{{first_name | Leader}}, welcome back.
AI is accelerating at every layer. Infrastructure is getting funded, agents are getting deployed, and young companies are hitting milestones at record speed.
These are today’s updates.
Switch to a browser where AI works in the background. Try Neo.*
Google adds Gemini agents to Opal
Startups hit $10M ARR faster
MatX raises $500M for AI chips
Tools, resources, and a prompt for a kill or double down framework. ⬇️
AI should work for you, not the other way around. Yet most AI tools still make you do the work first—explaining context, rewriting prompts, and starting over again and again.
Norton Neo is different. It is the world’s first safe AI-native browser, built to understand what you’re doing as you browse, search, and work—so you don’t lose value to endless prompting. You can prompt Neo when you want, but you don’t have to over-explain—Neo already has the context.
As AI gets more powerful, Neo is built to make it useful, trustworthy, and friction-light.
Google adds Gemini-powered AI agents to Opal
Google upgraded Opal with AI agents powered by Gemini 3 Flash. Users can now create automated workflows and mini-apps using text prompts, with agents selecting tools like Google Sheets on their own, maintaining session memory, and asking for input when needed.
Stripe’s 2025 report shows more startups reached $10M ARR within three months than ever before, roughly double the 2024 figure. The 2025 cohort of new Stripe users grew 50% faster than the previous year, with 57% based outside the U.S.
AI tools are enabling smaller teams to scale revenue quickly, even as investors emphasize durable growth over pure speed.
AI chip startup MatX, founded by former Google TPU engineers, raised $500 million in Series B funding. MatX aims to deliver up to 10× better large model training performance compared to Nvidia GPUs. The funding supports production with TSMC, with chips expected to ship in 2027.
Productivity Tools
✏️ Pencil - Agent-driven design canvas inside your IDE for precise, fast builds.
📱 Surfn - Create conversational AI agents that drive leads and conversions.
💬 Articos - Turn landing pages and ideas into structured, interactive conversations.
⚛️ Dirac - AI-powered workspace for reasoning, planning, and complex problem solving.
Get featured tomorrow: How do you use AI for business/personally? Interesting stories will be shared with 100K curious readers.
Useful Resources
What is your biggest AI tradeoff right now?
💰 Funding
Slang AI raised $36M (Series B) to scale AI voice agents for customer engagement.
Koah raised $20.5M (Series A) for its AI-native monetization platform.
💼 Roles in AI
🐦 How LLMs Actually Work
Kill or Double Down Framework
When to use this?
When a project, tool, campaign, or AI initiative has been running for a while, and you need a clear decision: continue, fix, or stop.
I’ll describe an initiative below.
Apply a Kill or Double Down Framework:
Original Hypothesis
What was this supposed to achieve?
Current Reality
What measurable results exist?
What leading indicators exist?
Sunk Cost vs Future Value
What past investment should be ignored?
What future upside remains?
Decision Recommendation
Kill
Fix (with 1 clear change)
Double down (with 1 scaling move)
Decision Deadline
When this must be revisited
Be decisive. No hedging.
Initiative: [describe initiative + current results]P.S. Get more such prompts in the Prompting Playbook (free for you)
Stay curious, {{first_name | leaders}}
PS. If you missed yesterday’s issue, you can find it here.