No Product, $2B Raised

THIS WEEK’S STORY

You don’t need VC money to build a company anymore

We’re lucky to live in a time where you don’t need a seed round to build 99.9% of software companies.

Not long ago, the standard playbook was: have an idea, build a deck, raise some money, hire a team, then spend months struggling to find product–market fit. That world is fading fast.

Today? The game is flipped.

Got an idea? You don’t need a pitch deck. You don’t need a team. Just open V0 or Bolt and start building. You can literally vibe your way to a product in 24 hours with the tools that exist today.

Sure, if you're trying to build the next LLM to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic (good luck), you'll need deep pockets. But like Sam Altman said, in 99% of cases, trying to out-build the current AI giants is a losing game. By the time you perfect your model, they’ve already released something 10x better, with features that make yours obsolete in a second.

I saw this firsthand while building my app.

I spent hours hacking together a workaround to give the LLM web search capabilities. It kind of worked, but it was messy. Then Perplexity released a new model with native web search via API. I swapped one line of code and boom, instant upgrade.

Sometimes, waiting a few months gives you a better tech stack for free.

That’s the new game. No one went to school for vibe coding, MCPs, prompting, or AI-first marketing. We're all figuring it out in real time.

You don’t need a CS degree or a dev cofounder. You just need to experiment relentlessly and ship.

That’s what this newsletter is here for: to help non-developers go from zero to a fully working app, with nothing but AI and some curiosity. If you wanna learn how in detail, check out here.

HEADLINES

Ex-OpenAI CTO raises $2B at a $10B valuation... with no product

Remember what I said earlier about only needing VC money if you are challenging the giants of AI?

Mira Murati just did exactly that.

The former CTO of OpenAI. One of the key minds behind ChatGPT, DALL·E, and voice mode. She just raised the most expensive seed round in history: $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation.

Read that again.

Her new company is called Thinking Machines Lab. It is only six months old. There is no product. No demo. No press tour. Just a vague mission to use reinforcement learning to customize AI models.

And still. $2 billion in funding.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Sarah Guo’s Conviction also backed it, along with other top AI investors. John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, is also on board.

This is conviction capital at its peak.

Murati’s track record and timing just did what most founders cannot do with a thousand pitch decks. It shows exactly where we are in the AI cycle.

Technical skills speak louder than slides.
Stealth is back.
Trust is once again the most valuable currency in Silicon Valley.

Thoughts?

Higgsfield SOUL is changing UGC forever

Higgsfield just raised the bar for AI generated images. Their new feature, SOUL, creates characters that look scarily real.

Not “close enough” real. Actually real.

It is getting harder and harder to tell what is AI and what is human. The faces, expressions, even the lighting. It is wild.

Have a look for yourself:

THIS WEEK’S TIP

Wanna build an app fast? Use these two tools

If you want to go from idea to working product without spending weeks on tutorials, here’s what I recommend:

1. v0 by Vercel
The latest update lets you build a full-stack app in NextJS using just prompts and manual design tweaks. You can plug in Supabase or any backend service and have a working app in hours. For simple web apps, it is a no-brainer.

2. Bolt.new
For mobile apps, Bolt is the best tool I’ve found. Just type a few prompts and it generates slick UIs instantly. It builds in React Native, so the code works for both iOS and Android. You can export it to Cursor, hook up your backend, and you are off to the races.

PS: you can see all of my recommended tools and how to build with AI here.

QUICK HITS

• President Trump Admin Plans AI-Focused Executive Orders: New actions aim to expand energy access and land use for AI infrastructure, boosting U.S. competitiveness.

• Teen Founder Raises $12M for AI Startup: 16-year-old Pranjali Awasthi’s Delv.AI is making academic research more accessible with LLMs.

• FDA Deploys First Agency-Wide AI Tool: INTACT streamlines data analysis, regulation, and risk assessment—pushing AI deeper into government.

• Midjourney Launches AI Video Model V1: Users can now generate video from text prompts with motion and style controls, entering the video AI race.

• Amazon Cuts Jobs Due to Generative AI: Some corporate roles are being replaced or redefined, signaling industry-wide AI-driven workforce shifts.

And That is all for this week!

See you next Saturday!

Filippo

Filippo Pietrantonio

Find me on X, or Book a 1:1 Call