Gideon

Founder @rulebasehq (YC F24)

[Benjamin Dada @DadaBen_]

Abandoned my startup to do this.

Let's go!

[fai nur @faionur]

Status has raised $17M in seed and Series A funding led by @AbstractVC, @generalcatalyst and @usv to let anyone step inside their favorite stories, become famous, and live a million different lives.

We quietly launched Status last year and grew to over 1 million users in 19 days - making us the fastest growing AI app since ChatGPT.

But we hit a (predictable) snag - the app was incredibly expensive to run. How do you serve millions of users without degrading the product with a cheap LLM?

So the team locked in: we rebuilt the whole experience, and our technical bets paid off. Our users now spend 35 minutes on average to (90 minutes each day for power users!), and millions of characters and worlds have been created. All by our users.

The next frontier of entertainment is mobile-first and deeply personal. Traditional mobile games take years to build and rarely stick. TV shows are fleeting in the age of streaming. Status is different. It is not a game you finish, it is a world you can live in.

Status is a new category entirely: Immersive Social Entertainment, and we believe strongly that it is the next great entertainment paradigm. We’ve 10x’d to millions in annual revenue in Q1 2026, we're just getting started.

On Status, you can be anyone.

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

@faionur @AbstractVC @generalcatalyst @usv Congrats Fai, great work!!!!

[Gabriella @GabriellaHach]

So excited to share that @Dessn_ai has raised $6m, led @pietrobezza , with participation from @betaworks , N49P, and a few other amazing partners and angels.

@eminimnim and I started the company 2 years ago
with one conviction: the future of product development wouldn’t happen in disconnected mockups or recreated environments. It would happen directly in production.

Today, Dessn is the only product that enables an entire team to design and prototype directly in prod — visually, collaboratively, and in one click.

[Brandon Hill • Vori.com @IamBrandonHill]

Grocery is a $1.5T domestic market — bigger than restaurants, bigger than hotels. But it's running on technology from the Reagan administration.

We just raised a $22M Series B for @VoriHQ to make every supermarket in America autonomous.

[Everett Cook @everettcookny]

Invoicing was our most requested feature for over a year, but we held off on building it. After crossing $1M in invoicing volume this week, here's why I'm glad we did.

Most of the requests weren't coming from people who had never invoiced before. They were coming from founders who had tried other tools that shipped the feature fast and gotten burned - the designs looked good, but what was under the hood just didn’t work well enough to save them actual time and effort.

This ties back to a core product philosophy at Rho: You get one shot at a core financial workflow. We took the time to get the infrastructure right, even when that meant saying no to hundreds of Slack messages requesting it.

$1M in transaction volume in since launching our beta a few weeks ago, and there are three themes I’m most excited about.

Cash application is the real problem to solve. Sending invoices is easy. Knowing which invoice got paid, by whom, and for how much is not. Payments don't match cleanly. They cover multiple invoices. They arrive with unclear remittance. So even when the money comes in, teams end up reconciling manually. Solve this and you stop being a tool that helps people send invoices. You become a tool that actually closes the loop on getting paid. That's the product we're building toward.

The payment portal changes the equation. When customers pay through your portal, you control the session. You have the context you need to match the payment correctly, automatically. This is why we're doubling down on it in Q2.

Invoicing is relationship management. How you follow up on a late invoice with a 10-year contractor is different from chasing a one-time vendor. The notification trail, the customer record, the tone. It all matters. We're building AR as a relationship layer, not just a money movement tool.

We’d love more customer feedback - invoicing is free with Rho! Reach out to your account team to apply for early access. If you're not a Rho customer and want to try it, send me a message.

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

Portable agents are inevitable. Probably the only real way to compete with the vertical model providers. Expose your expertise everywhere the user lives: in the browser, Slack, or Word. Everywhere relevant to your workflow.

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

@alexberkovic Lets go!!!

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

Any recommendations for designers who specialize in interactive data visualization projects? I would want something similar to https://t.co/H0jMz1uOr3

[Everett Cook @everettcookny]

there's locked in and then there's zero to one at 900wpm locked in

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

For anyone looking for a great 0-1 designer, look no further @aydahnizzy. Our entire team is moving to New York to work in person, otherwise, he would be joining us. Every team would be lucky to have him.

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

@aydahnizzy @RulebaseHQ Let's go 🦾🦾🦾

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

@GJarrosson Light refractions 🤝 Transparent resin - 🏌️‍♂️every time.

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

Hi everyone, we spend an absolutely sh*t ton of money with OpenAI, here is our shiny plaque for it. 🙏🤣

[Ben South @bnj]

If you want your generations to feel designed and not…generated

We hid a few invite codes to @variantui in this video

The first 100 get unlimited credits, reply for a hint

[Gideon @gideon_eb]

@KMkota0 🤞

[chidi @chidiwilliams__]

https://t.co/fR1Kxt9aTw

[chidi @chidiwilliams__]

Read more about our journey on TechCrunch and Business Post:

https://t.co/Id0p3nwUym

[chidi @chidiwilliams__]

Excited to share that we raised $2.1M to build the future of CX and back-office operations in financial services.

For fintechs and banks, customer service back-office work remains a maze of manual processes, including quality assurance, dispute investigations, and fraud and compliance checks.

At @RulebaseHQ, we built Coworker to work alongside CX and ops teams to:

- Review 100% of interactions for compliance and quality assurance

- Automatically file and track fraud and dispute cases end-to-end across CX, case management, and back-office platforms

- Proactively follow up with teammates and third-party partners to keep SLAs on track

- Flag compliance risks in real time and generate audit-ready reports.

Coworker bridges CX and back-office ops, automating the most manual tasks so nothing slips through the cracks and every customer issue is resolved quicker and more effectively.

A massive thank you to our investors, customers, and the growing @RulebaseHQ team for believing in our vision and being part of this journey!

Our round was led by @LorenStraub from @BoweryCapital, with participation from @ycombinator, @CommerceVC, @transposevc, and founders of t3 chat, Atrium, Cron (now Notion Calendar): @theo, @raphaelschaad, and more.

Incredibly grateful to have the support of the @ycombinator community and mentors, @dflieb and @koomen.

Thank you all for being incredible partners on this journey!