🕶️ 'Boring' AI Startups Are Quietly Winning

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Ten bullets of updates

1. 💸 Business Insider ranked the top early-stage investors backing the next wave of breakout startups, before most people even hear about them.

2. 🧠 Tensor9 helps vendors deploy anywhere by simulating environments with digital twins. No more surprises when moving from cloud to on-prem or edge.

3.  🤣 Rahul Ligma is back in tech as co-founder of an AI data startup used by Harvard. Yes, the same guy who faked getting fired from Twitter.

4. 💻 OpenAI quietly shut down Codex after years of declining use, despite being the tech that powered the first version of GitHub Copilot.

5. 🎮 Epic says Apple is blocking Fortnite from U.S. and EU app stores again, reigniting their long-running feud over antitrust and app marketplace control.

6. 🚐 Canoo can keep selling assets after a judge rejected a last-minute attempt by mystery investors to block the EV company’s survival plan. 

7. 🛂 Trump’s visa crackdown is back as tech workers face renewed scrutiny under proposals to tighten immigration, sparking concern across the startup ecosystem.

8. 💊 Telehealth startups are pivoting to weight loss as demand for FDA-approved liraglutide surges, despite shortages and rising scrutiny over off-label use.

9. 🧫 Fieldstone Bio is engineering microbes that can detect threats like TNT, arsenic, and pollutants; turning bacteria into tiny, living sensors.

10. 🧩 EA is battling anti-DEI mods in The Sims 4 as offensive content resurfaces online, challenging the game's inclusive legacy and highlighting the ongoing struggle between game developers and discriminatory mod creators.

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🤖 Everyone’s Talking About AGI, But No One Agrees What It Is

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has become Silicon Valley’s new obsession; and its favorite pitch. OpenAI says they’re building it. Elon Musk claims it’s already “a year away.” Founders are name-dropping it in decks, investors are funding it, and regulators are scrambling to define it. But here's the thing: nobody really agrees on what AGI actually is.

A new piece in The New York Times cuts through the hype and attempts to answer the question: is AGI a real scientific goal or just an evolving buzzword? The article lays out a growing divide. Some see AGI as a clear benchmark (machines matching or surpassing human intelligence across all tasks), while others argue it’s a slippery marketing term that conveniently moves the goalposts every year.

And yet, the ambiguity hasn’t stopped anyone. In the startup world, AGI is already being sold: tools claiming to “reason,” “plan,” and “think” like humans, even when they're often just fancy autocomplete engines with confidence issues.

The bigger question might be: who benefits from calling it AGI now and what happens if the public buys it before the tech can deliver?

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AI Looks EXACTLY Like the Dot-Com Bubble

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These companies just raised money

1. 💰 Redpoint raised $650M for a new early-stage fund, signaling fresh confidence in startups just three years after its last big raise.

2. ⚖️ Harvey is reportedly raising $250M at a $5B valuation, as the legal AI startup continues its meteoric rise with backing from OpenAI and top law firms.

3. 🚑 Sprinter Health raised $55M to grow its at-home healthcare service, betting that house calls are the future of patient convenience and preventive care.

4. 🎬 Moonvalley just raised $53M to fuel its AI video ambitions, joining the race to generate Hollywood-style content with minimal human input.

5. ⚛️ The Nuclear Company raised $46M to build massive reactor sites, betting that big, not small, is the future of next-gen nuclear energy.

6. 🍼 Hedra raised $32M from a16z for its AI voice app that powers talking baby podcasts and other surreal audio experiments with synthetic speech.

7. 🛍️ Doji raised $14M to make virtual try-ons fun, using AI avatars that let shoppers see how outfits look without leaving their couch.

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⚖️ Legal Tech Is Quietly Booming—and Investors Are Taking Notice

While everyone’s distracted by humanoid robots and AGI moonshots, a different kind of AI gold rush is happening in a place no one expected: the legal industry.

According to Business Insider, legal tech startups are raising more money than ever, despite broader VC pullbacks. Why? Because AI is doing what it does best here: automating expensive, repetitive work. Think document review, contract drafting, compliance, and even legal research. It’s not sexy, but it’s exactly the kind of ROI-driven use case investors love right now.

Forget Better Call Saul. These days it’s more like Better Call GPT. VCs say legal tech is one of the few sectors where AI isn’t just hype, it’s a clear productivity unlock. And for startups?

There’s a rare combo of slow-moving incumbents, high margins, and huge room for modernization.

Boring? Maybe. But boring gets funded.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

1. Startmate | Deadline: May 18 | Australia

2. AI Startup Pitch Night with Qlay, Context VC & Startup Intros l May 19 l SFO

3. Crash Course on Startup Fundraising with Caya (Slidebean CEO) l May 20 l Online

4. The Startup Stories by Bengaluru Entrepreneurs l May 20 l Bengaluru

5. Slidebean’s Crash Course in Financial Modeling l May 22 l Online

6. Startup Battlefield 200 | Deadline: June 9 | Global

7. Entrepreneur First London - Summer | Deadline: July 1 | UK

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