From Chat to Code in 5 Minutes
Inside the startups automating software, hiring, and development
Hey,
Another Tuesday. Another newsletter.
Quick thought. Why most startup demos fail?
Airbnb’s early prototype? PowerPoint slides. They tested the concept with basic mockups before building anything. Most startups do the opposite—build first, validate never.
The difference? They knew a prototype answers one question. Not “will this work?” but which specific question are we testing?
Three types:
Role - Does anyone actually need this?
Look & Feel - Will they enjoy using it?
Implementation - Can we build it?
Pick one. Answer it. Throw it away. Repeat.
Airbnb raised $600K with their early pitch deck. Today they’re worth $77B. They didn’t build the perfect product. They prototyped fast enough to learn what mattered.
“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” - Herb Kelleher
Now, to this week’s startups...
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Latest in startups
🇺🇸 🇮🇳 Emergent
Funding - Series A, $23M; Investors - Lightspeed India, Together Fund, Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Mistral founding scientist and current Thinking Machines researcher Devendra Chaplot, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Emergent is building a “vibe coding” platform—an AI-powered system that turns natural language into production-ready software. Users describe an idea in plain English and the platform generates a full-stack application with backend, database, authentication, integrations, and deployment.
Building software has always required code, capital, or a technical co-founder. Non-technical founders and small businesses get stuck because engineering talent is expensive, no-code platforms are rigid, and most AI code tools produce half-baked outputs that need expert supervision. As a result, many ideas never move past the whiteboard.
Emergent’s answer is a conversation-to-code platform. Agents handle planning, architecture, testing, debugging, and deployment. A builder can describe a product in chat and get a working application with live preview, GitHub integration, and secure hosting. The company claims full applications are delivered in under five minutes.
Adoption has been fast. Since launching in June 2024, more than 1M people have built 1.5M apps. The company reported reaching $15M ARR within 90 days of launch, making it one among the fastest growing AI startups on record.
Hiring: Analyst, Founder’s Office, Affiliate Marketing Specialist, Growth Hacker - Bangalore; Growth Lead, Product Manager, Product Experience Specialist - Intern - San Francisco
🇺🇸 Alex
Funding - Series A, $17M; Investors - Peak XV Partners (lead), Y Combinator, Uncorrelated Ventures, Tim Sackett, Kris Fredrickson, Dalton Caldwell, CHROs at Fortune 500 companies; The $3M Seed was led by 1984 Ventures.
Alex is an AI recruiter that automates the first step of hiring: the screening interview. Instead of one-way video recordings or recruiter phone calls, Alex uses voice AI to run live two-way conversations with candidates right after they apply.
Recruiting is a volume nightmare. Companies spend over $5k per hire, hiring processes average 30 days, and most of that is just recruiters and hiring managers grinding through interviews. Meanwhile hundreds of applicants compete for one position and only a handful get interviewed.
The real issue? Human recruiters physically can’t talk to everyone. Good candidates get lost because there’s not enough time, and recruiters burn out on repetitive screening calls asking the same background check / salary / availability questions over and over.
Plus existing video interview platforms suck - they use one-way recordings with cookie-cutter questions that create a terrible candidate experience and low completion rates.
Alex conducts thousands of interviews per day with live, two-way conversations. It’s not a bot spitting canned questions - the AI asks personalized follow-up questions in real-time based on what the candidate says.
The platform handles phone screens, video interviews, background checks, salary discussions, fraud detection - basically everything a recruiter does in that first call. Then it generates detailed feedback customized to your hiring goals so recruiters can focus on pre-qualified candidates.
Hiring: Product Designer, Product Manager, Fullstack Software Engineer, Founding Product Marketer, Talent Lead, SDR, Customer Success - San Francisco
🇺🇸 Greptile
Funding - Series A, $17M; Investors - Peak XV Partners (lead), Y Combinator, Uncorrelated Ventures, Tim Sackett, Kris Fredrickson, Dalton Caldwell, CHROs at Fortune 500 companies; The $3M Seed was led by 1984 Ventures.
Greptile is an AI code reviewer that plugs into GitHub and GitLab, reviewing pull requests with full context of the codebase. Instead of syntax checks or linting, it provides in-line comments that catch bugs, flag antipatterns, and offer architecture-level suggestions.
Code reviews are essential for quality assurance, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. Yet, they’re time-consuming and manual, especially in large codebases. Human reviewers miss bugs, lack context across the entire system, and create bottlenecks that slow down development velocity. As time goes on and multiple programmers work on a codebase, it tends to get very difficult to understand. Teams need someone who has deep understanding of the code but that person doesn’t exist or is too busy.
Greptile’s approach is context-aware automation. It provides comments on PRs with click-to-accept suggestions for minor fixes, generates mermaid diagrams, delivers file-by-file breakdowns, and assigns confidence scores for every PR. Teams can also set custom rules, style guides, and context that align with their coding standards.
As you use Greptile, it infers new rules and idiosyncrasies about your team and codebase from your comments, replies, and 👍/👎 reactions . The API has two parameters: connect repositories for indexing, then add natural language queries like “How does authentication work in this codebase?”
Hiring: Software Engineer (Frontend), Software Engineer (Generalist), Software Engineer (Infrastructure), Founding Account Executive (Enterprise) - San Francisco
Top news
Swift tests blockchain rails: Swift, the global financial messaging network, is running a pilot with 30 banks to use blockchain for cross-border transfers. The goal is to replace multi-day settlement times with near-instant, fully trackable payments.
Trump paves way for $14B TikTok deal that puts US investors in the driver’s seat: Trump just approved a TikTok deal where American investors, including Oracle, Michael Dell, and Rupert Murdoch, will control 80% of a new US entity valued at $14 billion, with ByteDance keeping 20%. The new structure means the US company will control TikTok’s algorithm and content, technically complying with the 2024 law requiring ByteDance’s divestiture while keeping the app running.
A new coding contender? Anthropic just rolled out Claude Sonnet 4.5, the latest in its mid-sized model series. Early tests suggest it’s strong at code generation, though some reviewers rank it a notch below OpenAI’s Codex in certain tasks. The release also comes with an upgraded API and hints of a “vibe-coding” feature in the works. Pricing lands at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
xAI pushes back in India: X, the social platform owned by xAI, is challenging the Indian government’s Sayhog portal. The system allows authorities to order takedowns of online content, which X says enables removals “based only on allegations” without court oversight, while threatening platforms with criminal penalties for non-compliance. The company says it will appeal, framing the move as a defense of free expression.
Search APIs are heating up: Perplexity rolled out a search API this week, letting other companies embed its AI-powered search into their own products. The move shifts Perplexity from being just a consumer app to a platform play. Meanwhile, Ollama—known for making it easy to run AI models locally—introduced its own API-based search tool. They’ll be up against incumbents like Glean and Algolia, which are also fighting for a share of the enterprise and private search market.
U.K. bailout after cyberattack: The British government is guaranteeing a £1.5 billion loan to Jaguar Land Rover after a cyberattack halted production for weeks. It’s the first state-backed rescue tied directly to a hack, underscoring how exposed major manufacturers remain to coordinated digital threats.
Open roles
Parter: Account Executive (AE), Go-To-Market (GTM) Engineer - New York; Fullstack Software Engineer - Tel Aviv, IL
Highlo (stealth): Founder’s associate - London
Supanote AI: Growth Marketing Manager - Bangalore
Trestle: Founding Fullstack Software Engineer, Founding Product Designer - New York
Spade: Enterprise Account Executive (Banks), Senior Backend Engineer, Head of Engineering - New York
Howie: Senior Product Designer, Senior Software Engineer (AI), Senior Software Engineer (Backend), Senior Software Engineer (Frontend) - Seattle, WA
Neon: Fullstack Developer - New York
Exponential: Associate Product Manager, Senior Full Stack Developer - Remote (US)
Virio: Head of Growth, Founding Account Executive, Founding Engineer, Head of CEO Content - San Francisco
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See you Thursday,
Chief