brought to you with
✦
Meta shelves facial recognition in its smart glasses after users push back. Border airspace shuts down over one suspected drone.
Meanwhile, the real money flows to infrastructure: $22M for AI defense tech in Africa. $15M for grid-to-GPU data centers. Fresh funding for medical sensors. India hosting 100+ AI leaders to talk policy, not prompts.
New video out: The Secret U.S. Town where Microwaves are Illegal
-🕶️
✦
Six bullets of updates
😶🌫️ Meta shelves facial recognition in smart glasses, citing ethics and tech hurdles debated by 70% of surveyed users.
🚁 Border airspace paused for 3 hours as officials scrambled to track a single suspected cartel drone near El Paso.
⚡ AI data centers can cut power losses by up to 30% using a grid-to-GPU approach now being piloted by new $15M funding.
🤖 India brings together global AI leaders for its first major AI Summit, gathering over 100 execs and policymakers from top tech and government.
🛡️ African defense startup nets $22M to scale up drone and AI-powered security tech across more markets.
🩺 Fresh funding will help scale up Sendance's wearable sensor data platform for medical devices, boosting real-time insights.
✦
Hype at the top, contracts at the bottom?
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
At first glance, it looks like OpenAI and Anthropic could steamroll smaller AI startups in law and healthcare. But Sweden’s Legora and Tandem Health see it differently.
They say the hype around ChatGPT and Claude is actually helping them. Big platforms create awareness and drive curiosity. When companies want real, production-ready tools, they turn to specialists.
Legora isn’t just answering legal questions — it’s building infrastructure. It tracks massive legal databases, builds knowledge graphs, and works with 400+ law firms. New AI plug-ins don’t replace that. They validate demand.
Tandem makes a similar case in healthcare. Clinical AI needs deep EHR integrations, strict EU data compliance, and alignment with local medical guidelines. That kind of regulated, embedded workflow can’t be solved with a general chatbot.
The bigger story: general AI creates the top-of-funnel buzz. Vertical AI wins by owning the workflow — through proprietary data, integrations, compliance, and long-term contracts.
✦
The Secret U.S. Town where Microwaves are Illegal
There’s a place in America where microwaves can get you fined, cell phones are restricted, and WiFi is (mostly) banned.
All so that one telescope can listen for aliens.
In this video, we travel to the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia — home of the Green Bank Telescope — to understand how far the U.S. went to create electromagnetic silence… and why that silence is slowly disappearing.
From Bluetooth and 2.4GHz WiFi to Starlink satellites and transformer noise, we break down how radio waves actually work, why your phone could theoretically “deafen” a telescope from miles away, and how progress may have accidentally destroyed America’s alien detector.
This isn’t really about aliens. It’s about physics, infrastructure, and the quiet things we lose when technology gets louder.
✦
Losing buyers over compliance?
Enterprise buyers won't sign until you show SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance. Most startups overpay Big 4 firms $50K+ and still feel lost in the process.
SecureLeap bundles SOC 2, ISO 27001 & Pentest. One invoice.
Led by a 20+ year cybersecurity veteran from Citibank and Aircall.
✦
🇺🇸 Entrepreneurs can borrow 6 Oval Office playbooks to sharpen vision, stay steady in crises, and drive execution.
🧭 Execs stumble on 5 common traps—here’s how to turn weaknesses into upgrades that stick and scale for good.
Cap Table Template for Startups
Slidebean’s Cap Table Template helps founders organize and visualize ownership from day one. Model share distribution, understand dilution, and plan fundraising rounds without messy spreadsheets.
Simple, accurate, and investor-ready; so you can focus on building, not fixing equity mistakes.
✦
OpenClaw’s agent hype meets reality
OpenClaw’s new viral “agent platform” is being pitched as the next big leap in AI.
But some AI experts, cited by TechCrunch, argue it’s mostly an orchestration layer — connecting tools rather than delivering a fundamental model breakthrough. Early demos exposed security gaps like weak authentication and prompt-injection risks. The guardrails still leak.
For startups, this is automation, not autonomy. Keep scopes tight, limit permissions, add spending caps, and require human review for sensitive actions.
Enterprises — and their insurers — will demand containment: sandboxing, RBAC, signed tools, audit logs. The winners won’t be flashy. They’ll be secure.
✦
Startup Events and Deadlines
Crash Course in Financial Modeling l Feb 19 l Webinar
Web Agents Hackaton l February 28 - March 1 l San Francisco
AI Tech & Startup Night — San Francisco l Feb 25 l San Francisco
How to Find your Startup Valuation l Feb 26 l Webinar
✦
How did we do?
