Jihoon Kim

Curating early-stage B2B SaaS startups.
Building

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

Tools that remove bottlenecks in vibe design will become the next big trend.

1. A high-quality vector SVG image generator (Quiver is doing this well)

2. Web animation capture

3. Precise component cloning
(Replicates details like shadows, gradients, and other visual effects with high fidelity. There are many tools out there, but I haven’t seen one that truly nails this yet.)

The startup that fully satisfies the DIY urge at a high level will win.

[Micka @micka_design]

New side project: a tiny Chrome extension to Slooow down and capture any web animation.

I never open the animation devtools, but I always want to see how far a team pushed their polish.

0.1x turns every interface into a motion design critique — you see things you’d normally miss.

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

It's been a wild day in tech:

Helicone acquired by Mintlify

Drizzle joins PlanetScale

Harvey partners with Parallel Web Systems

Cursor surpasses $2B ARR

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

Seeing this trend more and more lately. Kernel (YC S25) actually started as onkernel .com before switching to kernel .sh.

There's a clear shift happening where brands are moving away from using prefixes or suffixes just to hold onto a .com domain, and instead opting for shorter, cleaner names to strengthen their brand identity.

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

I'm really excited about this company. Some might think it's just a tool for generating SVG logos, but the potential is massive.

Creating a clean, proper SVG logo is trickier than it sounds. Way more than just a png to svg converter. 2026 is the era of branding. This is about breathing life into your brand.

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

I curate early-stage startups raising from pre-seed to Series A every day. Follow me for the latest funding updates. Full list:https://t.co/lhQ4FVm9BP

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

12 B2B SaaS startups that raised today, most are hiring

1. Dentio - $2.3M / Pre-seed (Sweden)
Automates insurance back-office operations

2. Paraglide - $5M / Seed (UK)
B2B accounts receivable operations

3. Twin - $10M / Seed (France)
No-code builder for autonomous business agents

4. Risotto - $10M / Seed (US)
Autonomous handling of IT support tickets

5. Midship - $4.15M / Seed (US)
SOX compliance testing and documentation

6. Brickanta - $8M / Seed (Sweden)
Pre-construction cost and risk analysis

7. FLORA - $42M / Series A (US)
Collaborative canvas unifying multimodal AI models

8. Pace - $10M / Series A (US)
Automates insurance back-office operations

9. Concourse - $12M / Series A (US)
Corporate finance analysis and reporting

10. Porter - $20M / Series A (US)
Production-ready Kubernetes with one-click deployment

11. Fulcrum - $25M / Series A (US)
Insurance brokerage copilot for client servicing

12. Memcyco - $37M / Series A (Israel)
Real-time phishing and account takeover protection

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

@HankCouture @thecosmos is doing exactly this

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

I share daily updates on early-stage startups that have raised funding. See the full list here.
https://t.co/lhQ4FVm9BP

[Jihoon Kim @thejihoonk]

10 early-stage B2B SaaS startups that raised seed rounds in January

Open - $7M
Omnichannel customer support automation

Legato - $7M
Natural language app builder for SaaS

Nexxa - $9M
Agents for heavy industry

Yuki - $6M
Data query cost optimization

Blockit - $5M
Automated meeting scheduling

Whistle Performance - $2M
Athlete performance and injury analytics

Mave AI - $5M
Marketing automation for real estate listings

Neuropacs - $1M
Neuroimaging for brain disease detection

Furl - $10M
Autonomous security remediation

AiStrike - $7M
SOC automation for detection and response

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

.@cambioml has raised $18M to transform commercial real estate operations with agentic AI.

Cambio targets a $20T commercial real estate market still run on spreadsheets, using AI to cut months of capital planning and compliance work to minutes.

Congrats to the team on the raise!

https://t.co/uS253pCtrI

[Woosuk Kwon @woosuk_k]

Today, we're proud to announce @inferact, a startup founded by creators and core maintainers of @vllm_project, the most popular open-source LLM inference engine.

Our mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster.

The Challenge
Inference is not solved. It's getting harder.

Models grow larger. New architectures proliferate: mixture-of-experts, multimodal, agentic. Every breakthrough demands new infrastructure. Meanwhile, hardware fragments: more accelerators, more programming models, and more combinations to optimize.

The capability gap between models and the systems that serve them is widening. Left this way, the most capable models remain bottlenecked and with full scope of their capabilities accessible only to those who can build custom infrastructure. Close the gap, and we unlock new possibilities.

And the problem is growing. Inference is shifting from a fraction of compute to the majority: test-time compute, RL training loops, synthetic data.

We see a future where serving AI becomes effortless.

Today, deploying a frontier model at scale requires a dedicated infrastructure team. Tomorrow, it should be as simple as spinning up a serverless database. The complexity doesn't disappear; it gets absorbed into the infrastructure we're building.

Why Us
vLLM sits at the intersection of models and hardware: a position that took years to build.

When model vendors ship new architectures, they work with us to ensure day-zero support. When hardware vendors develop new silicon, they integrate with vLLM. When teams deploy at scale, they run vLLM, from frontier labs to hyperscalers to startups serving millions of users. Today, vLLM supports 500+ model architectures, runs on 200+ accelerator types, and powers inference at global scale. This ecosystem, built with 2,000+ contributors, is our foundation.

We've been stewards of this engine since its first commit. We know it inside out. We deployed it at frontier scale—in research and in production.

Open Source
vLLM was built in the open. That's not changing.

Inferact exists to supercharge vLLM adoption. The optimizations we develop flow back to the community. We plan to push vLLM's performance further, deepen support for emerging model architectures, and expand coverage across frontier hardware. The AI industry needs inference infrastructure that isn't locked behind proprietary walls.

Join Us
Through the open source community, we are fortunate to work with some of the best people we know. For @inferact, we're hiring engineers and researchers to work at the frontier of inference, where models meet hardware at scale. Come build with us.

We're fortunate to be supported by investors who share our vision, including @a16z and @lightspeedvp who led our $150M seed, as well as @sequoia, @AltimeterCap, @Redpoint, @ZhenFund, The House Fund, @strikervp, @LaudeVentures, and @databricks.

- @woosuk_k, @simon_mo_, @KaichaoYou, @rogerw0108, @istoica05 and the rest of the founding team

[Jacqueline Cheong @JacquelineSYC19]

Announcing Artie’s $12M Series A.

When Robin Tang and I started Artie, the idea was simple: make it easy to deploy real-time streaming pipelines.

Streaming pipelines used to be something only a few companies could afford to build. Guaranteeing transactional integrity, handling schema evolution, recovering from failures, and keeping latency low at scale is hard. Most teams limp along with brittle systems.

But today, with AI systems that make decisions, trigger workflows, and interact with customers, stale data isn’t just slow - it’s incorrect. Real-time data is becoming non-negotiable.

Today, companies like ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy, are processing 700B+ rows of data annually with Artie to power AI/ML workloads, customer-facing analytics, and operational systems.

@artie_labs is a fully managed real-time data streaming platform. We move data across systems in real time - so teams can rely on fresh, accurate data to power AI products - without building or maintaining streaming infrastructure.

We raised this round to double down on a simple belief: the next generation of data infrastructure will be streaming-first.

Huge thank you to @daltonc and @Standard_Cap for leading the round, with continued support from @ycombinator, @PathlightVC, and incredible angels including @arashf, @bennstancil, @chrisbest, @charleshearn, and @lennysan.

I also want to thank our team, customers, and partners for supporting our mission.

And thank you to Chris Metinko and @axios for capturing the exclusive story.

P.S. - If you want the same streaming infrastructure that Netflix and DoorDash have, but want to skip the multi-year build - reach out.

[Kais @kaiskhimji]

BIG NEWS: Today we are launching @blockitAI -- the first AI scheduling agent that actually understands your time.

After spending my career as a partner at @sequoia, I stepped back to build this. Why?

Because I believe the calendar is the last untouched social network, and it can only now be unlocked through AI.

Our scheduling agent can handle any degree of complexity and has spread purely through virality to date.

Blockit now works for 200+ companies and has coordinated 100,000+ meetings — all with zero humans in the loop.

We're excited to emerge from stealth and announce our $5M raise from @sequoia led by Pat Grady (@gradypb) with participation from @haystackvc, @adjacent, Original, and NPV, i.e. Jeff Weiner, the former CEO of Linkedin.

Come for the agent, stay for the network — get started free today at https://t.co/9J0KjLklwv

[Alexis Carlier @alexispcarlier]

In a world with abundant intelligence, AI agents will not just replace humans in existing workflows, but make new kinds of work possible; work that was previously too slow or expensive to perform at scale.

In cyberdefense, automated digital forensics, i.e. deep security investigations, will become ubiquitous.

Today we’re launching Asymmetric Security, the first full-stack AI Digital Forensics and Incident Response company. We're working with the worlds largest global cyber insurers, and our AI platform has already helped incident responders handle hundreds of cyber attacks. Building on this experience, we’re creating realistic training scenarios and evaluations to improve both our AI cyber-defense capabilities and those of frontier labs.

Our mission is to accelerate AI cyberdefense to address the security challenges of the AGI era.

[Peter Fuller @peterfuller23]

Introducing Tracelight 1.0

After six months, we are live with 5 of the 10 biggest management consultancies in the world, as well as PE funds and asset managers with over $600B in AUM.

Tracelight is the best AI add-in to Excel. In testing against the leading alternative add-ins, Tracelight 1.0 was:
- The most accurate
- 2x faster building analysis on average
- 20x faster at finding human errors in complex spreadsheets

We’ve been building with early adopters and enterprise partners for months. You can now reach a completely new level of performance in Excel. That’s why today we’re proud to launch a major new version.

To celebrate, we're giving 1 month of Tracelight Pro for free to anyone who comments LAUNCH below or TAGs a friend who needs this

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Retail startup Another raises a $2.5M seed to help sell excess inventory https://t.co/7ipSriuqdD

[Overworld @overworld_ai]

Today, we’re releasing a research preview of our real-time, local-first world model built for interactive, playable AI-worlds

60fps, locally run, all on consumer-grade hardware.

Come take a look ⬇️

[Maitreya Wagh @maitreya_wagh]

Proud to share that @bolna_dev has raised a $6.3M seed round, led by @generalcatalyst, to make Voice AI the default mode of communication for Indian businesses.

More detailed posts on learnings, gratitude, and plans soon.

For now, back to work🚀

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

.@usecrunched has raised $6M to scale to all Excel power users around the world.

Crunched automates manual Excel work inside the spreadsheet so analysts can focus on analysis instead of mechanics.

Congrats to the team on the raise!

[John Gargiulo @JohnnotJon]

Today, we’re launching Airpost.

I’m 46. That’s not a cool age to found a startup. At least according to Twitter. I still call it Twitter.

I’ve loved advertising all my life. Since I was 19 and my mom told me about a movie called “Nothing in Common” with Tom Hanks where he plays an ad exec whose main job seems to be shooting hoops with his creative partner. That sounded fun.

Since then, traditional advertising has stayed… traditional.

From my 1st job out of college writing TV ads for Snapple and Fox Sports, to leading product marketing at Airbnb, I’ve seen a lot. Now the AI era is here and an entire $1T industry is about to change. Who will change it?

Why not me? Why not us?

Introducing Airpost: a platform and service where world-class creative strategists use custom-built AI to build video ads. Fast.

If you’ve ever sat down to make an ad with AI and realized 20 minutes later you’re still wrestling with that same clip… that’s why we built Airpost.

Growth teams are busy. They’re asked to do too many things as it is. They shouldn’t have to be AI experts as well. Creative strategists shouldn’t have to stare at a white box trying to decide what to prompt. They should have a partner. That’s what we aspire to be. And that’s what we’ve built our tech to do.

AI ads shouldn’t have to mean only AI footage. We have an exclusive library of over 300,000 video clips we’ve shot ourselves. Our engine uses these, along with client footage and AI footage to make the ads we deliver each week.

We’re funded by the best investors and humans we know. We bootstrapped our performance creative agency, Ready Set, to 200 people. I was always told VCs didn’t add value. If that’s true, it must be other VCs, because ours have been awesome. Thank you Zach Perret, Nate Abbott, Peter Hebert, Max Mullen and all of the firms and folks who’ve believed in us so far.

We’ve gone from 0 to $1M ARR in the six months since we quietly started working with early clients like DoorDash, Dr. Squatch, Calm and more.

So far, every customer has renewed.

To celebrate the launch, we’re giving away a superagent where you:

1) Put in your product URL
2) Get snippets of what your real users are saying on Meta, TikTok, Reddit and X
3) Paste them into ad scripts

Comment “Airpost” and I’ll DM you the private link.

It feels (a little scary but) good to be out there.

Here we go! 🚀