Are You Copying Competitors or Learning from the Best?

💸 Who Got Funded – September 2–8, 2025

It was a high-volume funding week with 38 startups raising rounds across pre-seed to Series B, totaling more than $850M in disclosed capital. The AI, healthcare, and fintech sectors dominated early-stage rounds.

Here are notable highlights founders should study — not just for what got funded, but why:

🥚 Pre-Seed

• Model Health ($1M) – Personalized health platform
  → Early bets on healthtech AI remain strong — especially with personalization angles.

• Reprai ($500K) – AI product copilot
  → Tools helping PMs speed up ideation and testing are in demand.

🌱 Seed

• FriendliAI ($20M) – AI infrastructure tooling
  → Infrastructure for AI builders is still raising big; dev-centric platforms are hot.

• Boost My School ($10M) – K-12 fundraising software
  → Niche SaaS + highly engaged users + operational pain = investable opportunity.

• Eloquent AI ($7.4M) – AI-powered finance customer service
  → Vertical AI platforms that streamline CX in complex sectors are getting funded.

• Professional.me ($3.1M) – Recruiting platform for technical roles
  → Even in a hiring slowdown, tools that help companies hire faster or better are interesting.

• Munify ($3M) – Cross-border fintech platform
  → B2B payments and embedded fintech stay hot, especially in emerging markets.

🚀 Series A

• Predoc ($30M) – AI-powered healthcare ops platform
  → Investors love AI that clears bottlenecks, not just insights.

• Xampla ($14M) – Plastic alternative materials
  → ESG is still driving funding — especially with credible IP and climate alignment.

• Intella ($12.5M) – Arabic speech tech
  → Niche markets + frontier tech = major opportunity.

🔬 Series B

• Exa ($85M) – “Search engine for AI”
  → Big bets on infrastructure that powers how we work with models, not just build them.

• CHARM Therapeutics ($80M) – Cancer drug discovery via AI
  → Biotech + AI continues to draw the largest checks.

• Ketryx ($39M) – Life sciences compliance automation
  → Niche, high-stakes verticals get rewarded for repeatable process wins.

🔍 Insight: Are You in a Transformation Motion or an Operational One?

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is not being clear on whether they’re pursuing a transformational initiative or an operational optimization.

🧠 A transformational motion is:

• Rebuilding your go-to-market model

• Launching a new product category

• Entering a new customer segment

🛠️ An operational motion is:

• Tweaking pricing

• Improving retention

• Refining onboarding

The mistake? Assigning a strategic transformation to an operator… and then being disappointed when it stalls.

Know the difference. Staff accordingly.

🧠 Founder Framework: Learn From the Best, Not Just Your Competitors

This post hit a nerve on LinkedIn last week:

Too many startups obsess over direct competitors or ignore them entirely.

The smarter play:
🏆 Study world-class leaders across industries and extract the principles that make them exceptional.

Example:

• ✨ Disney → for customer journey design

• ⚙️ Amazon → for logistics excellence

• 📦 Apple → for product simplicity

Then ask: How can we apply those same principles to our business?

📥 Download: 5 AI Prompts to Upgrade Your Competitive Analysis

To help you run cross-industry excellence reviews using AI, we created a simple prompt pack. It includes:

• Discovery frameworks

• Principle extraction

• Gap analysis techniques

🧠 These are designed to help you innovate across departments — from product to pricing to CX.

Reply with "PROMPTS" and we’ll send the download straight to your inbox.

🧭 Final Thought

Your strategy is only as good as your lens.

If you're only looking left and right at competitors… you’ll get incremental progress.

But if you look up — at world-class leaders across industries — you’ll set a higher bar for excellence.

→ And right now, that’s the competitive advantage most of your peers are missing.

Want help figuring out whether your current plan is transformation or optimization?
Need help building a real strategy cadence into your calendar?

Reply with “STRATEGY SESSION” — we’ll line up a quick coaching call to break it down.

Thanks for Reading,

Apryl Syed, CEO ApetureCodex

The Founders Edge