYodawy 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.
Read the caseTruKKer 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.
Read the caseZed 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.
Read the caseBoson 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.
Read the caseImpossible 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.
Read the caseOxford 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.
Read the caseZyg'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.
Read the casePocket 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.
Read the caseEdukoya'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.
Read the caseTrueLayer'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.
Read the caseRegent 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.
Read the case