Hey — It’s Nico.

Today’s issue takes 5 minutes to read. If you only have one, here are the five main things:

• Bluelearn, an Indian edtech startup, shut down last week — read why below.

• Jam.Dev’s CEO shares 4 startup ideas.

• Alphabet is investing $5B in autonomous vehicle startup Waymo.

• DocketAI raises $15M to build AI sales engineers.

• OpenAI is testing SearchGPT, their new AI search engine — read more below.

Let’s get into it.

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This Week In Startups

🔗 Resources

Andrew Chen discusses the challenges of creating viral apps.

Understanding which service-based industries are ready for AI disruption.

A guide on how to start a company by Skyflow’s CEO.

Jam.Dev’s CEO shares 4 startup ideas.

6 methods to improve user onboarding and activation. 

📰 News

Stripe acquires payment processing startup Lemon Squeezy.

Canva acquires generative AI platform Leonardo AI.

Alphabet to invest $5B in autonomous vehicle startup Waymo.

Airtable acqui-hires product onboarding experiences startup Dopt for AI talent.

Kennet closes sixth fund at €287M to invest in B2B SaaS across Europe.

💸 Fundraising

Vanta raises $150M to fuel expansion and AI innovation. 

Bike-taxi startup Rapido raises $120M and becomes a unicorn.

Flo Health secures $200M becoming the first digital women's health app unicorn.

DocketAI raises $15M to build AI sales engineers.

Fail(St)ory

Paying Back Investors

A few weeks ago, Bluelearn, an upskilling and job-finding platform, announced its shutdown.

The company, known for its mission to democratize education and career opportunities for students from less prestigious colleges, decided to return 70% of its raised capital to investors.

What Was Bluelearn: Founded in 2021, Bluelearn began as a Telegram channel aimed at helping students with common academic and career-related questions. It quickly grew into a full-fledged platform, with over 250,000 members from over 20 countries. 

The company aimed to create an online university experience, providing students from less prestigious institutions with the same opportunities to learn, network, earn, and gain exposure as students from top-tier colleges.

The Numbers:

• 📅 Founded in 2021

• 💰 It raised over $4M.

• 🌍 It had over 250k members.

• 🧑‍🎓 They helped thousands of students get internships and land new jobs.

• 🔚 They managed to return 70% of the capital to investors.

Reasons For Failure:

• Market challenges: Bluelearn's closure is part of a broader trend among Indian ed-tech startups, many of which have faced significant challenges in recent years. Over a dozen such companies have been acquired or shut down, highlighting the tough funding environment and market saturation. The Indian EdTech sector has become more consolidated, leaving less space for smaller startups trying to break into the market.

• Scalability issues: according to one of the co-founders, the team couldn't foresee Bluelearn evolving into a large venture-scale business capable of generating significant revenue. The inability to follow the expected VC path of exponential growth and high ROI led the founders to shut down the platform.

• Competitive pressure: The EdTech space in India is highly competitive, with established players like BYJU'S and Unacademy dominating the market. Bluelearn struggled to differentiate itself and capture a sustainable market share.

Why It Matters:

• Bluelearn's closure is part of a broader consolidation trend in the Indian EdTech sector, affecting many startups.

• Bluelearn was heading in the zombie startup way. They had secure funding but had no business model to provide the high ROI VCs demand. Instead of continuing down this path, they decided to quit early and pay back their investors.

• This is another example of why following VC demands for rapid, exponential growth might not suit every business. Since Bluelearn raised relatively modest funds and did not fully utilize them, bootstrapping and pursuing slow, sustainable growth might have been a better approach.

Go Deeper: This article by The Economic Times.

Trend

The End of Google?

Last week, OpenAI announced what many were anticipating: they are testing SearchGPT, their new AI browser that combines the capabilities of GPT with real-time web information.

Why It Matters:

• A new way to search the web: Ever since GPT became a thing, many have anticipated the “death of Google,” realizing that LLMs could make searching the web much easier.

• New SEO: We don't know all the details yet, but it's clear that SearchGPT will play by its own rules. What works for Google might not cut it here, so SEO experts will need to adapt.

• Partnerships with publishers: OpenAI wants to make sure websites get credit when SearchGPT uses their info. They're planning to partner up with publishers to make this happen.

Better Search: The whole point of SearchGPT (and other AI search engines like Perplexity) is to make searching less of a hassle. Finding exactly what you need online can sometimes be tricky and time-consuming. The solution is an LLM model that can understand what we want, perform the search, and summarize the relevant results.

This means that searching the web will feel more intuitive. Because you will be able to ask follow-up questions to GPT, searching the web should feel closer to talking with another person.

SearchGPT will also show you where it got its info from, so you can check out the sources if you want.

The links to the sources are really important for websites, too – it's how they'll get visitors from SearchGPT. Understanding how to optimize your website so that SearchGPT selects it in its answer could be crucial for the next generation of SEO experts.

The Future: Right now, SearchGPT is just getting started. Only a small group of people are testing it out. But when it launches for real, it could shake things up as much as the original ChatGPT did.

With Microsoft pushing their Copilot, and new players like Perplexity and the Arc browser jumping on the AI bandwagon, it's clear that AI is the future of web searching.

This could be a game-changer for websites and content creators:

• Traditional SEO tactics might not work the same way with AI search. 

• Some websites might see less direct traffic as users get their answers right in the search results.

• Websites might start optimizing not just for human readers but for AI "readers" too. This could mean including more structured data or using clearer, more concise language.

• It's unclear how well AI search will handle video, audio, or interactive content. Websites might need to ensure they're providing text alternatives or transcripts to stay relevant in AI search results.

Help Me Improve Failory

That's all of this edition.

Cheers,

Nico