.@ArmatureYCP26 helps companies monitor and optimize how AI agents experience their products. It runs real agent workflows and improves your MCP or CLI. Reinventing the Agent Experience! Congrats on the launch, @Totzenberger and @louis_scremin! ycombinator.com/launches/QQc…

Today @usemonk is announcing our $25M Series A co-led by @footworkvc and @AcrewCapital with continued support from @btv_vc. $3T sits in U.S. accounts receivable. Our mission is to close the gap between earning revenue and receiving it. For most B2B companies, that gap is 45-90 days, thousands of hours of manual work per year, and millions in trapped working capital. It's a tax every growing business pays. Monk invented the Intelligent Collections category. Most AR tools automate the easy parts. We built for the edge cases, portal uploads, PO mismatches, and disputes. On average, customers see 40% lower DSO, 24% higher collections response rate and 25 hours/month saved. Thank you to @ElevenLabs, @tryprofound, @siro_app, and our customers for the trust. Our platform typically pays for itself in month one. Book a demo to learn more.

Coding agents are surprisingly bad at spreadsheets. They'll cobble together a Python script that silently breaks formulas, misreads cached values, or corrupts formatting. The problem isn't the model, it's the tools. We built Witan to fix this. witanlabs.com/agents

The public markets have decided that SaaS revenue durability and growth is challenged at best and extinct at worst. So where is value in a world of uncertainty. Gnarly, f****** hard, backend businesses. Fintech for one. Airwallex and @awxjack the level of integrations, partnerships, permissions with banks around the world. Insanely hard. OpenAI ain’t coming for this. 😉

Revenue automation software has a credibility problem. Numbers appear in dashboards. And accountants are told to just trust them. Our team at @usemonk took a different approach. We set out to make every number traceable and defensible. Today, @zhou_squared shares our product philosophy on building for accounting/finance professionals. We’ve been fortunate to have the support of our customers and experts in this build. Thank you for continued feedback!

The average dunning email gets ignored. You are literally sending "please ignore me" messages to customers who owe you money. Playbooks - our workflow system for intelligent collections - is now live on the @usemonk platform. A system that reasons, not just reminds. We filmed a 60 second video showing you an experiment between @zhou_squared and @francescocoacci collecting $100K. Finance, biz-ops and post-sales teams should not be spending time chasing customers. Many spend 10 hrs/week doing what Joe did in this video: - context switching between tools (slack, gmail, quickbooks, google sheets) - breaking flow from deep work - sending reminders because the average dunning email is ignored But agentic collections are not enough. Every customer relationship is different. Some need white-glove treatment and others a nudge. That’s why we built playbooks, giving every business a customizable collection workflow. With playbooks you can: - create triggers and workflows specific to a customer segment (tone shift, conditions, escalations to sales/customer support) - auto-resolve AP questions with context from relevant email threads - pause automatically when product questions or upsells opportunities come up Playbooks is how you get paid while you sleep. And we do it with professionalism and empathy that your customers deserve. Heading into Q1 with a gap between signed ARR and actual cash? Watch the video. And if you want to see bloopers from Frank/Joe filming, comment “payday” tag a teammate and we will send you bloopers from the shoot.

Where are the European Super Angels? These are high volume, incredibly well connected angel investors that often go on to raise their own funds. The US is FULL of them (e.g. @JoshuaKushner, @sacca), where Europe doesn't seem to have many. I know of: @danonanthony: Operator and now investor at rerail. Investments include @fuseenergy, @TideBusiness and @TrueLayer @AlexBerriche: Founder, scout at @sequoia and angel into @lovable, @fyxerai and Tandem Health Who else is out there? I interviewed Alex on the latest @ScalingEurope show which I'll link below.

$3 Trillion is currently stuck in unpaid invoices. An average invoice takes 59 days to clear. If you're doing >$10M in revenue, getting paid in 30 days instead of 59 days will literally make you millions over 2 years. Introducing Monk. It collects your money faster and pays for itself in 30 days, guaranteed. Fast-growing companies like ElevenLabs and Profound rely on Monk. The Problem: 39% of the $3T stuck is due to two stupid reasons: 1. "Please fix this comma in the invoice and then we'll pay you'" (this happens 2-3 times per transaction) 2. "Sorry the payment reminder got buried in my inbox" (automated emails get ignored) A payment that should take 2 days, takes 10 days. Your cash on hand is embarrassingly behind "recorded revenue". To fix this, we raised $4M led by @btv_vc with participation from @gtmfund and @danonanthony. For our first product, we had to innovate on 3 dimensions: 1. Monk turns signed contracts into invoices with near-perfect precision - We leverage frontier models to extract key terms from your deals and turn them into invoices. 2. ⁠Monk collects payments agentically with a 24% better reply rate than automated emails: - Tuned to write emails that feel like a human request, not spam. Your invoice is competing with everything in their inbox. - We know how to find an alternate point-of-contact when someone is OOO, when to reach out, and what tonality yields a higher response rate. If you had someone on your team whose invoice emails got answered 24% more than others - that would be a big deal. You’d make them the head of revenue collection. 3. Granular visibility into your cashflow: - Understand your cash position, aging, or expansion/contraction at customer level. Book a demo at monk.com/book-a-demo-form and we guarantee that Monk will pay for itself within 30 days. If you've read this far, we are giving away 40 water-tight contract templates. This would cost >$10K to any agency, startups, or freelancer, to create from scratch. Retweet this and comment 'Monk' and we'll send them to you.

Revealed: Phoebe, an AI ‘immune system’ for software founded by former Stripe executives Matt Henderson and James Summerfield, will this week announce that it has raised $17m in seed funding, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Cherry Ventures. news.sky.com/story/ai-immune…

Welcome to the rebel alliance 🏴‍☠️ Me @danonanthony went deep with @the_euvc @LPhypeman on new wave of small funds solo GPs in Europe. - why speed value add at first round matters right now - rise of "headless round" (no trad lead) - conviction without consensus

Adyen & Stripe '24 annual reports are out! Processed volume: Adyen: $1.34T, 33% YoY Stripe: $1.4T, 38% YoY Valuation: Adyen: $56B Stripe: $91.5B Employee count: Adyen: 4.3k Stripe: 8.2k Both profitable, Adyen EBITDA of $1B. Note: Stripe has higher margins!

Every day I wake up and think "I love my job." I get to work with my friend and genius, @HarryStebbings. My new brothers Paul Bonnet & @alexandre_dewez. $400m is a big number, but in my head, it's just more time to continue doing what I love. ft.com/content/7b553b44-7c92…

The Evolving Landscape of Venture Capital: Are Emerging Managers DOA? There’s been a lot of debate lately around whether the VC ecosystem is being negatively impacted by the largest firms hoovering up LP money at the expense of Emerging Managers. The observation is real and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the venture capital industry is at a critical inflection point. But the phenomenon isn’t new. It’s been unfolding for years and was easy to spot. I wrote about it a few years back in a presentation titled “The Three Body Problem: Finding The New Stable Points In Venture Capital” and I’ll add a link in the replies if you’re interested in learning more. With this said, other experts have been writing about it as well. For instance, @wolfejosh’s recent prediction that 30-50% of venture firms may cease to exist in the coming years is not just a provocative statement, but a stark warning to Emerging Managers and many established VC firms. When we consider that only 17% of venture funds make it to fund 4, and that 44% of VC capital raised this year went to just two firms, it becomes clear that the industry is starting to consolidate. This consolidation is not just a theoretical concern to Emerging Managers - it's a very real threat to the diversity and dynamism that has long been the hallmark of the very early stage VC ecosystem. However, while the outlook may seem bleak for many Emerging Managers, I believe there is a path forward. The key lies in understanding what Founders and LP are struggling to find within the "established" VC ecosystem and aligning with these unmet market needs. For Emerging Managers, the writing is on the wall: adapt or perish. The days of simply working hard and expressing a desire to LPs that you deserve to be a VC are long gone. Today's landscape demands true differentiation and specialized skill. Emerging Managers will do best if they position themselves firmly within one of two key boxes: The Solo VC or the Non-Consensus Alpha seeker. Hunting in thematically consensus spaces or chasing serial Founders with many options is a good way for an Emerging Manager to fail. The Solo VC Option Not all Emerging Managers fit in the Solo VC box. It requires a unique combination of skills, experience, and network that can provide outsized value to founders. Solo VCs win deals not because they can write the biggest checks, but because they can provide the most value per dollar invested. They are often industry veterans, serial entrepreneurs, or individuals with deep expertise in specific sectors. Their ability to provide hands-on mentorship, make crucial introductions, and offer strategic guidance is their competitive advantage. They need to be a “brand” in and of themselves, and if they aren’t, they’ll struggle to source and win deals. The Non-Consensus Alpha Option Non-Consensus Alpha seekers are those willing to venture in sectors, themes, specific businesses and Founder profiles that others avoid. These are the VCs who are not afraid to back ideas that seem outlandish or premature to the mainstream. They have the courage to invest in overlooked geographies, underrepresented founders, or technologies that are super risky and have yet to prove their commercial viability. Their differentiation comes from their willingness to take calculated risks on ideas and teams that larger, more conservative firms might pass on. Attracting LP Capital But identifying with one of these archetypes is just the beginning. To attract LP money in this competitive landscape, Emerging Managers need to be incredibly crisp in articulating their differentiation and path to victory. They need to clearly demonstrate how they can "see" great deals that others miss, "analyze" them effectively to pick the winners, and then "win" those deals by being the investor of choice for great Founders. This means developing a compelling narrative around their unique value proposition. For Solo VCs, this might involve showcasing their track record of successful exits, their deep industry connections, or their ability to provide hands-on operational support that will kink the curve on outcomes. For Non-Consensus Alpha seekers, it could mean demonstrating their thesis-driven approach to identifying overlooked opportunities, their unique deal flow sources, or their ability to help Founders navigate from non-consensus to consensus. Sharp thinking and a highly differentiated approach will be critical to success in this space and being able to explain your strategy and skills will be critical to attracting capital. What’s clear is that being a passive “first check writer” who can’t lead, doesn’t have the capital to follow-on, and isn’t about to provide differentiated advice and connections to Founders isn’t going to cut it anymore. These firms won’t survive the current wave of consolidation and will be culled from the ecosystem by being starved of LP capital. For Emerging Managers, it's crucial to understand that in today's environment, LPs are not just looking for generalists with decent short-term markups and interesting logos. They're seeking specialized expertise, unique angles, and differentiated strategies that can generate alpha in an increasingly competitive market. Emerging Managers who can rise to this challenge will find that there's still plenty of room for success in the VC industry. So, while Josh Wolfe's prediction may well come true for a significant portion of the industry, it doesn't have to be a death knell for all Emerging Managers. The VC ecosystem of the future may (will) be more concentrated, but it could also be more specialized, more differentiated, and ultimately, more effective at identifying and nurturing the transformative companies of tomorrow.

PayPal's Braintree (including Venmo) acquisition for $800M in 2012 is one of the best fintech M&As Assuming Braintree is ~$500B TPV x ~25bps net take rate = ~$1.3B net revenue. At a 10x NTM multiple, worth $15B Stripe does ~$3.5B of net revenue, valued at $65B (15x) popularfintech.com/p/a-few-r… h/t @jevgenijs

Vertical SaaS is mostly fintech. All the public companies: Shopify, Procore, ServiceTitan, Toast etc make more money from financial services than SaaS