Impersonation Agents, SDK Machines, and the $2B AI

From AI that kills phishing scams to SDKs that write themselves—plus, Mira Murati’s moonshot raise. Oh—and a dire wolf revival.

Apr 11, 2025

Hey there—

Welcome back to Why Join.

Hiring for a few standout roles—if it’s you or someone you rate, let’s talk: Account Execs B2B SaaS — SF / NYC; BDRs / SDRs — SF / NYC; Full-Stack Engineers (2–5 yrs) — SF / London; Growth Marketer (3–5 yrs) — SF

Now, onto this week’s edition.

Create how-to video guides fast and easy with AI

Tired of explaining the same thing over and over again to your colleagues?

It’s time to delegate that work to AI. Guidde is a GPT-powered tool that helps you explain the most complex tasks in seconds with AI-generated documentation.

Share or embed your guide anywhere
Turn boring documentation into stunning visual guides
Save valuable time by creating video documentation 11x faster

Simply click capture on the browser extension and the app will automatically generate step-by-step video guides complete with visuals, voiceover, and call to actions.
The best part?

The extension is 100% free.

Check out Guidde

Interested in sponsoring a future edition? Fill out the form, and we’ll be in touch.

This Week in Startups

Outtake

Funding – Series A, $16.5M; Investors – CRV (lead), Nikesh Aurora, Bill Ackman

TL;DR: AI agents that detect and kill impersonation attacks across email, social, SMS, and domains

AI is now impersonating people—at scale. Phishing emails, spoofed domains, deepfake ads, and fake social accounts are spinning up with zero marginal cost. Most companies aren’t equipped to fight it.
Outtake builds AI agents that act like autonomous trust & safety teams. They identify fake personas, shut down phishing domains, and remove impersonators across platforms—working directly with Meta, X, LinkedIn, and more.
Detects misuse of name/image/likeness in real time
Shuts down phishing domains before launch
Removes fake accounts across social/ad networks
Covers the full surface area: web, SMS, app stores—from one dashboard
It’s not alerting you to the threat. It’s handling it.

Hiring: Software Engineer, Product Designer, Software Engineer - Security, Software Engineer - GenAI, Founding Account Executive - NY

incident.io

Funding – Series B, $62M; Investors – Insight Partners (lead), Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital

TL;DR: AI-native incident management platform

As AI accelerates software development, outages are becoming more complex, harder to diagnose, and more frequent. Traditional tools weren’t built for this pace—or this scale.
incident.io’s AI agents act like your best engineer in a crisis: investigating issues, surfacing root causes, and suggesting or applying fixes—all inside Slack or Teams. No dashboards, no training—just real-time decision-making where teams already work.

Hiring: AI Engineer, Product Designer, Business Development Representative, Sales Engineer, Enterprise Account Executive - London; Head of Revenue Operations, Sales Engineer, Strategic Account Executive - SF

Fern

Funding – Series A, $9M; Investors – Bessemer (lead), Y Combinator

TL;DR: SDKs and API documentation generator

Every API needs developer tooling—but unless you're Stripe, building SDKs in every language and keeping docs updated is an expensive drag on engineering. Fern automates it: write your API spec once (OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, gRPC) and it generates SDKs (TS, Python, Go, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby) and matching docs that publish directly to GitHub, npm, PyPI, and your branded docs site.
What sets Fern apart:
SDKs and docs are tightly coupled—code examples and inline comments stay in sync
Docs include an API playground and SDK code snippets for live testing
Full branding control and Git-based workflows for versioning
They’ve landed 150+ customers since launching in 2023, including Square, LaunchDarkly, Webflow, ElevenLabs, and Intercom.

Hiring: AI Engineer, Backend Engineer - Docs, Backend Engineer - SDKs, Frontend Engineer - Docs, Technical Account Executive - NY

LiveKit

Funding – Series B, $45M; Investors – Altimeter (lead), Redpoint Ventures, Hanabi Capital

TL;DR: Real-time media infra for audio, video, and AI agents

As more apps go multimodal—combining voice, video, and AI—delivering high-quality real-time media has become a massive infrastructure challenge. You need low-latency infra, high bandwidth, and bulletproof uptime. Most companies duct-tape WebRTC or pay heavily for clunky video SDKs.
LiveKit solves this with open-source building blocks and a cloud platform that handles WebRTC, media routing, and AI agent orchestration out of the box. It’s already the backbone for 25% of 911 calls in the U.S., powers OpenAI’s Voice Mode, and is used by Spotify, Meta, and Microsoft.
Co-founders Russ d’Sa (early Twitter) and David Zhao (ex-Motorola) built LiveKit after realizing large tech companies like Spotify, Oracle, and Reddit were already using the OSS—and asking for a hosted version. That became LiveKit Cloud.

Hiring: Head of Growth, Senior Software Engineer - Media, Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Senior Software Engineer - Agents, Staff Growth Engineer - Remote, US

Tired of late payments and messy invoicing?

This guide is your go-to resource for streamlining payments, improving cash flow, and keeping your business running smoothly.

What’s inside:

An actionable 8-step framework to create a seamless payment process
Expert strategies to reduce late payments and enhance your professional image

A well-structured payment system leads to smoother operations, happier clients, and long-term financial success.

Download the guide now

Top News

Murati wants $2B for a seed round: Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is reportedly raising a $2 billion seed round for her new AI company, Thinking Machines. That’s not a typo — it's 2x Ilya Sutskever’s record-breaking $1B raise. The team is pure OpenAI alumni: John Schulman (ChatGPT co-creator), Alec Radford, Bob McGrew. Schulman briefly joined Anthropic after leaving OpenAI, but left just weeks later to team up with Murati. So yes, the pedigree is top-tier. What’s missing: a product. The website says it’s building “more widely understood, customizable and generally capable” AI—but no details.
ByteDance hit $155B in 2024: ByteDance pulled in $155B in revenue last year—up 29%, with $33B in profit. Slower than the previous year’s 50% surge, but still massive. TikTok is the engine: international rev jumped 63% to $39B. That’s 25% of the business—rare for a Chinese consumer app. TikTok’s now at 1.6B monthly users, with the average person spending 34 hours a month on it—more than any other platform. And it’s not just eyeballs: ads, ecomm, and creator payouts are turning TikTok into a money-printing machine. Almost 1 in 5 creators now say it’s their main income source.
China raises tariffs to 125%: Beijing just hiked tariffs on all U.S. goods from 84% to 125%, effective April 12—a direct response to the U.S. raising its own to 145%. But China says that’s it. No more tit-for-tat. From here on, it’s asymmetric escalation: fewer American films, travel warnings, student advisories. Nearly $700B in goods are now subject to double- and triple-digit tariffs—squeezing everyone from chipmakers to soybean exporters. Geopolitics is now an operating expense.
Prada bags Versace at a discount: Prada just scooped up Versace for $1.38B—$420M less than what Capri Holdings paid in 2018. It’s the biggest acquisition in Prada’s 112-year history and brings Versace back under Italian ownership. The deal gives Prada a stronger shot at competing with LVMH and Kering, and a chance to finally scale a brand Capri couldn’t quite globalize. Despite trade tensions, Prada is betting that flashy fashion still travels well.
Colossal brings back the dire wolf. No, this isn’t sci-fi: Dallas-based Colossal just announced it’s birthed three dire wolf pups—a species extinct for 12,000 years. The team used gray wolf cells and DNA from 72,000-year-old fossils. Welcome back to the Ice Age. Colossal has raised $435M from Peter Thiel, In-Q-Tel, and Paris Hilton. Valued at $10.2B, the company is also working to revive the mammoth and dodo. But this isn’t just Jurassic Park for billionaires—Colossal is betting its gene-editing tech can spin out into healthcare, conservation, and biotech.