🚨 The Early Application Deadline for PearX W27 is right around the corner! Apply by 𝗦𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆, August 16th 𝗮𝘁 𝟭𝟭:𝟱𝟵 𝗣𝗠 𝗣𝗦𝗧 and hear back from us by early September. pear.vc/pearx/

Today we're announcing our $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by @a16z , with participation from existing investors @8vc, @pearvc, and @BloombergBeta and new investors @HRTVentures and @nextladder. Alongside the fundraise, three more announcements: - Vals Smith: is now generally available. Anyone can create a custom coding benchmark from any GitHub repo with 120 free credits to get started. - Frontier Risk Benchmarks: We are releasing the RSI Index in collaboration with @CoreWeave and just launched ReverseEngBench, a new cyber benchmark built with Columbia University, Tufts University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. We are also sharing our initial work in mental health, with more to come across environmental impact, military, and biosecurity. - Website + Vals Index 2.0: We completely rebuilt the Vals website and have released Vals Index 2.0, with coverage of more of the economy. Our revenue has already grown 8x compared to all of 2025. Our customer base doubled and the team tripled in 6 months. Our results have been cited in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI. The AI economy runs on self-reported grades. When a model ships, the scores come from the company that built it. No other trillion-dollar industry works this way. Finance has ratings agencies. Medicine has the FDA. AI has vibes and vendor benchmarks. We built Vals to be the independent evaluation layer the industry is missing. Check out our new website and try Vals Smith!

Today's Request for Startups by Icons comes from @praveenTweets , CTO of @Uber . If you're building in this area, we'd love to hear from you. The AI Operating System for Work Every company is racing to deploy AI across functions like finance, HR, legal, customer support, operations, and engineering. Today, most of these efforts are built as isolated workflows, making them difficult to scale, measure, and share across the organization. We want founders building the platform that helps companies discover, deploy, govern, and continuously improve AI-powered workflows. The long-term opportunity isn't another AI assistant, it's the operating system that enables every business function to adopt AI quickly, capture best practices, and turn successful workflows into repeatable capabilities across the entire company.

PearX early applications are now open. Come build with people who will make you faster. → Unix was written in 3 weeks. → Apollo 8 went from commitment to launch in 39 days. → Moderna designed its COVID vaccine 2 days after the sequence was published.

Introducing Stanley: The first AI Head of Content that will help you grow your following. Stanley works just like a real employee: text him and he’ll create, edit, and strategize viral content across X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Making viral content is hard. It requires deep research, deep platform understanding, and knowing what’s culturally relevant at that exact minute. When you ask ChatGPT to “write a social post” it doesn’t know what good content looks like, it’s not actively consuming content, and it doesn’t understand you. This is why the output is slop. Stanley solves this. First Stanley deeply understands your unique voice and writing style (and doesn’t include AI language like em dashes and “it’s not x it’s y”) Then he plugs into your day-to-day (your Slack, Notion, Calendar, Granola) and proactively suggests viral posts for you based off the most interesting things happening in your life. All you need to do is voice note him your thoughts, and Stanley optimizes and then schedules a post across all platforms. Example: Last week I asked ChatGPT "what happened on X" and got a generic summary. I asked Stanley the same thing and he told me about @JensenHuang's first post on X and the viral Deny’s comment. That’s because Stanley has a team of specialized agents that are always on. One agent researches viral posts through the X API. One studies your voice. One doom scrolls X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 2 months ago we released Stanley in beta to 100 social media power users like @chasepassiveincome, @jayyanginspires, @MitcheIl, and @iampascio who’ve used Stanley in their daily content process. Engagement rates increased by >50% for the average beta tester. (in fact you’ve probably engaged w/ Stanley posts without realizing) Posting content has genuinely changed my life for the better: it’s helped me raise millions of $, landed me my first customers, and attracted the very best employees. Stan wouldn’t be a $40M ARR business without Content. Stanley is our attempt at democratizing that. Our mission is to help any Entrepreneur tell their story, so we'd love for you to try Stanley for free here: getstanley.ai One more thing.. You can see a glimpse of Stanley’s power in the comments below. Drop a reply and Stanley will analyze your X content right now. It'll pull your posts, study your voice, and tell you what's working and what's not. Each reply costs us abt ~$1 in tokens. Go abuse it. (Thank you VC’s.) FYI: This post and launch video were written 100% w/ the help of Stanley (how’d he do?) See Stanley work below 👇