Posts by Liam Redmond
AI Sales Assistant Tools Get Cheaper With Fireflies
Fireflies.ai launched its AI Sales Suite this week, aimed squarely at teams that cannot stomach six-figure sales software. The company already supports more than 22,000 sales teams and groups inside most of the Fortune 500. Now it wants to hand that toolkit to smaller teams too. If you run sales yourself, you know the quiet…
Read MoreAI Coding Tools Power Emergent’s Fast Unicorn Rise
An Indian startup just turned soaring demand for AI coding tools into a $1.5 billion valuation. Emergent raised $130 million in a Series C round, and it reached unicorn status just over a year after launch. That speed should grab every founder’s attention. I used to tell builders that real scale takes a decade. Emergent…
Read MoreAI Jobs Surge as Skills Reshape Founder Hiring
Fresh hiring data for 2026 shows a steep rise in demand for AI skills, and the trend now shapes how small teams build their rosters. Deel’s Global Hiring Report counted a 283% jump in AI roles over the past year. For founders, that figure works best as a planning signal rather than a headline. When…
Read MoreDisneyland employee shocks guests, plunges into Rivers of America in bizarre act
This Disneyland cast member apparently just needed a swim. In a bizarre act caught on video, a Disneyland employee plunged into the Anaheim park’s Rivers of America shirtless and began swimming around Thursday. A woman could be heard exclaiming as parkgoers stared in amazement at the man, who also wore long white pants. The man…
Read MoreProtecting Trade Secrets: Lessons From Apple v OpenAI
Apple has taken OpenAI to court over stolen technology, and CNBC reported the trade secrets complaint, which Apple filed in a federal court in Northern California. The suit lists OpenAI, hardware venture io Products, and two former Apple staffers, alleging an organized effort to lift confidential hardware work. The fight reads like a corporate thriller,…
Read MoreSmall Business Profitability Turns Positive in June
Running a small business has felt like a slog all year, so here is some genuinely good news. According to the Bank of America Small Business Checkpoint for July 2026, the average small firm finally started adding to its bottom line again in June, the first month of 2026 to show that kind of lift.…
Read MoreAI Materials Discovery: CuspAI Raises $450M
I still remember when landing a seed round felt like a miracle, so a nine-figure bet on a young science company grabs my attention fast. CuspAI just showed how far ambition can stretch, and Quartz reported the $450 million Series B on July 21. The Cambridge company leans on ai materials discovery, using machine learning…
Read MoreSilicon Anode Battery Maker Sila Raises $300M
Battery maker Sila just pulled in $300 million to grow its US production, as TechCrunch detailed in its July 21 coverage of the round. Leading this round was Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures. The California firm builds a silicon anode battery material meant to stand in for the graphite inside the majority of lithium-ion…
Read MoreOnlyFans’ Lena the Plug and Adam22’s fake divorce doc drama takes a turn
The person impersonating Lena the Plug is still trying to end the OnlyFans star’s marriage to Adam22, in the latest twist in the couple’s hoax divorce filing. According to documents obtained by Page Six on Tuesday, the person claiming to be Lena filed proof that Adam22 had been served at his home in Studio City,…
Read MoreExperiential Marketing Wins the 2026 World Cup Economy
The breakout winner of this summer’s tournament may not be a team at all, and a fresh Entrepreneur report on the World Cup experience economy lays out why brands are spending heavily on live fan moments spread across 13 host cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The games pull the crowd together, and…
Read MoreJudge approves Anthropic’s $1.5-billion settlement with authors
Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to authors whose pirated books it used to train its AI in the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. Federal Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in Oakland granted final approval of the settlement Monday. The record payout was a modest win for copyright holders, setting a precedent as a wave of AI-related…
Read MoreSkills Assessment AI Draws $5M as Hiring Proof Shifts
Hiring on a small team means guessing whether someone can actually do the work, and a startup just raised money to remove that guess. On July 16, DeweyLearn announced in a PR Newswire press release that they raised a Series A funding round of $5 million. The oversubscribed round, as noted in the press release,…
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