🦄Startups & VCs (Web3, AI & SaaS) 🕘 история названий (1)

Investors rarely say direct “no”; instead, they say “let’s stay in touch” to waste your time. But you should know: No meeting or next step is a polite refusal. We built a free tool to decode these VC replies. Paste the message to identify if it’s a soft no, hard no, or genuine interest, and get advice on what to send back. TRY to decode investors’ replies in your inbox 😉

🚩 VC Red Flag of the Week. № 4 Imagine you’re a VC. A founder opens the deck: TVL: $100M 🚀 Nice. You keep reading. Then you discover that most of this capital came through aggressive yield incentives and points campaigns. Suddenly, that $100M looks very different. 👀 The question isn’t: “How much capital did you attract?” It’s: “What kind of capital is it?” Here’s what a VC will want to understand: 🔹 Concentration: Is the TVL spread across many depositors, or does a handful of wallets control most of it? 🔹 Duration: How long does capital stay in the protocol? Long-term deposits are a stronger signal than capital that moves in and out within days. 🔹 Organic vs. incentivized: How much capital remains when points, farming rewards, or other incentives are removed? 🔹 Economic activity: Is that capital actually being used? Look at transaction activity, borrowing, trading, or other meaningful protocol usage. 🔹 Revenue: How much actual protocol revenue or fees does the TVL generate? 💡 The VC takeaway: $20M of sticky, productive TVL can be more convincing than $100M of rented liquidity. So next time you put TVL on a slide, don’t stop at the number. Show what’s behind it. 🚩 Would you rather see $100M TVL or $20M TVL with strong retention and organic fees?

💸 Who’s writing seed checks in 2026? I bet: many investors who back startups like yours are still NOT in your fundraising radar. Why⁉️ Because the publicly available data about recent early-stage deals is a mess. And sources that have actual & verified data cost a fortune. 2 months were spent on collecting, cleaning & structuring data about web3 deals for PitchPop. And 1 more to dive into early-stage investments in AI startups. And today NEW PitchPop beta is live for both verticals. An updated fundraising intelligence module, that analyses your startup & similar deals, filters relevant funds that fit your case, matches investment partners who curate that kind of deals & gives you ready-to-use fundraising outreach pipeline, segmented as 12 prio investors to contact each week. An example from a $2.5M seed round for DePIN startup: ▪️ 579 funds screened ▪️ 208 marked as a good fit ▪️ 12 ranked & ready for this week outreach (with contacts, deal info, intro message, and follow up reminders for your calendar). That’s the research a professional fundraiser bills from a $1.5k/mo minimum retainer, often plus a % of your round. PitchPop does it in 3 minutes. €49 one-time fee during beta (free for InnMind PRO members - ask abt promocode in support chat), €149 after. 👉 Check your first investor matches for free 👈

3 lessons about startup freebies you’d better learn 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nelli-orlova_google-offers-up-to-350k-in-free-credits-share-7513567566968266752-bNSh/

📊 $60,000 value. $0 for the 1st year. Founders, here’s a perk worth putting on your radar. Amplitude is giving eligible early-stage startups one full year of its Growth plan for free, a package the company values at $60,000. What’s inside? Product Analytics, Session Replay, MCP and AI Agents, with unlimited seats and capacity for up to 100M events per month or 200,000 monthly tracked users. Why does this matter? Because “we have users” tells you very little. You need to understand what they do, where they drop off, what drives activation and which product changes actually move the needle. That’s the space Amplitude operates in. The platform is used across industries from B2B SaaS and financial services to media, healthcare and ecommerce. It was also recognized as a Leader and Customer Favorite in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Analytics Solutions, Q3 2025. For startups, the eligibility bar is straightforward: 🚀 Under $10M raised 👥 Fewer than 20 employees Amplitude says 96% of startups that apply get accepted, with most approvals happening instantly. One detail founders often miss: you need to create your free Amplitude account first, then apply from inside the product. 👉 Check the startup perk: Amplitude Startup Scholarship on InnMind Stop guessing what users want. Start learning from what they actually do. 🔍

🔥 September Web3 Deals: Less Capital, More Signal September brought a mixed picture for Web3 funding. Investors deployed $1.05B across 48 announced rounds. That is well below the previous 12 month average of $2.01B and 66.8 rounds per month. (Source: FinDas) But here is where it gets interesting 👀 The market may be funding fewer companies, but the deals that are getting through tell us a lot about where investors see real opportunities. 🏦 Tare: $13.25M Tare is building onchain infrastructure for private credit, covering everything from origination and servicing to financing and securitization. Why this one? Because of the investor mix. The participation of Janus Henderson, a traditional asset manager, alongside crypto native investors is a strong signal for the RWA narrative. Private credit is moving further onchain, and infrastructure that can connect blockchain rails with institutional credit markets is becoming increasingly relevant. 🃏 CatchBack: $8M The startup combines physical collectibles with custom mystery packs, real time trading and instant buybacks. Why this one? Because it shows where blockchain infrastructure can become almost invisible to the end user. The product is built around a familiar consumer behavior, collecting and trading, while the underlying infrastructure creates new ways to aggregate demand and provide liquidity. With 75,000+ users and more than 500,000 packs opened, CatchBack is also an interesting example of how crypto aligned infrastructure can support consumer markets beyond traditional DeFi. 🛡 Firelight: $8M The startup is building decentralized cover infrastructure designed to protect DeFi capital against protocol, smart contract and economic risks. Why this one? Because DeFi needs more than yield and liquidity. It needs risk infrastructure. For institutional investors, the ability to protect capital can be just as important as the ability to deploy it. Firelight is targeting exactly this gap, building protection infrastructure that could help make onchain finance more accessible to professional capital. 👀 What does September tell us? The biggest signal is capital concentration. Funding activity slowed, but investors continued to write large checks into infrastructure and financial products with clear institutional use cases. Stablecoin infrastructure was the biggest sector anomaly, with 7 rounds versus a monthly average of 1.6. RWA also remained above its historical baseline, while DEXs, Memes, Digital Identity and DePIN all recorded above average activity. Meanwhile, DeFi had the sharpest decline, coming in 10.2 rounds below its monthly average. Another interesting signal is round size. Series A median funding reached $16.6M, up 38% YoY, while Series B reached $45M, up 12% YoY. Seed remained relatively resilient at $5.2M, up 4% YoY. The takeaway for founders? 👇 The market is more selective, capital is concentrating around fewer companies, and investors are increasingly looking for infrastructure that can connect crypto with real financial and institutional demand. September may have been a quieter month for Web3 funding. But the deals themselves are giving us plenty to watch. 🚀

How AI ruined the love story of a crypto founder 💔🤖 TRON founder Justin Sun shared that Claude AI advised him against a $50M request in his love life. Founders nowadays are really trying to outsource anything… Weekend read for u 🍿https://blog.alphamind.co/justin-sun-jing-tian-claude-50-million/

🚩 VC Red Flag of the Week. №3 “Our token will drive the entire ecosystem.” 👀 Sounds ambitious. But then a VC asks: “What happens if you remove the token?” If the answer is “the product stops making sense”, that’s a serious red flag. 🚨 Why? Because the token can create incentives, but it can’t replace product demand. If users only show up for rewards, farming, or token speculation, it becomes much harder to prove that people actually need the product. A stronger approach: Build the product first. Give the token a clear job. The token should solve a specific problem in the ecosystem, for example by enabling access, coordination, governance, or another meaningful user action. The key question is: Would people still want to use the product if the token disappeared tomorrow? If yes, you have a product with token utility. If no, you may have a token looking for a product. 👀 Founders, try this test before your next pitch: 🔥 Remove the token from your deck. Can you still explain why users need your product? 🚩 More VC Red Flags coming next week. #VCRedFlag

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