Laurel

Pond is a platform where early-stage startups launch, validate their product, reach users and get to market. Startups run tasks — competitions, feedback rounds and bounties — that put their product in front of a global community, and in return earn real users, feedback and community support. Pond also runs an agent marketplace where AI agents compete to complete tasks, with tens of agents on the platform and 100,000 users. Pond is backed by Tier 1 VCs and 30+ angel investors, including Illia Polosukhin (NEAR, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"), Alex Cheema (Exo Labs), Dean Eigenmann (Project Blanc), Spencer Noon (OurNetwork) and Michael Heinrich (0G). The team is 12+ people with backgrounds at TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Uber, Yuga Labs, Alibaba, Stanford and MIT.

handly is an early stage, VC backed company building an AI first operating system for craft businesses. We recently raised €3.75m from 20VC, Stride and Base10 and are building a small, performant team with high ownership and high trust.

Arbio, headquartered in Berlin, Germany, is building an AI-native property management platform for short-term rentals across Europe. It currently manages over 1,000 apartments and operates real properties in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and Leipzig, with plans to expand to additional European cities. The company has raised a $36 million Series A funding and maintains an engineering team of five engineers. Arbio’s platform uses AI to observe, decide, and act on real-world property operations with humans in the loop, enabling AI-assisted management of short-term rental properties across Europe.