Jul 21, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Stripe Aims Stablecoins

More Stories: Cartken Robots Go Industry, Perplexity Bets India

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Veins pulse, limbs stretch, and eyes turn to new horizons. The body of tech is evolving—quietly, structurally, irreversibly.

M&A

Stripe Buys Orum to Advance Stablecoin Strategy

👀 What’s the move: Stripe snatched up Orum to beef up its real-time payments game—just months after buying Bridge for stablecoin rails. The message? Stripe wants to control both sides of the payment coin: chain and bank, crypto and ACH, stablecoins and FedNow. This isn’t about redundancy. It’s orchestration.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Stripe’s making a chess move most aren’t watching. With Bridge, it can move money globally onchain via USDC. With Orum, it can move money locally via RTP, ACH, and FedNow. The real prize? Routing payments smartly across both worlds—optimizing for speed, cost, and compliance. A programmable, multi-rail engine that just so happens to also own the rails.

⛵ Key takeaway: Stripe isn’t picking sides—it’s building the switchboard for money, chain or no chain.

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ROBOTS

Cartken’s Robots Just Got a Factory Job

👀 What’s the move: Cartken, the campus food bot darling, just hard-pivoted to hauling parts in industrial facilities. After a German auto supplier used its lunchbox-on-wheels to shuttle production samples, Cartken realized the real money’s not in burritos—it’s in B2B logistics. Cue the birth of a 660-pound “Hauler” and a cozy deal with Mitsubishi to deploy 100 bots in Japan.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Last-mile delivery was cute, but crowded, margin-thin, and labor-backed. Industrial automation? Way stickier. Robots that move widgets between labs and warehouses don’t ghost shifts, need tips, or require sidewalk permits. Cartken is betting that predictable floorplans beat unpredictable sidewalks—and VCs seem to agree.

⛵ Key takeaway: Turns out the robot revolution starts with factories, not French fries.

Perplexity’s $200 Freebie Bet: Buy India, Bleed OpenAI

👀 What’s the move: Perplexity just handed out a free $200 Pro subscription to all 360 million Airtel users — an exclusive partnership aimed squarely at planting its AI search flag in India before OpenAI gets comfy. Downloads are up 600%, MAUs surged 640%, but revenue? Still a rounding error next to ChatGPT.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just expansion — it’s arbitrage. Perplexity is using India’s scale, tech-savvy population, and lack of entrenched AI players to leapfrog Western paywalls and pump user metrics. But India’s love for “free” could turn this growth hack into a revenue mirage unless monetization shows up fast.

⛵ Key takeaway:
Perplexity’s playing growth games in India — but eyeballs without wallets don’t beat OpenAI’s cash-printing GPT.

STARTUP SPOT

🛻 Cartken
“AMR that moves anywhere.”
AI‑first autonomous mobile robots for mixed indoor/outdoor logistics—camera‑based perception, no LiDAR, self‑charge & fleet management.
→ Founded 2019 by ex‑Google Bookbot engineers (Christian Bersch et al.); raised $22 M+ from 468 Capital, Vela, Magna, Mitsubishi Electric.

🧠 Greptile
“AI code review that knows your base.”
Automated PR reviewer using full codebase context—catches 3× more bugs, merges PRs 4× faster → deep GitHub/GitLab integration, in-line suggestions, natural-language summaries.
→ Founded 2023 by Georgia Tech alumni Daksh Gupta, Soohoon Choi & Vaishant Kameswaran; YC W24 grad; used by 250+ teams incl. Stripe, Amazon, PostHog. Raising $30M Series A at $180M valuation led by Benchmark; seed $4M from Initialized; founder admits “no work‑life‑balance” grind driving fast iteration.

🛠️ BrightAI
“Physical AI for infrastructure ops.”
Stateful edge‑AI platform adds vision/sensor‑based autonomy to pipelines, power grids, HVAC, pest control & more → deployed 250K+ endpoints across 50K+ sites, delivering 20–30% productivity gains.
→ Founded in 2019 by Alex Hawkinson (ex‑SmartThings); bootstrapped to $80M+ revenue pre‑Series A. Just closed $51M Series A led by Khosla & Inspired (total $78M); now expanding SF HQ, hiring 100+, targeting scale in new verticals .

BAY AREA MEMOS

Microsoft urges on-premises SharePoint customers to immediately patch a critical vulnerability that is under active attack.
After a nine-year wait, Tesla's India launch is met with disappointment from early loyalists due to high prices and increased competition.
The AI code reviewer Greptile is reportedly in talks with Benchmark to lead a $30 million series A round at a $180 million valuation.
A new AI model significantly improves retail demand forecasting for peak periods by aligning sales data with future events like holidays and promotions.
BrightAI raises $51 million in a Series A round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital to apply its "physical AI" platform to critical infrastructure.

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