🧠 $200/hr Interns, 1M Amazon Bots, and the Ultimate India VC List...
Inside/VC Weekly #24
Good morning!
Welcome to another Inside/VC edition. This issue takes 5 minutes to read.
If you only have one, here are the 5 most important things:Cluely hits $7M ARR in 7 days {and pays interns $200/hr}(🇺🇸)
Elon Musk launches “America Party” after Trump fallout (🇺🇸)
At least 36 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 so far (🌍)
YC alum raises $34M solo fund to bet on the next Stripe (🇺🇸)
These are the top 95+ most active Indian VC Funds (🇮🇳)
Let’s get into it.
Weekly Spotlight:
Cluely hits $7M ARR in 7 days {and pays interns $200/hr}(🇺🇸)
Silicon Valley’s most talked-about notetaker startup just doubled its ARR to $7 million - one week after launching its enterprise product. Cluely’s pitch: real-time, invisible AI that feeds you context, questions, and notes during meetings.
The company, which was once known for developing tools to help people "cheat" on interviews, is now backed by a16z and is hiring aggressively. Interns are paid up to $200 per hour. As far as I know, it's currently the highest-paying internship on the market (even quants ‘only’ earn a maximum of $150/hr).
However, they are still facing the typical problem of intense competition. The open-source clone, Glass, launched just days later and has already received 850 stars on GitHub.
Inside/VC Shorts
📰 News Shorts:
Elon Musk launches “America Party” after Trump fallout (🇺🇸)
Elon Musk just declared the founding of his own political party: the America Party. In a post on X, he said it’s meant to “give you your freedom back” and blasted the US as a “one-party system of waste and corruption.”
The move comes after a public split with Donald Trump over the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a tax-and-spend package Musk called a “disgusting abomination.” He had supported Trump with $250M, but now accuses him of betraying fiscal conservatives.
Musk can't run for president (born in South Africa), but he doesn’t need to. With $360B and 180M followers, he plans to influence House and Senate races — and spook both parties.
🚀 Startup Shorts:
At least 36 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 so far (🌍)
At least 36 startups have joined the unicorn club this year, according to Crunchbase and PitchBook. Most are in AI, but not all of them are building models.
Olipop makes gut-friendly soda. Gecko builds bug-like robots. Loft Orbital puts satellites into space. Even a Medicare navigation tool made the list.
Biggest outlier? Thinking Machines Lab: $2B seed round, $10B valuation, no product. Backed by a16z and Nvidia. Fun Fact:They're also handing out substantial paychecks with up to a $500,000 base salary for early employees. I think that should be just enough to get by.
Amazon edges toward a majority-robot workforce (🇺🇸)
Amazon now operates over one million robots across its warehouses, with human staff numbers falling to 1.56 million. At this rate, machines could soon outnumber people inside the company.
In 2020, the average warehouse had around 1,000 employees. Today, it’s closer to 670. Over the same period, output per worker jumped from 175 to nearly 4,000 packages annually — a shift powered almost entirely by automation.
Three out of four Amazon deliveries already rely on robots in some way. With the rollout of its new in-house AI system DeepFleet, Amazon plans to make its machines smarter, more autonomous, and capable of doing tasks that used to require human hands.
The company is also testing humanoid robots. Full deployment might not be far off.
Substack pushes deeper into video with new livestream tools (🇺🇸)
Substack has rolled out a fresh wave of livestreaming features as it doubles down on video. Creators can now generate highlight clips automatically, post them to Substack Notes, and sync their top-performing ones to YouTube Shorts with one click.
The platform also generates ready-made promo assets for each scheduled stream, optimized for social platforms. Livestream guests can now be invited via email or SMS — no Substack account required.
These updates follow the launch of audio-only livestreams and a TikTok-style scrollable video feed earlier this year. It seems like they try to battle every big platform out there…
💸 Fundraising Shorts:
YC alum raises $34M solo fund to bet on the next Stripe (🇺🇸)
Kulveer Taggar, founder of Zeus Living and one of Y Combinator’s earliest graduates, has launched Phosphor Capital — a $34 million fund investing exclusively in YC startups.
The fund is backed by Zeus LPs, family offices, and YC CEO Garry Tan himself. Taggar writes checks between $100K and $500K and has already backed over 200 YC companies, including Circleback and Gumloop.
Phosphor isn’t the only YC-focused fund out there, but it’s the only one led solo by someone with two YC stints and an exit behind him.
Just Eat founder raises €115M to challenge Salesforce (🇩🇪)
Christoph Gerber, co-founder of JustEat (a.k.a. Lieferando, takeway.com → They have like 50 different names), just raised €115 million for his second act: Berlin-based loyalty startup Talon One. Backers include Meritech Capital, CRV, and Silversmith, all with deep B2B and SaaS roots.
Talon One helps brands like Adidas, H&M, and Costa Coffee run promotions, loyalty programs, and discount campaigns from one central platform. The tool emerged from Gerber’s early mistakes running promotions at Just Eat and now counts 270 clients globally.
Unlike Salesforce Loyalty Cloud, Talon One combines rewards with gamification and custom promo logic — and is already betting on AI to better predict consumer behavior.
xAI raises $10B to expand Grok and build out Colossus (🇺🇸)
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has closed a $10 billion funding round split evenly between debt and equity, according to Morgan Stanley. Investors include global institutions betting on Grok and its role inside Musk’s X platform.
The money will go toward scaling xAI’s infrastructure, including expanding its Memphis-based Colossus data center from 200,000 GPUs to a planned one million. The facility has already drawn criticism for its use of gas turbines.
Grok 3 currently ranks in the top 10 of LMArena benchmarks, but still trails OpenAI and Google. With OpenAI now valued at $300B and Anthropic at $61.5B, xAI needs both capital and speed to stay relevant.
Here are some more interesting reads:
100+ Most Active Venture Capital Companies in Germany
Women in Startups: What It’s Like to Be a Female Entrepreneur in 2025
How to Build a Killer Dealflow Machine (That Actually Works)
How Oatly Turned $640M Revenue Into a $200M Loss
🧑💻 Career Corner: Hot VC Internships (US + EU)Internships
🇸🇬 Stride Ventures - Investment Intern (Singapur) ➤ Job desc.
🇧🇪 Syndicate One - VC Analyst Intern (Brussels) ➤ Job desc.
🇫🇷 OneRagtime - IR Visiting Analyst (Paris) ➤ Job desc.
🇫🇷 ⚡ SUPER CAPITAL ⚡ - VC Analyst Intern (Paris) ➤ Job desc.
🇫🇷 Founders Future - VC Analyst Intern (Paris) ➤ Job desc
🇸🇦 Kinetic Investments - Venture Scouts (UAE + Saudi Arabia) ➤ Job desc
🌏 Latin Leap - VC Analyst Intern (Remote) ➤ Job desc.
🇳🇱 NLC Health Ventures - VC Investment Analyst Intern (Amsterdam) ➤ Job desc.
Alright, that’s it for this week.
Let me know which VC/Startup data stack you'd like to see next.
Until next week,
Jannis
