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Good morning! 👋 This week’s lineup hits on a theme we’ve all been feeling: the AI market is maturing fast. Funding is still flowing, but cracks are showing. Meanwhile, a new crop of tools is quietly redefining how software gets made — from Google’s “vibe coding” revolution to Okara’s privacy-first AI suite and Microsoft’s evolving browser-as-agent play. Let’s dig in.
In this issue:
The AI funding frenzy might be near its peak 💸
Private AI is a making a big wave 🌊
Google’s AI studio get major upgrades 🪄
Microsoft enters the browser wars 🥊
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Open AI
TL;DR: European AI startups have already raised €8.3B in 2025 — nearly double last year — but top investors are warning founders to raise now before a potential correction hits. With valuations hitting unsustainable multiples and ARR definitions getting stretched, the AI funding boom looks increasingly fragile.
VC firms like Oldenburg Capital, Playfair, and Northzone say the current market echoes past bubbles, from the dot-com crash to the 2021 post-COVID tech correction.
Startups are being told to secure 24–30 months of runway while investor appetite is still strong, in anticipation of a potential “funding freeze” scenario.
Founders chasing horizontal “AI platform” plays — like browsers or coding agents — are at higher risk as LLM giants (OpenAI, Anthropic) expand into those categories.
Even fundamentals are being warped: ARR is increasingly inflated by GMV or projected revenue without churn data or contractual lock-in.
The AI market’s current boom has been fueled as much by FOMO as by fundamentals. If the correction comes — triggered by a stumble at Nvidia or OpenAI, or just a collective reality check — startups with weak unit economics or generic “agent” plays will be hit first. The smart founders are already raising defensively and focusing on vertical use cases with clear technical moats.
Private AI
TL;DR: Okara.ai is positioning itself as the first truly private AI chat platform — combining end-to-end encryption, 30+ integrated models, real-time web search, image generation, and a marketplace where users can build and monetize their own agents. It’s aiming squarely at professionals who want AI horsepower without sacrificing data control.
Unlike ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, Okara encrypts every chat, prompt, and response — no shadow storage or data resale.
Users can switch between 30+ AI models mid-conversation and access 7 image generators for creative workflows.
Built-in search across X, Reddit, YouTube, and the web turns Okara into a research cockpit rather than a closed chat box.
The agent marketplace lets users create, train, and sell custom AI agents using their own datasets or URLs — a new path to monetize expertise.
Clean UI, file uploads, live response streaming, and private/public sharing links make it feel more like a productivity suite than a chatbot.
Okara is carving out a powerful niche: private, professional AI. As regulatory pressure around data usage intensifies and founders, lawyers, and researchers demand confidentiality, the platform’s encryption-first approach could become a differentiator. Its model-agnostic design also hints at a future where privacy and flexibility, not just raw model power, define the next generation of AI tools.
Build Apps
TL;DR: Google is quietly arming indie builders and small businesses with tools to create AI-powered apps — no coding required. Through AI Studio, Gemini, and a growing set of APIs, anyone can now prototype apps, voice agents, or video analyzers in under two minutes. Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind calls this shift “vibe coding” — the new way to build software by prompting, not programming.
AI Studio lets users deploy working AI apps in ~90 seconds with zero upfront cost, powered by Gemini and Nano Banana models.
Vibe coding is lowering the barrier to software creation — founders can launch multiple AI products using prompts instead of full dev cycles.
Google’s ecosystem (Gemini, AI Mode in Search, Notebook LM, Live API) is quietly becoming a builder’s toolkit for AI-native startups.
Case studies show real traction: indie creators making millions from lightweight, niche AI tools built through AI Studio.
Google sees voice agents and video understanding as the next major frontiers, while travel booking and overcomplicated “everything apps” are overhyped
For founders, this is a new kind of leverage. The AI “app explosion” isn’t just hype — it’s a platform shift in how digital businesses are created. Google’s move to make AI development fast, cheap, and accessible opens the door for solo makers and small teams to compete with larger players. The winners will be those who ship relentlessly, iterate on prompts, and build for specific user niches rather than chasing broad, overbuilt platforms.
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Agent Browser Wars
TL;DR: Microsoft has officially rolled out Copilot Mode in Edge, transforming the browser into an AI-powered workspace where chat, search, and navigation blend into one. The update integrates your browsing tabs, history, and even email — though its new “agentic” features still feel more experimental than dependable.
Every new tab now opens with Copilot, letting users chat, search, or enter URLs directly in a unified window.
Copilot can access all open tabs to summarize content, compare products, or analyze multiple sources at once.
The new Copilot Actions feature allows the AI to perform small tasks like unsubscribing from emails or booking reservations — though reliability remains hit-or-miss.
Microsoft also introduced Journeys, an AI-powered history view that clusters past browsing into topics and suggests next steps.
Privacy-conscious users must explicitly enable Copilot’s access to history and tabs for deeper functionality.
With Copilot Mode, Microsoft is positioning Edge not as a browser, but as an AI operating layer for the web — an early vision of how search, browsing, and task execution might converge. While today’s execution is still buggy, the direction is clear: browsers are becoming AI agents in disguise. Whoever nails reliability and trust first will define the next decade of web interaction.
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