Signals

May 7, 2026

Phia: Pivoting to Social Commerce Feed, Not Just Price Comparison

New Intel: Phia, the AI fashion price-comparison agent backed by Kleiner and Khosla, is quietly building a creator-driven content feed. The pitch was Honey for fashion. The execution is starting to look like Pinterest, which is a very different company to underwrite.

Phia

Shopping AI

Series A

May 7, 2026

Phia: Recruiting From Social Platforms, Not Shopping Companies

New Intel: Phia is pulling data science talent from the TikTok and Pinterest pool, not the Honey and Shopify pool. Companies recruit against who they think they compete with. The public story is price comparison. The hiring pattern says social commerce.

Phia

Shopping AI

Series A

May 7, 2026

Phia: Building Internal ML Platform, Not Buying One

New Intel: Phia, the AI shopping app, is building its own internal ML platform rather than buying off-the-shelf infrastructure. For a 20-person company, that is either conviction that personalization is the moat, or a classic case of premature infrastructure investment.

Phia

Shopping AI

Series A

May 7, 2026

Upwind Security: First APAC Beachhead And Quiet Federal Prep

New Intel: Upwind Security is building FedRAMP-ready release processes and opening a Japan technical presence, both ahead of any public announcement. Series A cloud security companies almost never do federal prep this early, so someone there sees a specific opening.

Upwind Security

Cloud Security

Series A

May 7, 2026

Risotto: Land through IT, expand through HR and Legal.

New Intel: Risotto sells one price for IT, HR, Legal, and Finance support instead of charging per department. One customer rolled it out to 12 teams on the original contract, which is the kind of expansion math that usually only shows up in horizontal SaaS after Series B.

May 7, 2026

Risotto: Training data is the moat, not the model.

New Intel: Risotto publishes ticket auto-resolution rates (55-60% at Gusto, 46% at Thinkific) that competitors mostly do not. Those numbers come from 18 months of resolved-ticket data at design partners, which is harder to replicate than the AI model underneath.

May 7, 2026

Waabi: Adding A Commercial Operator To A Research Company

New Intel: Waabi hired the founder of Uber Freight as COO. The clearest sign yet that Waabi believes their driverless truck is ready and the remaining problem is selling miles, not building the driver.

Waabi

Autonomous Trucking

Series C

May 7, 2026

Waabi: Shrinking Foundation Models To Fit On A Truck

New Intel: Waabi's biggest remaining gap before launching driverless trucks is making their AI small enough to run onboard a moving vehicle. Most AV companies hit this wall years into deployment. Which implies their models are more capable than they have publicly let on.

Waabi

Autonomous Trucking

Series C

May 7, 2026

Risotto: Collapsing ITSM into the chat window.

New Intel: Risotto is making Slack the primary UI for IT tickets, with ServiceNow and Jira reduced to databases underneath. That inverts the helpdesk software stack, which usually assumes the vendor's own web app is where work happens.

May 7, 2026

Upwind Security: Extending Runtime Sensor Into Windows And Autonomous Response

New Intel: Upwind Security is building Windows kernel-level sensors and autonomous AI response agents, pushing into territory traditionally owned by EDR vendors like CrowdStrike. Most CNAPP vendors stay in their swim lane; Upwind is choosing not to.

Upwind Security

Cloud Security

Series A