Somebody Must Have Fixed This
A self-driving construction kit, AI that actually gets paid, and healthcare's fax machine problem.
Hello hello!
Welcome to another edition of Why Join.
Most founders start with the technology and go looking for a problem. The ones who win usually do it backwards. They start with a problem so obvious that everyone assumes someone already solved it, go look, and find out nobody did.
That’s a strange thing about markets. The size of a problem has almost no correlation with whether anyone is working on it. Trillion-dollar inefficiencies survive for decades not because they’re hard to see but because they’re hard to believe. Bills of lading, the documents that prove who owns cargo on a container ship, haven’t meaningfully changed since the 1600s. Truckers still show up to ports with paper originals to get goods released. In 2026. With everything we’ve built. The paper still has to physically cross an ocean before the container moves.
Or take something closer to home. Your dentist’s office probably still sends referrals by fax. Not because fax is good. Because every system it connects to was built around fax, and ripping that out means rewiring the entire chain. So it stays. And a trillion dollars a year in healthcare admin piles up around it like sediment.
The gap between “that can’t be real” and “wait, it is” is where most of the best companies get started. Not the ones building new categories. The ones walking into old ones and doing the work everyone else assumed was already done.
On to who raised this week.
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The IPO Pipeline Is Heating Up - Here’s How to Potentially Profit
SpaceX is reportedly preparing for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history.
Canva and several other AI companies may also go public this year as well.
The problem: By the time these companies list, most investors will be buying at the opening price - or higher.
Augment Collective funds give accredited investors access to pre-IPO shares in companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks.
Minimums start at $10K and there’s no management fees and no carried interest.1
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See available pre-IPO companies before you miss out on Augment.
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Who Just Raised 💰
🇺🇸 Crewline AI
💵 Raised: $7.1M seed, led by Initialized Capital and Nebular. Ford Street Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and others also in.
One-liner: Aftermarket kit that turns existing construction rollers into self-driving machines.
Why it’s a fave: US construction productivity has fallen over 30% since 1970. Every other industry got more efficient. Construction went backwards. The workforce is aging out... median age is 42, nearly half are over 45, younger workers aren’t replacing them. Operators ghost shifts. Machines sit idle.
Everyone says autonomy will fix this, but Musk has spent a decade and billions on self-driving for open roads and it’s still not fully solved. So why would construction be different? Because a construction site isn’t an open road. A drum roller goes 3 mph in straight lines inside a fenced zone. If it gets confused it just stops. Nobody rear-ends a steamroller. Crewline’s CEO likes to paraphrase Karpathy: the first 90% of autonomy takes as long as the next 9%. Construction lives entirely in that easy 90%.
The product is an aftermarket kit that installs on an existing roller in about an hour without cutting a single wire. Foreman draws a geofence on an iPad, hits go. Five-layer safety system with stereo depth cameras, on-edge object detection, vision-language models that can recognize construction-specific hazards from a text description, independent safety controller, and emergency stops. First real deployment was 30 days on a 30-acre airport job in Austin. Downtime went from six hours a day to under one. Productive hours nearly doubled. Zero accidents.
Hiring: Founding Perception Engineer - San Francisco
🇺🇸 Monk
💵 Raised: $25M Series A, co-led by Footwork and Acrew Capital. BTV returning from seed. Total funding $29M.
One-liner: AI that automates accounts receivable so companies actually get paid.
Why it’s a fave: Software automated basically every other part of running a business. Operations, customer management, paying your own bills. But getting paid by other companies? Still the same. Company sends an invoice. Someone on the finance team starts chasing. Emails, follow-ups, uploading things to payment portals. Customer pays a different amount than what was billed because something doesn’t match. Or they dispute a charge. Or the money shows up in the bank and nobody can figure out which invoice it’s for.
This is trillions of dollars in the US. Most of it still runs on email, spreadsheets, and bank portals. The tools that exist handle the simple part... sending reminders. Monk built for everything else. The mismatches, the disputes, the weird one-off situations that break normal workflows, the back-and-forth that eats 25+ hours a month per finance team. Their AI handles the full cycle from invoice to money in the bank, but every step is locked down with hard rules and tested against thousands of scenarios. When real money is moving between real accounts you really can’t have the system guessing wrong.
Hiring: Founding Growth Marketer, Account Executive, Business Development Representative, Founding Full-Stack Engineer - New York
🇺🇸 Coral
💵 Raised: $12.5M seed, led by Lightspeed and Z47.
One-liner: Automates healthcare admin by working with the fax machine, not replacing it.
Why it’s a fave: The thing nobody outside healthcare realizes is that fax machines still run the entire system. Referrals, prior authorizations (when your doctor has to prove to your insurer that a treatment is necessary), patient intake... all faxes. McKinsey estimates over $1T is spent annually on healthcare admin alone. That’s a quarter of the entire healthcare market just on paperwork.
For a decade, legacy RPA (robotic process automation) vendors like UiPath and Automation Anywhere tried to fix this by mimicking keystrokes and mouse clicks. Combined $4-5B in revenue and they still fail over 30% of the time. Because healthcare is messy. Unstructured data, constantly changing interfaces, multiple stakeholders, fragmented legacy systems. Brittle scripts don’t survive that.
Coral took a different approach. Don’t replace the fax, automate around it. Plug into existing EHR systems, fax lines, payer portals. Handle intake, eligibility verification, prior authorizations, patient communications. Their AI reads handwritten fax forms, scanned insurance cards, prior auth templates at 99.7% accuracy. Traditional RPA in healthcare hits maybe 50%. Patient intakes that took 30+ minutes now run in under five.2
Hiring: ML Engineer, Account Executive, Business Development Representative - New York; Backend Engineer - Platform, Finance Lead - Remote
Open Tabs (stuff we’re reading) 📖
SpaceX partners with Cursor, has option to buy for $60B: Deal combines Cursor’s coding product with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer (~1M H100 equivalent). SpaceX will either pay Cursor $10B for its work or acquire the company for $60B at some point this year. Cursor was valued at $2.5B in Jan 2025, $9B by May, $29.3B by November. Two senior Cursor engineers already left for xAI last month, both reporting to Musk. Neither Cursor nor xAI has models that match Anthropic or OpenAI, and Cursor still sells access to Claude and GPT even as both compete directly with it.
SpaceX files for $1.75T IPO, biggest ever: Targeting a $75B raise. IPO filing reveals the full financials for the first time. Revenue hit $18.67B in 2025 but the company swung to a $4.94B consolidated loss (was profitable the year before) after absorbing xAI. Starlink is the bright spot: $11.4B revenue, $4.42B operating profit, 63% EBITDA margin, 10M users. The AI segment (xAI) is the drag: capex there surged to $12.7B from $5.6B the prior year. Total capex hit $20.7B. SpaceX ended 2025 with $24.8B cash, $92B assets, $50.8B liabilities. Musk gets dual-class super-voting shares (10 votes each vs 1 for public investors), stays on as CEO, CTO, and board chair. His salary was $54,080 last year but he stands to get 60M shares if market cap hits $6.6T. He also bought $1.4B of SpaceX stock from employees last year through his trust.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Images 2.0: Major upgrade to image generation. Two modes: Instant (fast) and Thinking (slower, reasons through the task, maintains character consistency across frames). Supports up to 2K resolution, flexible aspect ratios, up to 8 outputs per run. Biggest shift: image gen is now conversational. You can refine, zoom, adjust without restarting. Better handling of non-Latin scripts (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Bengali).
Cerebras files to go public: The AI chipmaker filed on Nasdaq under ticker “CBRS.” Revenue hit $510M in 2025 (up 76% YoY), swung to $87.9M net income from a $485M loss in 2024. $24.6B in remaining performance obligations. Huge OpenAI dependency: $20B+ deal to provide up to 750 MW of compute through 2028, OpenAI loaned Cerebras $1B at 6% interest, and got warrants to buy 33.4M shares. Revenue still concentrated in the UAE (G42 at 24%, MBZUAI at 62%). Raised $1B at $23B valuation in February, up from $8.1B in September. Fun fact: Musk tried to buy Cerebras back in 2018. Sam Altman is a personal investor.
Unauthorized users accessed Anthropic’s Mythos: A few people in a private Discord channel that hunts for unreleased AI models gained access to Mythos via a third-party Anthropic contractor. They guessed the model’s URL based on Anthropic’s naming patterns. The group has been using Mythos regularly since then, though not for cybersecurity purposes. They also claim access to other unreleased Anthropic models. Mythos was only supposed to go to select vendors (Apple, etc.) through Project Glasswing. Anthropic says no evidence its systems were impacted. Still alarming given what Mythos can do: the UK’s AI Security Institute warned last week that it’s a “step up” in cyber-threat capability, able to carry out multi-step attacks and find IT vulnerabilities without human help.
DeepSeek raising its first outside capital at $20B+ valuation: Tencent and Alibaba in talks to invest. First ever capital raise for the company, which is owned by Chinese hedge fund Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management. Was initially looking at $300M at $10B+, now reportedly above $20B. DeepSeek shook the AI world in Jan 2025 with a model matching US rivals despite limited chip access. The investment is likely a hedge for Tencent and Alibaba since open-source models (plus OpenClaw) have made it hard for bigger Chinese players to monetize their own AI. DeepSeek also expanding into agents to compete with OpenClaw, posting 12+ agent-related job listings in March.
Amazon investing up to $25B more in Anthropic: On top of the $8B already in. Total potential commitment: $33B. $5B going in now at Anthropic’s $380B valuation, remaining $20B tied to commercial milestones. In return, Anthropic committed to $100B+ in AWS spending over the next decade, including current and future Trainium chips. Bringing ~1 GW of Trainium2/3 capacity online by year-end, with up to 5 GW secured total. This lands just two months after Amazon agreed to invest up to $50B in OpenAI.
New York sues Coinbase and Gemini over prediction markets: AG Letitia James filed suits against both crypto exchanges, accusing them of operating prediction markets that violate state gambling laws. Notable: Kalshi and Polymarket were left out of the suits. The two platforms have dominated the “event contract” space where users bet yes/no on things like the economy or elections. Federal and state regulators still sparring over who actually has oversight of these platforms.
Tim Cook stepping down as Apple CEO, John Ternus taking over: Cook becomes executive chairman Sept 1 after 14 years as CEO. Ternus, 50, has been SVP of hardware engineering and has been at Apple for 25 years. Apple’s market cap went from ~$200B to $4T under Cook. Revenue nearly 4x’d to $400B+. Ternus’s biggest challenge: AI. Apple has lagged its megacap peers, delayed a Siri upgrade last year, and replaced its AI chief with a Google veteran in December. Updated Siri coming this year, built on Google’s Gemini. Johny Srouji becomes chief hardware officer.
44% of songs uploaded to Deezer daily are now AI-generated: That’s ~75K AI tracks per day, 2M+ per month. Up from 10K/day in Jan 2025 when Deezer first launched its detection tool. Actual consumption is tiny (1-3% of streams), and 85% of those streams are flagged as fraudulent and demonetized. AI tracks get removed from algorithmic recs and editorial playlists. An AI-generated track topped the iTunes charts last week in the US, UK, France, Canada, and NZ. Deezer survey found 97% of people couldn’t tell AI music from human-made. Spotify and Apple Music still don’t tag AI tracks at the platform level.
Who’s Hiring 💼
Roadrunner Venture Studios: Venture Architect - Albuquerque, New Mexico
ICONIQ: Associate, Investment Specialist - New York
Balerion AI: Software Engineer, Software Engineer, Applied AI, Founding Account Executive, Strategy & Operations - New York
Solidroad: Account Executive, Founding Product Designer, Senior Software Engineer - San Francisco/ Business Development Representative, EMEA, Senior Product Engineer - Dublin, Ireland
Amperos Health: Product Manager, Product Designer, AI Deployment Strategist, Operations (RCM Leader) - NYC/ AI Research Engineer, Software Engineer, Full Stack - NYC; SF/ Billing Associate (AI Quality), Billing Associate (AR & Denials) - India (Remote)
Mosaic: GTM Associate - Banking & Credit, Founding Designer, GTM Associate - Private Equity, Head of Marketing - NYC
Realm: Customers & GTM, Business Development Representative, AI Engineer, Product Engineer - Helsinki, Finland
BuildForever: Backend Engineer, ML / AI Engineer, Product Engineer, Social Growth Lead, San Francisco/New York
TextQL: Demand Generation / Growth Marketing Manager, Events Marketing Manager, Partner Manager - NYC/Remote
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See you Friday, Ryan
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Founded in 2024 by Ajay Shrihari and Aniket Mohanty, both AI researchers from IIIT Hyderabad who were previously founding engineers together at LimeChat building enterprise automation. Ajay’s motivation was personal... a minor accident put him through the US healthcare system as a patient for the first time. The clinical care was fine. The admin around it (unanswered follow-ups, paperwork that outlasted the injury) was broken in ways that clearly weren’t going to fix themselves.