Latest edition: 22 September 2026London — published continuously since 2026Free forever
The Founder Gazette
Startup news, held to newspaper standards

Filed under: ai

16 stories

The archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.

Tools

A calculator for when a local LLM rig pays for itself

Sunk Cost takes a machine, a model and a daily token count, and works out how long the hardware takes to beat renting the same model by the token.

256 · 21 September 2026
Startup news

Big Picture Bio leaves stealth with £2.2m, £700k of it non-dilutive

The London biotech split its pre-seed between two co-leads and an Innovate UK programme, keeping roughly a third of the money off the cap table.

248 · 20 September 2026
Startup news

Funding Atlas lists 27,000 funding opportunities in one database

David Raynor spent his career in film. At 75 he has built a search engine for grants, accelerators and angel investors, and says it now holds more than 27,000 entries.

237 · 13 September 2026
Startup news

CloudNC raises $20m to put AI on the shop floor

The London company says its software is used by more than 1,000 machine shops, and Lockheed Martin is both a customer and an investor. A quoting product follows later this year.

220 · 11 September 2026
Startup news

Small-firm AI use doubles to 47%, but only 19% feel confident

Simply Business says half of UK small business owners now use AI tools. Its own survey also finds a third use them only for routine admin, and security worries top the list of reasons the rest stay out.

216 · 10 September 2026
AI costs

Six large firms cut AI bills by routing work to open models

Uber, Stripe, Coinbase and three others have dropped proprietary models for parts of their workload. The reported saving is around half.

196 · 7 September 2026
Startup news

Cambridge spinout sells frontier model firms can host themselves

Flower Labs says its Endeavor model matches OpenAI and Anthropic on task completion, and can run inside a customer's own systems. The price has not been published.

175 · 2 September 2026
Tips

Ghostwriter claims 20 times the LinkedIn reach of his peers, without AI

Inc. reports that a LinkedIn ghostwriter outperforms creators of similar following by a factor of 20, and that he refuses to draft with AI. The specifics of how are thinner than the claim.

150 · 26 August 2026
Tips

Replit's founder: over half the company will be salespeople

Amjad Masad spent a decade believing a good product sells itself. Enterprise procurement disagreed. The lesson for product-led founders is not whether to hire sellers, but when.

138 · 24 August 2026
Founder tactics

Filmmaker refused a $100,000 deal over AI-generated faces

Trevor Rappleye told a franchise brand his studio would not fake testimonials. He spent three hours certain he had ruined his company, then the board signed anyway.

114 · 22 August 2026
Startup news

Medly raises $8m seed for AI exam tutoring

Felix Capital led a €6.89m round in the London platform, which says it has passed 400,000 UK users 18 months after launch. Two former NHS doctors run it.

105 · 20 August 2026
Working practices

Clay tells staff: writing a document should take longer than reading it

The sales software company has put a rule in writing about how long internal documents should take to produce. The detail of how it is enforced has not been published.

73 · 13 August 2026
Startup news

Deep Real signs WWE's Natalya Neidhart for launch Beta

The company films performers once, then lets fans query the recordings. Its first wrestling signing is a test of whether non-union talent can sell access without selling their likeness.

68 · 12 August 2026
Fundraising

Three AI firms hit $100m ARR. Multiples ran 50x to 100x

Harvey, Sierra and Legora each crossed $100m in annual recurring revenue within nine months. The venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz argues the gap between their valuations is not explained by how fast they grew.

55 · 11 August 2026
Founder tips

YC partners say one word gives away an AI-written application

Applications to Y Combinator have grown 60% longer in three years, and the word "wedge" now appears in more than a fifth of them. Two partners have said publicly what that tells them.

33 · 9 August 2026
Startup news

Airtable sells at 2.7x ARR, a ninth of its 2021 mark

Bending Spoons is buying Airtable at a $1.285bn enterprise value on roughly $480m of recurring revenue. The company was worth $11.7bn in December 2021 and raised $1.4bn along the way.

19 · 8 August 2026