everything to read instead of doomscroll this week by @stephthefounder (July 20)

Jul 20, 2026

The best succinct + fun weekly newsletter to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, AI, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback? Things I should add? Respond back here or comment below x

abbreviated newsletter this week since i’m on the go today.

another plug - if you’re in your job hunt, get a preview here of our new product and/or sign up to give feedback + share your job seeking woes here! <3

💰 Companies that will make you a millionaire

Every week I highlight a few of my favorite startups that I personally think are really promising. They’ve typically received funding that week + are hiring, and occasionally I’ll include some special bonus ones.

And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use Shortlist (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:

you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏
all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win

(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)

This week’s featured companies:

Neko Health: A preventive health company co-founded by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek, offering full-body health scans using proprietary sensors, blood analysis, and clinician consultations. The Stockholm-based company raised a $700 million Series C co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners.
- Job openings can be found here
State Affairs: A platform that helps lawmakers, agencies, and companies track legislation, regulations, hearings, and policy trends using statehouse reporting and government data. The DC-based company raised a $70 million round from investors including Founders Fund.
- Job openings can be found here
Chai Discovery: An AI-powered drug discovery platform that helps drugmakers design molecules by predicting and reprogramming how molecules interact. The company raised a $400 million round at a $3.8 billion post-money valuation led by Index Ventures.
- Job openings can be found here

Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:

Emergent (AI app builder for SMBs) 💻 → $130M Series C (Job openings here)
Monumental (autonomous bricklaying robots) 🧱 → $32M Series B (Job openings here)
Oak (AI agent access management) 🔑 → $60M Seed (Job openings here)
Walden Robotics (factory warehouse robots) 🤖 → $300M Round (Job openings here)
Meticulous (frontend testing AI) 🔍 → $15M Series A (Job openings here)
Corner Health (nurse practitioner platform) 👩‍⚕️ → $32.5M Seed + Series A (Job openings here)
Ollama (local LLM platform) 🦙 → $65M Series B (Job openings here)
Helsing (military drones & AI) 🛡️ → $1.8B Series E (Job openings here)

🤓 Best things to read instead of doomscrolling

All the best things I’ve read this week (lots of AI ~thought pieces~ this week, here are the ones that were particularly on my radar):

The Future Worth Building is Human by Mira Murati (Thinking Machines)
The Reverse Information Paradox by Satya Nadella
A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age by Demis Hassabis

📱 Everything you may have missed in tech/startup news

All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:

A lot of China x AI news - on the heels of Deepseek planning to go public, two huge models were announced ahead of WAIC Shanghai (and they’re really good, leading people to wonder if China is as far behind on the AI front as previously thought)
- Kimi K3 (from Moonshot AI) — 2.8 trillion parameters, billed as the world’s largest open-source model (meaning anyone can download it and run it for free). Independent tests it ranks third in the world just behind OpenAI/Anthropic. Not as big of a Deepseek moment but still stocks dropped (chipmaker TSMC dropped 7% in a single day and SoftBank fell 9%, as investors got nervous)
- Qwen 3.8 (from Alibaba) — 2.4T params, unveiled at WAIC. Claims it’s “second only to Fable 5.”
Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro didn’t launch on July 17 like it was supposed to because it fell short on coding/reasoning tests. Stock fell 4%.
Anthropic changed its mind and Fable 5 is now included in the pricier Max/Team plans (instead of being usage based only going forward) - a move likely in response to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol release (that everyone seems to be saying has been much cheaper than Claude lately)

🤪 Just because / for fun

aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week

old and underrated news, but if you also have 49,385 screenshots (mostly of places you want to go and restaurants you want to try), i was just alerted to the Google Maps screenshot feature this week and it’s brilliant

upload your screenshots (for me - lots of tiktoks and infatuation posts), it scrapes the locations from them and automatically adds them to a list for you 🫡

<3 until next week!

Steph The Founder

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