FROM THE DESK OF
Clark Valberg
MANAGING PARTNER
In The Matrix, Neo plugged in and woke up knowing kung fu. The rest of us have spent the internet age pausing videos, rewinding steps, and squinting to figure out what the instructor actually meant.
Farza Tehrani's tool Clicky went viral (again!) because it lands on a frustration every learner knows: the distance between being told what to do and seeing exactly where to do it. The AI tutor draws directly on your screen, marking up a geometry proof, circling a control buried in the editing software, and pointing to a task in real time while you work. The placement is the breakthrough. It does not sit in a separate chat box waiting to be consulted. It appears on the surface where the confusion is. The video tutorial you paused fourteen times to follow starts to look obsolete when something can just point at the thing you missed.
That changes the emotional cost of learning. Most people quit hard things long before they hit the limit of their ability. They leave when the next step turns invisible, too small to find, too basic to ask about, too specific for any tutorial to have covered. Clicky points to a more practical future for AI in education: guidance that meets people at the moment of friction, whether they are learning design software, music production, algebra, coding, data analysis, or a new tool at work.
"The next learning curve may not get shorter. It may become visible enough for more people to keep climbing."
/ THE DEEP DIVE
Claude Now Works in Slack Like a Coworker You Can Tag
Claude Tag lets teams summon the AI with an @Claude mention, after which it splits the request into stages, executes them with approved tools and data, and reports back when finished. It builds context about a team's work over time and can act across multiple channels wherever it has been granted access. An ambient mode lets it pull information from relevant channels and revive tasks that have stalled.
SOURCE: TECHCRUNCH
BUSINESS IMPACT:
AI Startups:
Anthropic shipped the "AI coworker" product dozens of startups were racing to build, and it did it the same day it announced it.
Workplace Software:
The company that controls the chat app now controls the AI inside it, leaving Slack rivals scrambling to keep up.
Productivity Apps:
When Claude handles tasks right inside the conversation, the separate to-do apps and add-on assistants start looking redundant.
/ INDUSTRY WATCH
MANUFACTURING
Jack Technology Bets on AI and Humanoid Robots to Cut Apparel Costs 30%
Jack Technology, a Chinese sewing-equipment maker, is deploying Siemens' Intelligence Center X to deploy AI and humanoid robots into textile manufacturing, targeting a 30% cut in apparel costs.
SRC: MANUFACTURING BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY
REAL ESTATE
Zillow Folds the Whole Homebuying Journey Into One Hub
Zillow's new hub tracks buyers across four milestones from budget to closing, syncing finances, documents, agents and lenders. Verified Pre-approval ties real borrowing power to listings; a shared workspace lets co-buyers compare homes live.
SRC: HOUSINGWIRE
AGRICULTURE
OneSoil's AI Agronomist Offers Dashboard for One Daily Answer Across 4% of Global Cropland
OneSoil launched AI Agronomist, which fuses satellite imagery, weather and field records into a plain-language daily read flagging flooding and pest risk. It runs on a platform managing 70 million hectares, where tools have saved farmers $10 to $85 per hectare.
SRC: IGROW NEWS
TECH
OpenAI Reveals Jalapeño, Its First Custom Chip, Built to Cut Inference Costs by Half
OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño, a chip purpose-built for serving large language models, reportedly cutting inference costs about 50%. Designed in a record nine months partly using OpenAI's own models, it loosens the company's reliance on Nvidia.
SRC: THE VERGE
HEALTHCARE
Ainos Builds an AI Nose That Diagnoses Disease From a Single Breath
Ainos and National Taiwan University are testing an AI nose that reads breath chemistry to separate look-alike conditions with opposite treatments, like COPD flare-ups and heart failure. A proprietary Smell Language Model classifies the patterns, already running in a live ER.
SRC: THE REGISTER
BANKING & FINANCE
Coinbase Lets AI Agents Pay Their Own Bills for Under a Tenth of a Cent
Coinbase opened agentic checkout across all Payments APIs, letting software settle USDC transactions through its x402 protocol with no accounts or keys. An Amazon Bedrock integration lets AWS developers build agents that procure and pay per request.
SRC: CRYPTO BRIEFING
RETAIL
L'Oréal Drops Maybelline's Virtual Try-On Into ChatGPT's 900 Million Weekly Users
L'Oréal teamed with OpenAI to embed Maybelline's ModiFace try-on inside ChatGPT. The deal also surfaces Lancôme in product discovery and enrolls SkinCeuticals, CeraVe and Garnier in OpenAI's ad pilot.
SRC: AI NEWS
MEDIA
Adobe Turns Creative Cloud Into an Agent That Runs Production While Designers Direct
Adobe's new creative agent, in public beta across Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io, reads plain-language prompts and taps each app's APIs to sort footage and push brand assets across layouts.
SRC: VENTUREBEAT
/ NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS
$1.5B
Baseten Raises $1.5 Billion at $13 Billion
The AI inference startup routes prompts to the cheapest capable model to cut enterprise compute bills; Spark, Sands, Altimeter, and Wellington co-led.
VIA BUSINESSWIRE
$650M
Groq Lands $650 Million After Nvidia's $20 Billion Raid on Its Engineering Team
The AI inference chipmaker is rebuilding leadership and leaning into its cloud business, with the round valuing it well above prior funding.
VIA TECHBUZZ
$460M
Alan Raises $460 Million at $6.3 Billion to Merge Insurance, Care, and Prevention
The French health-tech firm passed €800 million in recurring revenue, up 53% year-on-year, serving 1.1 million members; Prosus led the round.
VIA PROSUS
$310M
Odyssey Raises $310 Million at $1.45 Billion to Build AI That Simulates the Physical World
The Palo Alto lab's world models predict real-world outcomes for robotics and self-driving; Natural Capital led, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, and Google Ventures joining.
VIA AI BUSINESS
$100M
Cadence Raises $100 Million to Put AI Agents in Charge of Chronic-Disease Monitoring
Its supervised agents track vitals for 100,000-plus patients across 20 health systems, saving Medicare roughly $2.7 million a week; Spark Capital led.
VIA FIERCE HEALTHCARE
/ EMERGING TOOLS
01
Turns your inbox into a swipe deck — archive, skip, or get an AI-drafted reply in one tap, without storing your email data.
02
Describe a research or reporting task in plain language; AllyHub's AI agent browses, scrapes, and delivers results via reusable workflows that get faster over time.
03
Converts architectural sketches or rough renders into client-ready photoreal images and videos, with material swaps and design consistency built in.
04
PowerPoint add-in that turns rough notes, audio, or whiteboard photos into polished, fully editable slides inside your existing brand templates.
05
Feed it one piece of content — a podcast, video, or blog — and it rewrites, reformats, and publishes it across every platform automatically.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
TRANSFORMATIVE STUDIO
We partner with deeply embedded operators to discover, design, and spin out AI-native companies that transform industries.