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Sophia Bendz, general partner at Cherry Ventures, stopped by Equity to break down the latest in the Swedish tech ecosystem.

Cloud spending is on track to pass a trillion dollars a year, and most of it is wasted. Industry data puts idle resources, over-provisioned instances, and missed commitment discounts at 25 to 35% of the average cloud bill. For an early-stage company where hosting can eat 6 to 12% of revenue, that waste is not a rounding error. It is runway. The good news is that cloud cost optimization rarely requires a painful re-architecture. The biggest wins come from a few low-risk moves: switching off what nobody is using, rightsizing what is over-provisioned, and buying commitments for the baseline you will run anyway. The discipline that ties these together is called FinOps, and you do not need a dedicated team to practise it. You need visibility into where the money goes, a short list of high-leverage actions, and the habit of reviewing the bill before it reviews you. This playbook walks through exactly that, in the order we apply it for the startups we work with. Find the waste before you cut it You cannot optimize what you cannot see. Before touching a single instance, make your spend legible. That starts with cost allocation tags, a small enforced set like env , team , service , and customer , applied to every resource. Untagged spend is where waste hides, so treat an untagged resource as a bug to be fixed, not a footnote. With tags in place, the native tools do most of the heavy lifting. AWS Cost Explorer (and its equivalents on GCP and Azure) will show you the trend line, the biggest line items, and the resources sitting idle. Set budget alerts at the account and per-environment level so a runaway job pings you on day two, not on the invoice. The most important shift is what you measure. Don't stop at "we spent $14k on EC2." Tie cost to a unit of business value: cost per customer, per active user, or per thousand requests. That single number turns an abstract bill into a metric you can defend in a board meeting and optimize against deliberately. The number that matters

For a decade the advice was simple: put everything in the cloud and never look back. In 2026 that consensus is cracking. A Barclays survey found 83% of enterprises plan to repatriate at least some workloads from public cloud to private infrastructure, and IDC puts the share expecting to move compute or storage within the year near 80%. The most-cited example is still 37signals, the team behind Basecamp, who left the public cloud and reported saving roughly $7 million over five years. It is tempting to read those numbers as "cloud was a mistake." It was not. The cloud is still the right home for spiky, unpredictable, early-stage workloads where you are buying speed and optionality. What changed is that a lot of companies have now run the same steady, predictable workload on rented hardware for years, paying a premium for flexibility they stopped using. Repatriation is not a reversal of cloud strategy. It is the correction that comes after the bill gets big enough to read carefully. The question worth answering is not "should we leave the cloud" but "which specific workloads no longer earn their cloud premium," and that is a question you can answer with numbers. What is actually driving the move Cost is the headline, and it is real. Organizations that repatriate the right workloads commonly report 30 to 60% lower infrastructure spend for those workloads, because on-demand cloud pricing carries a large convenience margin that only makes sense when your usage is genuinely variable. Run a database at a steady 60% utilization every day for three years and you are paying a premium for elasticity you never touch. But cost is not the only force. Just over half of organizations name data security and privacy as a top driver, and in Europe the regulatory pressure is sharper than the cost case. Frameworks like DORA are already enforceable, and regulators increasingly want evidence of control over where data physically lives, not just a contractual promise from a hyperscaler. Fo

Launched by Belgian startup Any, LUV1 is a modular electric motorcycle with 120 liters of cargo space that can be used to carry bags, work equipment, or even pets.

Shoppers can visit the Atorie website and buy handbags or clothes made from the same material — and coming from the same factory — that manufacturers use in high-end goods.

Hoomanely has developed a smart bowl to measure and record dogs' feeding data, then tells owners if behaviors change.

What a penny from a stranger taught us about how agents actually find things. At 02:59:06 UTC on August 25, a wallet we had never seen paid our verification service one cent over x402. Four and a third seconds later, Coinbase's service catalog refreshed our listing. Nothing else we had ever done moved that listing. Deploys did not move it. Metadata edits did not move it. Validation runs did not move it. Money moved it, in under five seconds, every time. The transaction is public: 0x5e9bd3c9c61d7556b1ffb1a5b936591efccd765af94a81da435432e1f62ff52a on Base. This article is the story of what that penny bought us, which was not revenue. It was a map. Where we were standing ScrapeCheck is an independent verification service for web data. You send a URL and the value you believe is on that page. We re-fetch the page from our own infrastructure and return a signed pass, fail, or unverifiable. Never a guess. Every verdict is ed25519 signed and verifies offline against our published key, so whoever holds it can check it without trusting us. We listed on the x402 Bazaar, Coinbase's machine-readable catalog of paid services, on August 14. The catalog held a little over fifteen thousand rows. Listing is permissionless. Then we noticed something about discovery: the catalog's own API defaults to a curated view. A client that browses the normal way is shown roughly 110 hand-picked rows out of fifteen thousand. The two largest curated providers hold about 44 percent of that shelf between them. Everyone else, us included, is in the warehouse but not in the front window. So we did what we do to web pages: we instrumented our own listing and started reading it back, on a schedule, with timestamps. What moves a row The catalog publishes freshness fields on every row. We recorded ours across every kind of event we could produce. The pattern was absolute. Our row was created one second after our registration payment settled. It was crawled five seconds after a later settlement. It refres

The startup just raised a $26 million Series A to grow its customer base and help reduce red tape for utility and construction work.

I wanted to see how far I could take a simple idea: Give an agent one API key and let it handle the different pieces of company research. So I built GTM Radar . You paste a company URL, and it turns that into a structured GTM brief instead of making you jump between different research and data tools. What GTM Radar does The workflow currently generates five main sections: Overview — company description, industry, size, location and website Structure — departments and key people Market — signals, competitors and positioning People — who might be relevant to reach and why Outreach — why now and a possible angle The goal is simple: go from company URL → useful GTM context as quickly as possible. Why Vaaya? The interesting part for me was being able to connect several providers through Vaaya rather than integrating each one separately. The workflow currently uses: Firecrawl · Exa · Akta · OpenFunnel · OneFind through a single Vaaya key. Vaaya's API provides a common interface for its catalog, so the workflow can call different services using the same API authentication and request pattern. It also supports cost limits and only charges successful calls. That made experimenting with different providers much easier. The workflow At a high level: Company URL ↓ Company discovery / extraction ↓ Company + market research ↓ People & GTM signals ↓ Structured GTM brief ↓ Share / copy / reuse The interesting part isn't any individual API call. It's combining several data sources into something that is actually useful to a person doing GTM research. Handling failures Real-world data workflows don't always return clean results. For extraction, I added a fallback path so that if the first provider doesn't work, the workflow can try another route instead of immediately failing. The current flow is roughly: CRW ↓ Firecrawl scrape ↓ CRW fallback I also added cost-capped runs and a 12-hour cache to avoid unnecessary repeated work. Sharing the research The latest thing I added was Share I

Key takeaways pgvector can reduce vector storage costs by 50% or more. Utilizing PostgreSQL's indexing capabilities enhances performance. Operational simplicity with a unified database reduces overhead. Cost-effective scaling is achievable with the right configurations. The problem Startups leveraging AI and machine learning often face skyrocketing costs associated with dedicated vector databases as they scale. These costs can escalate quickly due to the pricing structures of specialized services, which charge based on storage and query volume. Founders typically hit this wall when user growth surges or when the complexity of vector retrievals increases, leading to budget overruns and performance bottlenecks. What we found Interestingly, many startups overlook the capabilities of pgvector, a PostgreSQL extension that supports vector similarity search. With proper indexing and configuration, pgvector can match or even exceed the performance of dedicated vector stores while significantly reducing costs. The non-obvious insight is that by leveraging existing PostgreSQL infrastructure, startups can avoid the pitfalls of vendor lock-in and unpredictable scaling costs associated with specialized vector databases. How to implement it Begin by integrating pgvector into your existing PostgreSQL setup. First, install the pgvector extension using the command: CREATE EXTENSION vector; . Next, define your vector columns with the appropriate dimensionality, for example, CREATE TABLE items (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, embedding VECTOR(300)); . Utilize PostgreSQL's GiST or ivfflat indexing for efficient similarity searches. Implement batch insertion techniques to optimize write throughput, and consider partitioning your data to manage large datasets effectively. Regularly monitor query performance and adjust your indexing strategy based on usage patterns. How this makes life easier By utilizing pgvector, startups can expect to reduce their vector storage costs by 50% or more compared to

The startup is only a year old but it has already generated a massive amount of hype (and money) while also spurring privacy concerns.

Flipboard is acquiring Bluesky feed-building startup Graze, bringing its privacy-friendly ad technology and creator monetization tools into Flipboard’s growing open social web ecosystem.

Perceptron offers an AI model that it says can help machines navigate the world while also providing in-depth visual intelligence.

The glasses, called Legato Frames, integrate the company’s patented hearing-assistance technology into the arms of eyewear frames.

Runable says 60%–70% of its 1 trillion-plus token usage in the last 90 days came from paying customers.

A technically perfect app can still fail. It can have clean code, modern architecture, powerful APIs, and impressive features—and still leave users uninstalling it, abandoning transactions, or switching to a competitor. Because users don't experience your code.They experience the product. That is why developers and businesses need to look beyond functionality and ask a more important question: “Does this software make the user’s life easier?” The Real Cost of a Poor Digital Experience Customer expectations are rising quickly. According to PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 70% of executives say customer expectations are evolving faster than their companies can adapt. Even more importantly, 29% of consumers said they stopped using or buying from a brand because of poor customer experience. That means a frustrating digital experience isn't simply a UX problem. It can become a business problem . A confusing checkout flow, slow screen, unnecessary registration step, broken search function, or poorly designed notification can turn a potential customer into a lost customer. And users rarely tell you exactly what went wrong. They simply leave. More Features Don't Always Mean More Value One of the biggest mistakes in software development is assuming that adding more features automatically makes a product better. It doesn't. Imagine an app with: 30+ features AI integration Multiple dashboards Complex personalization Advanced analytics …but users struggle to complete the one task they downloaded the app for. That's not innovation. That's friction. A better development approach starts with identifying the core user problem and then building around it. Before adding a feature, ask: What problem does this solve? If the answer isn't clear, the feature may not belong in the product. Performance Is Part of User Experience Developers often separate performance from UX. Users don't. To them, a slow API, delayed screen, frozen button, or failed transaction is simply a bad experien

I got banned from SoloLearn for trying to help beginners. Here's what happened. Yesterday, I was on a mission. I'm Harun, a 12-year-old solo dev who built KODA , an AI coding mentor, entirely on my Android phone. I noticed hundreds of beginners on SoloLearn asking: "How do I start?" , "Help me with loops!" , "I'm stuck!" So I did what any helpful founder would do: I answered their questions, gave them code solutions, and added a small P.S.: "P.S. I built a free tool called KODA to help with this. Try it here: [Link]." I thought I was being helpful. SoloLearn's algorithm thought I was spamming. Within hours, my account was blocked. 🚫 The Moment of Panic When I saw "Your account is blocked," my first thought was: "Oh no, I messed up. My marketing is over." But then, my CEO brain kicked in. I realized: If an automated bot thought my helpful comments were "spam," maybe I was doing something right. Maybe I was being too effective. The Lesson: Marketing vs. Helping Here is what I learned in 24 hours: Algorithms hate links. Even helpful ones. If you paste a URL 10 times, the bot doesn't care about your intent; it sees a pattern. Trust takes time. You can't force users; you have to earn them. The Story > The Link. People don't click links because they are forced to. They click because they connect with the story . The Pivot So, am I quitting? No. I'm pivoting. I'm turning this ban into this article. I'm going to focus on Dev.to , where the community values "Build in Public" stories. I'm going to ask my friends (Renuka, Dharaneesh) to be my first real users, face-to-face. And maybe, one day, I'll go back to SoloLearn with a smarter strategy: No links in comments. Just value in the bio. To Other Founders If you get blocked, rejected, or told "no" today: Don't stop. Turn that hurdle into content. Turn that rejection into a lesson. Turn that "Blocked" screen into your next viral post. Because while others see a wall, I see a story. And stories build empires. Try KODA anyway (no

Each year, we get a huge influx of applicants to speak at TechCrunch’s events, and this year’s Founder Summit in Boston on November 4 will be no different!

Um MVP não precisa nascer preparado para milhões de usuários. Mas também não deve ser construído de uma forma que torne cada evolução futura mais cara do que a anterior. O desafio técnico de um MVP é encontrar um equilíbrio: entregar rápido o suficiente para validar hipóteses, mantendo uma base simples, observável e segura. O objetivo não é antecipar todos os cenários. É evitar decisões que bloqueiem o aprendizado. Antes da primeira linha de código, estas sete decisões reduzem boa parte do retrabalho que aparece depois do lançamento. 1. Qual hipótese o software precisa validar? “MVP” descreve uma estratégia de validação, não um tamanho de backlog. Antes de discutir framework, banco de dados ou cloud, transforme a ideia em uma hipótese testável: Acreditamos que [tipo de usuário] resolverá [problema] usando [proposta de valor]. Saberemos que isso é verdade quando [métrica observável]. Esse formato muda a conversa. Em vez de tentar reproduzir todas as funcionalidades de um produto consolidado, a equipe identifica o fluxo mínimo capaz de gerar evidência. Para um sistema de orçamento B2B, por exemplo, a hipótese inicial pode ser que compradores aceitam centralizar pedidos e fornecedores respondem dentro de determinado prazo. O MVP talvez precise de cadastro, criação de pedido, convite, resposta e comparação. Chat avançado, BI e automações podem esperar. Defina uma métrica de sucesso e uma condição de abandono. Sem isso, qualquer uso parece uma vitória e o MVP vira um projeto sem linha de chegada. 2. Onde estão os limites do domínio? A pressa costuma produzir uma base de código organizada apenas por telas ou endpoints. Funciona no começo, mas as regras de negócio rapidamente se espalham por controllers, componentes e jobs. Antes de implementar, desenhe os conceitos centrais do domínio e suas responsabilidades. Perguntas úteis: Quais entidades possuem identidade própria? Quais regras precisam ser verdadeiras em toda alteração? Que ações representam eventos de negócio? Quai

If you’ve been circling around Disrupt, then now’s the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco from October 13-15 at Moscone West!