🕶️ Ring Ring, AI

Every week, another “dead” technology refuses to die.

Phone calls are making a comeback thanks to AI, factory software is getting version control, and even the office is finding new fans among Gen Z.

Meanwhile, regulators, founders, and brands are all learning the same lesson: the tools may change fast, but human behavior changes a lot slower.

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Turns out the phone isn’t dead, it’s just been waiting for an agent that never gets bored. Isaiah Granet turned 180 “phone calls are dead” passes into a $50M Series C round, pushing Bland past $100M raised on the thesis that the messiest conversations will stay voice-first.

Bland’s edge is doctrinaire: no OpenAI, no Anthropic, only its own models, which lets it offer long, unscripted 30–45 minute calls in healthcare and finance with real control over data, latency, and behavior. That model ownership plus self-hosting is the wedge into incumbents still running IVRs from the Blackberry era.

The interesting bet isn’t the current ~$3B call-center AI market; it’s whether owning the full voice stack becomes the new default interface to institutions. If that’s right, “boring” phone calls are a $100B surface area.

🚩 Nearly 60% say a toxic workplace builds slowly; early warning signs are often missed by leaders

Those overlooked signals; like rising passive-aggression, meeting side chats, and “silent quitting” from top performers, tend to show up months before engagement scores or exit data move, and leaders in the Inc. survey admit they rarely have a system to track them in real time.

💸 Andrew Yang bets the next startup wave is slashing costs; his Noble Mobile already serves “thousands” with cheaper wireless.

It’s a bet that flips the usual “grow ARPU at all costs” script: Noble Mobile’s margins come from running a lean MVNO and handing the surplus back, much like Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs play on pharma pricing.

🤖 AI-driven SaaS startups must prove ROI and adapt pricing, only 3% have reached $10M ARR, per Ivan Nikkhoo.

That tiny 3% is competing in a market where promising AI categories now see 2x–3x more entrants than past SaaS waves, while incumbents race to bolt on their own agents and workflow copilots, according to Crunchbase, which quietly changes what “defensibility” and “expansion” need to look like in a deck.

🤝 Black founders-turned-investors take on VC bias—just 1% of US VC funding goes to Black startups.

Many of these operators are now raising targeted funds and syndicates—like MaC Venture Capital and Impact America Fund—to write the first institutional check, then using LP pressure and data from Crunchbase’s Diversity Spotlight to force larger firms to follow on at real, not “diversity discount,” valuations.