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People Didn't Get Their Friend

People Didn't Get Their Friend

Christopher Webster
January 21, 2025

Startups:

People won’t get their Friend until Q3:

Friend is a startup that is creating an AI-powered necklace designed to be a digital companion. Think Tony Stark glasses, but on a necklace and not able to send missiles at people. The company planned to sell them for $99 and start shipping Q1 of this year. However, it seems like this goal was a little too lofty and has been pushed back to Q3 this year now. The company is still small with only an eight-person engineering team and $8.5 million in capital. They have also received some backlash for spending $1.8 million on the domain Friend.com. The reason they bought this was to run a so-called “experiment” with AI chatbots on the site. That’s one expensive experiment if you ask me. Would you wear an AI “friend” around your neck?

Metropolis’ $125M acquisition:

Contrary to popular belief not every AI company is thriving. Some startups are struggling which has lead to fire sales like Metropolis’ acquisition of Oosto. Metropolis is an AI-powered parking platform, while Oosto is a computer vision company. The price tag for Oosto is $125 million which is a third of the $380 million the company has raised from investors. However, Metropolis is doing quite well. Their tech is used in 4,000 locations and they are processing around $5 billion in payments annual. Speaking of $5 billion that’s the valuation of Metropolis as they are now raising another funding round. How much will they ultimately raise for their next round?

Venture:

What AI startups do enterprise VCs want to back:

As we all know AI is hottest market that every startup is going after. Venture capitalist are looking to invest in AI startups whether these startups are developing chips, using AI in robotics, or using AI to create solutions for industry-specific workflows. Which one of these is the one that VCs are looking to invest the most in though? Many VCs are looking to invest in startups that are creating AI solutions for specific tasks. This could be due to the similar playbook that previous SaaS companies used. A lot of those previous SaaS startups struggled because they were more of features than standalone products. Will these AI startups just be features like most of the SaaS failures or will they able to differentiate themselves into more standalone products?

Big Tech:

You guessed it…TikTok:

I’m sure you know that TikTok was only down for about 12 hours, some say that was the most productive 12 hours in the U.S. since TikTok’s inception, but its fate was still uncertain. Now we know TikTok’s future, kinda. President Trump has signed an executive order that delays the TikTok ban for 75 days. This still doesn’t quite give us an answer to what’s going to happen to the app, but at least we will get to keep scrolling while we wait and find out!