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luba yudasina @LubaYudasinaNew pod drop!! Loved meeting Dylan Fox (@YouveGotFox), founder and CEO of @AssemblyAI. He’s one of the calmest founders I’ve met: nine years in, 100M API calls a day, and he still calls the whole thing “fun.” @AssemblyAI also just announced AssemblyAI-TTS-1, a text-to-speech model built for voice agents. As someone who prefers talking to writing, I’m really excited for this launch. We talk about: Five years without a market → Series A in 2022 -Why the last 10% of an AI product is the whole product -Target furniture as a risk strategy -“Everyone’s still just figuring it out” -180% net dollar retention with zero contracts -Married to a founder whose company took off while his didn’t -Why he deleted X in 2023 (I think he’s back tho) -“I’m just a builder” and so much more! Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (01:16) Dylan Fox, Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI (01:46) YC's first AI batch and five years to a Series A (05:49) Granola, Tolan and the voice agents built on AssemblyAI (07:27) Why the last 10% of an AI product creates product market fit (09:43) 180% net dollar retention with zero committed contracts (14:04) Field sales techs earning $20K more commission with voice AI (17:47) Voice as the primary interface to all hardware and software (24:42) Teaching himself to code to build a DoorDash for toiletries (29:17) Rejected by Twilio, hired by Cisco (33:07) The Amazon Echo that started AssemblyAI (40:56) Applying to YC a month late with no co-founder (45:01) How Daniel Gross got him into YC (1:01:30) Scaling up too early and resetting go-to-market (1:07:21) Leaning on Accel, Insight and founders from Synthesia and Pinecone (1:14:19) Why he quit X (1:15:10) Outro
Zhenpeng (Leo) Lin @Markak_As part of our Open Defense Initiative, we used dfs-large1 from @depthfirstlabs to uncover two memory corruption bugs and a sandbox escape in Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. One bug had been present for more than eight years. We combined each memory corruption bug with the sandbox escape to build two separate exploit chains and won 2 v8ctf slots!
Legora @WeAreLegoraWe have raised a $550 million Series E at a $8.8B valuation to accelerate our growth in the U.S. and globally, and deepen investment in the Legora aOS, our agentic operating system for legal work. @Atreidesmgmt leads this round, alongside new investors @BaronCapital, @CapitalGroup, @Fidelity, @GladeBrookCap, and @jpmorgan. Every major existing investor is participating. We’re grateful to have partners who share our ambition and our long-term view. We build AI together with the people who use it. That’s always been our approach. Our customers help shape what we build, pushing us to go further on the work that matters. This is the most exciting time in history to be a lawyer, and we’re lucky to be in the middle of it. Read the full release:
Bob McGrew @bobmcgrewaiWe started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
Bob McGrew @bobmcgrewaiWe started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
Nebius @nebiusaiThe AI Builder Program is expanding across Europe with $10M in total support across compute grants, capital, and community programs. Are you building open models, developer tools, or applications on top of them? The program helps builders go from experimentation to scale-up through: - Compute grants for selected projects in areas such as open models, coding agents, post-training, and evals - VC connections to help turn open source projects into companies - Hackathons and demo days with communities including @AITinkerers, @techeurope_ , and @esra_robotics to build, connect, and share your work We’re kicking off the European expansion this week at #NVIDIAGTC Berlin with @NVIDIAAI, @Accel, and a network of European VCs. Building AI in Europe? Details below. 👇
