Rune Garborg’s Post

Voice AI startup Vapi has closed a $50 million Series B funding round, bringing its total capital to $72 million. The company's platform powers over 1 billion calls for enterprise clients like Amazon Ring and Intuit, showcasing significant traction and growth. https://lnkd.in/eDYAw9jy

This week I jumped on a call with two lads who left Barcelona and Madrid to build their startup out of London. Andreu and Alejandro graduated from the Antler residency in December last year. For those who don't know, Antler is one of the most competitive early-stage programmes in Europe. You go in as a founder, you build your company from scratch, and if Antler back you at the end of it, you come out the other side with funding and a real business. These guys made it through. What they're building is called Listo. Here's the simple version of what they do. Right now, if you want to book a hotel or a flight, you open Google, you go to a website, you go through the whole process. But that's changing fast. People are starting to just ask ChatGPT or Claude to do it for them. The problem is, most businesses have no way of actually being present in those AI platforms. Their services just don't exist there. Listo fixes that. They take a business's existing backend, connect it up, and build what's called an AI-native app. Think of it as your business having a presence inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and more. A user asks the AI to find them a hotel in Barcelona. Your hotel shows up. They can book it right there, without ever leaving the conversation. The tech that powers this is called MCP (Model Context Protocol) and it's genuinely one of the most important infrastructure shifts happening in AI right now. Listo builds and manages the whole thing for businesses so they don't have to. They're focused on travel first. 5 paying clients signed already. Fighting for every single one through conferences and outbound, the way every great early stage founder has to. And here's the part I loved. When they went to set up their own billing system, Alejandro didn't open a tutorial. He queried the Stripe MCP server through Claude and prompted his way through the whole setup. Using the exact same technology they sell to clients, to run their own company. Watch these guys. They're just getting started. #Startups #AI #Antler #Founders #MCP

Gamma is one of the fastest growing AI startups ever. They crossed 70M users, $100M in ARR - and all of this with less than 70 employees. I used our People Search API to analyze where this tiny team was sourced. Seems like there is no big "pattern" - Grant Lee and Jon Noronha seem to choose people based on what they are ABLE to do, and not primarily if they worked at a well-known company before. The full list is full of companies nobody has heard of yet. Not surprised at all, it's an incredible product.

Prabhav Jain sold his startup to Brex, led engineering at a fintech unicorn, then bet everything on autonomous AI sales agents. Now he's CEO of 11x. https://lnkd.in/evajBhjD via Yespress

Great to catch up with Jerome LECAT and the Scality team this week. The company has been a pillar of the French tech ecosystem for almost 2 decades. But it's facing the same challenge as many software incumbents: AI could make it vulnerable, but could also be a massive opportunity. This week, Scality launched its agentic AI platform as it navigates this moment. We discussed how the company is rethinking its ambitions and the road ahead. "Our ambition is bigger because we see what is possible," Lecat said. "If you walk into our office, we're like a young startup that has found something new and is just so eager to bring it to the world." https://lnkd.in/eNZkHHdf

Something big is happening in the global economy — and the numbers from Stripe back it up. AI is catalysing a new wave of entrepreneurship: 5 million "nanocorps" are now thriving in the US, new business registrations have jumped 40% in the Netherlands, 70% in Finland, and 80% in France. These aren't slow-burn startups — they're scaling 5x faster than businesses did just a year ago, and they're crossing borders from day one. The age of the lean, AI-native company is here. Last week at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco, 9,000+ of the world's most forward-thinking businesses gathered — and the message was clear: Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for the agentic era. Across 288 product and feature launches, the highlights were impossible to ignore. The Agentic Commerce Suite now includes Google alongside OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta. Metronome + Tempo delivers real-time usage billing, closing the gap between cost and revenue to milliseconds. And Radar + Stripe Signals have already blocked 3M+ fraudulent trial sign-ups across high-growth AI businesses — including 2,000+ abusive users stopped every single day for ElevenLabs. The question for every business in APAC right now isn't whether AI agents will reshape commerce — it's whether you have the right infrastructure partner when they do. With Stripe Treasury expanding, growing stablecoin and cross-border capabilities, and a platform purpose-built for machine-to-machine commerce, Stripe is uniquely positioned to help you grow — faster, smarter, and globally. If you're ready to build for what's next, let's connect. 🚀

My favorite talk from Stripe Sessions 2026 ✨ If I saw you last week, there’s a good chance you already heard me talk about this, Emily Sands and the solopreneur / “nanocorp” trend (I really couldn’t stop bringing it up 😊). Here’s the full talk, highly recommend listening it if you’re thinking about where AI, entrepreneurship, and the future of work are heading. #StripeSessions #AIeconomy #Solopreneur #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfWork #Startups #AInative #Innovation #TechTrends #DigitalEconomy

ICYMI: Sierra is raising $950 million at a $15.8 billion valuation: The customer service AI startup reached $150 million in annual recurring revenue in its first eight quarters http://dlvr.it/TSNb94

The line between AI vendor and VC is starting to disappear... OpenAI’s decision to offer every YC startup $2 million in API tokens for equity is a preview of a different startup economy, where the firms providing the intelligence layer also shape who is building, how quickly they build, and on top of whose stack they grow. For founders, this is powerful because it cuts the cost of experimentation dramatically. For the ecosystem, it should make us pause, because the same mechanism can create a generation of startups that move fast while becoming structurally dependent before they have real leverage.

Glad to have been part of the Founder Session at Google for Startups Hub, T-Hub today. Great conversations with founders and growth leaders from Cognida.ai, KonnectNXT and Beacon.li on building and selling enterprise AI products — a lot of it hit close to home. As someone building Nine Square Investments ,an AI-driven quantitative trading firm & Underlay AI , Software for agents. Rooms like this are exactly where you sharpen your thinking. The panel, the Q&A, the networking after. All of it was worth it. Thanks to Anvesh Nandamuru and the T-Hub team for putting this together. More to come from Nine Square. 🔲