标签：#startup

Anthropic's popularity with business users is growing so well that the latest beef with the government might actually boost it, data from Ramp suggests.

Last quarter our OpenAI bill went from $620 to $2,480 in 23 days. No new features shipped. No traffic spike. Zero error alerts. Deployment logs were clean. Just a number climbing in silence while five engineers stared at dashboards that gave us totals and nothing else. This is what we found. And why "cost monitoring" is completely the wrong mental model. The dashboard that answers the wrong question First thing I did was open the OpenAI usage dashboard. It showed me a total. A graph going up. A model breakdown. I knew we spent $2,480. I still had no idea which feature spent it, which service triggered it, or which user was responsible. The dashboard was answering "how much" while we were desperately asking "what caused it." Those are completely different questions. Almost every cost tool on the market only answers the first one. That distinction matters more than most engineering teams realise until they are staring at a bill like ours. Three features, zero visibility We had three features hitting GPT-4o: A document summariser, triggered manually by users An inline suggestion engine, triggered on keystrokes A batch report generator, triggered on export Any one of them could be the problem. Or all three. Or one specific tenant hammering one endpoint in a loop nobody noticed. Without attribution at the feature, service, and user level, we were just guessing. So I did what most engineers do: optimised the feature that felt most expensive. Added caching to the one that ran most often. Two weeks later the bill was still climbing. Guessing at cost problems without attribution data is exactly like debugging a performance issue without a profiler. You move things around and hope. 48 hours of real data A teammate dropped CostReveal in our Slack. I set it up that evening. The Node.js SDK wraps your existing provider calls. You instrument each one with a feature name, service context, and user or tenant ID. That is the entire integration for the base case: import { CostReveal

African payments infrastructure company Flutterwave has hit a new valuation and landed blockchain company Ripple as investor and partner.

TL;DR — A few weeks ago I tested four AI tools on a build job: a website for my son's cricket academy. This time the job had nothing to do with code. The coach just wanted a banner he could post. Same four tools, totally different result. ChatGPT made the best image, Grok made the best video, Gemini wouldn't make anything, and Claude tried to solve a graphics problem by writing HTML. If you read the last post , you've met my son's cricket coach. He runs MMCA — Maverick Master's Cricket Academy. Started in 2020, based in Bengaluru, genuinely good with the kids. The website is live now and parents have started messaging him on WhatsApp. So last weekend he came back with the next thing he needed, which is the thing every small academy actually runs on: "Can you make me a weekend batch banner? Something I can post in the parent groups." Now, this is a completely different job from the last one. That first experiment was design and development — agents writing real code, running tests, deploying to Cloudflare. This one is just graphics. No repo, no deploy, nobody reviewing a pull request. Just: here's my logo, here's a sample I like, make me something I'd be happy to send out. So I figured I'd run the same four tools again and see what happened. Same brief, same logo, everything on the default model with no special settings : ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. Here's roughly what I typed, the way a normal client would brief you: Similar to this banner, make one for MMCA Academy (since 2020, logo attached). Weekend batch Sat 4:30—7, Sun 7—9:30pm. Add a small phrase like the sample. Be creative, keep it simple, but don't copy the sample exactly. The whole test really came down to one instruction: be creative, but don't copy. Whatever each tool did with that told me everything. Round 1: the static banner ChatGPT got it on the first go. "WEEKEND BATCH. TRAIN. PLAY. GROW." Logo top-left, the "Since 2020" bit kept, timings in clean little cards, an enrol number, three badges acros

We Built Korexbase: A Lead Generation Platform for Finding Business Leads by City and Niche Building software is exciting. Building software that solves a real problem is even better. Over the past few months, we've been working on Korexbase , a lead generation platform designed to help businesses discover targeted leads faster. The Problem Many agencies, sales teams, freelancers, and startups spend hours manually searching for potential customers. The process usually looks something like this: Search for businesses online Collect contact information Copy everything into spreadsheets Repeat the process every day It's slow, repetitive, and difficult to scale. We wanted to simplify that workflow. The Idea Korexbase allows users to search for business leads by: City Industry Business category Instead of manually collecting data, users can generate leads and manage them through a clean dashboard. The goal isn't to replace sales. The goal is to help businesses spend less time searching and more time closing deals. Building the Platform A major focus during development was creating a dashboard that feels simple and easy to navigate. Some areas we focused heavily on included: Responsive layouts User-friendly navigation Clear data presentation Fast loading interfaces Consistent design patterns Challenges Like most projects, we faced a number of challenges: Designing for Simplicity One of the biggest lessons was that adding more features doesn't automatically create a better product. We spent a lot of time simplifying interfaces and removing unnecessary complexity. Creating a Better Dashboard Experience Presenting lead generation data in a way that is useful without overwhelming users required multiple design iterations. We focused on: Better spacing Better visual hierarchy Cleaner cards and tables Improved responsiveness Product Positioning An interesting challenge was refining the product's positioning. As development progressed, we learned more about what users actually w

Respond.io, one of Malaysia startups to watch, uses AI agents to handle high volumes of customer inquiries and charges per convo, not per seat.

At Inithouse — a studio running parallel product experiments — we built Be Recommended , a tool that checks how visible your brand is across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. The idea sounded simple: query multiple AI models, score the results, show a report. It was not simple. Here are four technical mistakes we made shipping v1 — and the fixes that actually survived production. Mistake 1: Rate Limiting Was an Afterthought We treated rate limits as edge cases. They were not. Every AI provider has different rate-limit headers, different backoff expectations, and different definitions of "too many requests." Our first architecture just retried on 429. That turned a rate limit into a cascade — one provider throttling triggered a retry storm that cascaded to the others. The fix: Per-provider circuit breakers with exponential backoff. Each provider gets its own state machine. When a circuit opens, we serve cached results for that provider and mark the score as "partial" in the UI. Users see real data, not a spinner that never resolves. At Audit Vibe Coding — another tool in our portfolio focused on code quality audits — we observed the same pattern in a different domain: external API dependencies need isolation. The lesson transferred directly. Mistake 2: The Caching Strategy Was Too Naive Our first cache key was query + model . That breaks immediately — AI model responses drift over time, and a cached result from two weeks ago is misleading. We also had no invalidation strategy beyond TTL. The fix: Cache by query + model + week_number . Weekly invalidation with stale-while-revalidate: serve the cached score instantly, trigger a background refresh, update the display when new data arrives. Users get instant feedback and fresh data within the same session. We measured the impact across our portfolio: stale-while-revalidate cut perceived load time from 8+ seconds to under 1 second for returning visitors. The background refresh means scores stay current without the

Indian IT services company HCLTech is investing $150 million in the Bengaluru startup.

NewCore argues the next challenge in enterprise security will be managing AI agents, not people.

We Built ARK Because Our Customer Support Was Spread Across 4 Apps The Problem A few months ago, our small team was drowning. Not in customers (well, a little) — but in tabs. WhatsApp open in one window. Instagram DMs in another. A live chat widget buried in a third. Email in a fourth. Every time a customer reached out, someone had to figure out: which channel did this come from, has anyone replied already, and what was the context of the last conversation? The result was predictable: slower replies, repeated questions to customers, and a support workflow that didn't scale past a handful of conversations a day. Why Existing Tools Didn't Fit We looked at the usual suspects — Intercom, Zendesk, Front. They're solid products, but they're built for large support teams with big budgets and dedicated admins. We needed something simpler: a single inbox, AI doing the repetitive work, and a setup that doesn't take weeks to configure. What We Built ARK pulls every customer conversation — WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email, live chat — into one inbox. On top of that, AI handles three things: Drafting replies based on conversation history and context Summarizing long threads so anyone on the team can jump in without reading 40 messages Routing conversations to the right person automatically based on topic or channel The goal wasn't to replace human support — it was to remove the busywork so the team can focus on actually helping people. Where We Are Now ARK is live with a 7-day free trial (auto-renews after that). We're still early, and we're shaping the roadmap based on real feedback from teams managing support across multiple channels. If you're dealing with the same multichannel chaos we were, I'd love to hear how you're handling it — and what's still missing from the tools you've tried. 🔗 https://byark.ai/

Orbio announces $21 Million Series A in round led by Dawn Capital.

Startups are trying to "ride that SpaceX IPO wave."

Tech leaders debate whether the Anthropic episode is a wake-up call for India’s AI ambitions.

Andrew Yang made a list of everything Americans overpay for — housing, food, wireless — and thinks the next startup gold rush is giving that money back.

Originally published on the Prufa blog . In June 2026 we pointed Prufa's free audit at 50 products that had just launched on Show HN — every launch from the previous 30 days that earned at least 10 points. These are products at their moment of maximum attention: front page, real traffic, founders watching the comments. The headline numbers, from the 49 audits that completed (one site couldn't be reached by our runner): 100% of the 49 launches had at least one machine-verified finding. 78% — 38 of 49 — had at least one critical finding. 40 critical and 61 warning findings in total, every one verified by deterministic checks against captured browser evidence. No site is named in this post. The point isn't to embarrass anyone — it's that these failures are systematic, and if these teams have them on launch day, you probably do too. Methodology, briefly Each site got the same audit a free Prufa run does: a real browser loads the public pages, captures network traffic, console output, cookies, and response codes, and a fixed suite of deterministic checks grades the evidence. Same input, same verdict. Every number below is from a code-verified check — no LLM opinions are counted anywhere in this data. One honest caveat: our export keeps only the top findings per site, so the per-issue counts below are floors , not totals. The real numbers are equal or worse. What actually breaks at website launch: the numbers Sites affected (of 49) Finding Severity 38 No analytics events detected critical 24 No canonical link on entry page info 22 Cookies set without the Secure attribute warning 14 Broken links warning 12 No <h1> heading on entry page info 11 No robots.txt info 10 JavaScript console errors during page load warning 10 Missing meta description warning 8 Images missing alt text info 7 Missing Open Graph tags info 3 Tag container loads, but no analytics events fire warning 2 Canonical URL pointing to a different host critical The most common launch bug: analytics that record

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The Budget You Approved Isn't the Budget You'll Pay You approved $180K for a senior AI engineer. Eighteen months later, you've spent $282K and you're still not sure the hire is working out. This isn't unusual. It's the rule. Companies hiring AI engineers for the first time routinely underestimate total cost by 40–60%. Here's a breakdown of where that gap comes from — and why most founders don't see it until it's too late. The 56% Gap: Where It Comes From 1. Recruiting Costs Are Higher Than You Think (~12–18% of first-year salary) AI engineer recruiting isn't like standard software recruiting. Specialized headhunters charge 20–25% of first-year salary. Even if you find someone through your network, you'll spend founder or VP time on 15–30 hours of interviewing, plus take-home evals that the best candidates increasingly decline. If you use a staffing firm, add the markup. If you DIY it, add the opportunity cost. Typical recruiting overhead: $22,000–$40,000 per hire 2. Onboarding Takes Longer for AI Roles (~2–3 months of ramp) An AI engineer hired to build production agent systems isn't productive on day 1. They need to understand your domain, your data, your existing architecture, and your risk tolerance for AI-generated outputs. The ramp is real — most teams see 60–90 days before meaningful output. At $180K salary, two months of ramp is $30,000 in salary with limited ROI. Add engineering time for mentoring (typically 20% of a senior engineer's time during ramp), and you're adding another $15,000–$20,000. Ramp cost: $30,000–$50,000 3. Infrastructure Spend Scales With Experiments AI engineers experiment. That's the job. Every experiment has a GPU bill, an API bill, and a storage bill. Early-stage teams routinely see $3,000–$8,000/month in AI infrastructure spend once they've hired their first AI engineer — much of it from exploratory work that doesn't ship. Over a year: $36,000–$96,000 in infra costs that weren't in the original headcount budget 4. Tooling and Data Cos

Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics — Theker's machines are built to be reconfigured.

on may 28 anthropic announced a $65 billion series h round at a post-money valuation of about $965 billion, which makes it, on paper, the most valuable ai startup in the world. the round was led by altimeter capital, dragoneer, greenoaks and sequoia, on top of earlier hyperscaler commitments that included around $15 billion with $5 billion of it from amazon. the headline everyone ran with is that anthropic passed openai. that part is true, but the comparison is messier than the headline, and the more interesting story is what is generating the number. i build small dev tools and write comparison content, and a lot of what i ship runs on top of anthropic's models. so when the company that makes the tools i depend on nearly touches a trillion dollars, i do not read it as a sports score. i read it as a question about whether the thing i am betting on is durable, and what i should do differently because of it. here is the honest version of both. the number, with the caveats intact the $965 billion figure is consistent across cnbc, axios, morningstar, al jazeera and euronews, so i trust it. what i would not do is state the gap over openai as a precise fact, because the sources do not agree on openai's number. axios pegged openai's most recent valuation at $730 billion. other outlets put it closer to $850 billion off a record round earlier in the year. either way anthropic is ahead right now, but "ahead by $115 billion" and "ahead by $235 billion" are different sentences, and anyone quoting one as gospel is rounding away the uncertainty. the safe claim is the one i will make: as of late may 2026, anthropic is the most valuably-priced private ai company, and it got there fast. the reporting has it roughly tripling from a $380 billion mark in february. the part that matters more to me is the revenue. anthropic crossed a $47 billion run-rate earlier in may. that is the line that turns a valuation from a vibe into something with a floor under it. you can argue about whether $

Bluesky's latest feature is group chats, arriving amid a shift in focus on building features for smaller communities.