May was about records and proof.
Venture capital had its biggest quarter of investment ever, the market named the engineering role it values most, and three ideas from our own contest turned into working tools. Here’s what happened.
The Engineer Role AI Changed Most
Writing code used to be enough. Now the most valuable engineer is the one who walks into a client’s business and makes AI actually work there. Andreessen Horowitz – one of Silicon Valley’s most influential VC firms – just launched an 8-week program for exactly these people: Forward Deployment Engineers. If that’s already your job, there’s a chance to join the first cohort and shape industry playbooks alongside people from Palantir, Google, and OpenAI. Apply by June 26.
Venture Capital Just Had Its Biggest Quarter Ever
Investors poured $300 billion into startups in Q1 2026 – more than any quarter on record. In April, the trend held: 73 cents of every venture dollar went to AI, with Jeff Bezos raising $10 billion for Project Prometheus, his bet on AI for the physical economy. We’ve been saying this for two years: AI isn’t a feature, it’s the new infrastructure. Now the money agrees. Read the Crunchbase report.
YC Runs a Free School. Take an insight.
Y Combinator, which invested in Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox before anyone believed in them, runs a free Startup School. Kyrylo Hrinchak, our Head of Product Portfolio, just completed it and rates it above most paid programs. His top takeaway: you don’t invent startup ideas, you notice them in problems you already live with. Take the course.
What Tallinn Taught Us About Speed
Estonia, with a population smaller than Kharkiv, leads the New Nordics in unicorns per capita. The region raised €7.1B in 2025. Our team spent two days at Latitude59, the Baltics’ main startup conference, and the interest in Ukrainian startups is real. The takeaway: test fast, sell fast, find partners now. Read the full insights.
Deus Robotics Shortlisted for Industry’s Top Award
Warehouse automation has moved past the proof-of-concept phase – the industry now rewards technology that delivers measurable value in live operations. Deus Robotics, our portfolio company, was just shortlisted for “Best Warehouse Operation of the Year” at the Multimodal Awards 2026. Years of building and testing in real warehouses have now been recognized at the industry level. See the finalists.
INPUT SOFT Is About to Launch Flight Print
Airport analysts spend days merging flight schedules with traffic data just to check if a new schedule works – and still miss how competitor flights overload shared gates at the same minute. INPUT SOFT is solving this with Flight Print: a tool tracking 35+ operational metrics to spot bottlenecks before they hit on-time performance. This is what we love about this team – they keep finding expensive problems hiding in spreadsheets. Get a sneak peek.
From Ideas to Working Tools 🐱🚀
Remember the AI Product Ideas Contest? Here’s what happened next. Out of 30+ submitted ideas, three are already working prototypes: an AI that fills in your timesheets, a pre-sales copilot, and a candidate pre-screening tool – built with their authors, just as promised. Season 2 is coming this fall.
That’s May. Next month: more portfolio updates, Labs Galaxy events, and industry shifts worth watching.
