🕶️ Cloudflare just pulled the plug on Free Data

Two major moves this week could redraw the roadmap for AI founders.

Author

Paula Echeverria
July 03, 2025

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Building a startup used to mean finding product–market fit. Now it also means dodging regulators, negotiating with AI overlords, and praying your server bill doesn’t double overnight.

The ground is shifting fast, not just under your business, but under the internet itself. Who controls data? Who pays to use it?

And who gets left behind when “innovation” starts carrying a cover charge?

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Eleven bullets of updates

  1. ☕ Black Rifle Coffee waives $40K in franchise fees for veterans, turning military discipline into a startup advantage.

  2. ⚡ Google’s data center energy use doubled since 2019, as AI demand collides with sustainability goals and grid strain warnings mount.

  3. 🧽 The top 10 cleaning franchises of 2025 are in, with low startup costs and recurring revenue, janitorial businesses stay quietly dominant in the franchise world.

  4. 📉 A single bad pitch deck can tank your deal: investors say even great businesses get passed over when storytelling and structure fall flat.

  5. 🧘 One founder turned rock bottom into a wellness brand, channeling personal burnout into a business built on balance, healing, and mindful routines.

  6. 💘 From swipes to startups. Business Insider reveals pitch decks from dating and social apps, offering a peek at how founders are selling connection in 2025.

  7. 📣 Online marketing overwhelms many small businesses: from SEO to social ads, founders struggle to keep up without burning out or breaking the bank.

  8. 🔓 A major data breach exposed Catwatchful stalkerware spying on thousands of Android phones, revealing photos, messages, and precise locations.

  9. 💬 New AI startup Tolan builds emotional companion chatbots, betting that loneliness is a bigger market than productivity.

  10. 💡 An accident at 18 sparked a $35M business: this founder turned adversity into a product millions now rely on daily.

  11. 💸 Perplexity rolls out a $200/month AI plan with “Pro Search” for power users, betting that premium answers are worth enterprise-level pricing.

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🤑 Cloudflare Wants to Make AI Pay to Crawl

The open internet just got a toll booth. Cloudflare, which handles traffic for millions of websites, is now blocking AI scrapers by default and launching a “Pay Per Crawl” program to help sites charge for their data. After years of AI startups training on scraped content for free, this could flip the economics of model building.

For founders, it’s a warning: your access to cheap training data may dry up fast. With over 1 million sites already blocking AI bots and Cloudflare claiming it can detect even “shadow scrapers”, the advantage may go to startups that can afford licensing deals or build their own datasets. The AI scraping gold rush is ending, and a meter is going up at the gate.

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AI Looks EXACTLY Like the Dot-Com Bubble

The rise of the internet and the rise of AI follow eerily similar timelines—Mosaic in the '90s, ChatGPT in the 2020s. Billions are pouring in, hype is skyrocketing, and history may be rhyming again. This video breaks down the parallels between two tech booms separated by 30 years, and what they can teach us about what happens next.

🕶️ Watch More Videos Here 🕶️ 

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These companies just raised money

  1. 💶 Europe’s top 20 startup rounds of 2025 total over €5B, with AI, climate tech, and fintech dominating the continent’s biggest bets so far.

  2. 📐 Figma files for IPO, aiming to raise $1.5B and test whether design-first startups can still draw big exits in a shaky tech market.

  3. 🚙 Rivian gets another $1B from Volkswagen, as the EV startup leans on partnerships to survive slumping sales and a brutal path to profitability.

  4. 💰 Catalio Capital closes $445M Fund IV to back breakthrough biotech, betting big on startups at the edge of science and longevity.

  5. 🤖 Genesis AI launches with $105M seed to build robot-ready AI models, aiming to give machines better instincts and a sense of “common sense.”

  6. 🛍️ Remark raises $16M to scale “human-powered” expert models for e-commerce, blending AI with real people to boost trust and conversion.

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🤖 The AI Wild West might be over

In a surprise 99–1 vote, the Senate killed a proposed 10-year ban on state-level AI laws, a move that would’ve let startups avoid a patchwork of compliance headaches. Big backers like OpenAI, Anduril, and Andreessen Horowitz had lobbied hard for it, hoping to keep regulation centralized (or nonexistent). Now, every state is back in the driver’s seat, free to pass its own AI rules.

For founders, this means regulation isn’t just coming: it’s coming in 50 flavors. From privacy laws to deepfake bans and autonomous vehicle rules, startups won’t get a federal grace period to scale first and ask permission later. The vote signals that the “move fast” era of AI might have real speed limits after all.

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