no. 37: when cheating gets you a 5.3 million dollar round.

saie did a matcha collab, tiktok is trying to be google, and more.

welcome back! this week i have a lot of startup news. happy almost may!

mini news round-up 🗞️

• superpower the worlds first ai doctor and health app just raised a $30m series a.

• saie beauty collabed with rocky’s matcha - matcha is taking us by storm. also, i am liking more creativity from brands recently, between saie and the ordinary eggs move.

  

• the washington post partners with openai on search content - chatgpt will display summaries, quotes, and links to original reporting from the post in response to relevant questions. i guess this the best way to preserve media transparency and integrity.

• perplexity announced a partnership with motorola to bring its artificial intelligence search engine technology directly into their smartphones.

• tiktok is trying to be google maps with their newest launch, surfacing reviews in the comments tab - not a surprising feature but really loving this feature because i look at reviews so often from tiktok, especially when traveling.

  

  reviews now on the right hand side.

• the rise of the brand world - when did brand worlds become the new normal? this was a quick and fun read on a topic i care a lot about…

brand-storming 🧃

• koatji 🥛(cpg)- i found this premium organic barista oat and koji milk while at the elk. koji is a type of fermented rice used in japan and is now “elevating plant milk to a new standard combining flavor, texture and health.” you can only buy 6 boxes of it at a time. i sense this could be the next oat milk since that’s out now.

trends to watch 👀

the best thing i’ve seen lately is from the startup, cluely. if you haven’t heard about them yet, cluely aims to help you cheat on everything by providing undetectable guidance in any phone call. interviews, sales calls, all of it. honestly, this is a pretty splashy way to announce a startup launch, given that it was built by 2 columbia students who got kicked out for cheating. they raised $5.3M to keep doing it, but legally: “columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’”

i haven’t been surprised by product marketing for an ai company in a while, but i found this particularly interesting for a plethora of reasons.

i love this “manifesto” which is essentially just their company “why” that has it’s own website page. it’s quite assertive in how it reads but i personally think it works well:

and finally, of course, they launched a trailer that was really bro-coded but speaks to their product:

all this to say, a job well done by two 21-year-olds. i think they have a marketing genius on their team.

if anyone knows more about them, or if anything in today’s newsletter caught your attention, let me know in the comments.

see you all next week!