Betaworks Launches 10, Kagi Fights AI Slop
Summary
These developments showcase a bifurcated tech landscape, balancing rapid startup incubation and creator tooling expansion against critical efforts in cybersecurity and search integrity.
- Betaworks Graduates 10 - The 13th Camp cohort concluded, launching 10 new ventures after a 13-week incubation period 1.
- Cybercrime Dismantled - Europol’s ‘Operation Endgame’ successfully dismantled three major international cybercrime operations targeting infrastructure 2.
- Creator OS Expansion - Newsletter platform beehiiv added AI website building tools, positioning itself as a comprehensive operating system for creators 3.
- AI Safety Deployed - Kagi Search launched SlopStop, a community system to detect and downrank deceptive AI-generated content (‘slop’) in results 8.
- Developer Tooling - DBOS introduced Java-based durable workflows backed by PostgreSQL, while LangChain launched Sandboxes for safe DeepAgent code execution [6, 5].
- 10 - Companies successfully launched from Betaworks’ 13th Camp cohort after 13 weeks 1.
- 3 - Cybercrime operations dismantled by international coalition coordinated by Europol 2.
- W25 - Tweeks, a web ‘deshittifier,’ was backed by Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch 10.
- 650GB - Dataset size tested in performance comparison between Polars, DuckDB, and Spark engines 9.
Key Moments
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Piramidal (YC W24) is hiring a Front End Engineer to build its user interface for its 10-person team.
— Article [4] -
The Zed Industries team holds its weekly all-hands meeting entirely inside the Zed editor environment.
— Article [7] -
Tweeks launches as a browser extension to 'deshittify the web' using modifications defined by YC W25.
— Article [10] -
Methods detailed for obtaining VPS host geolocation to report locations like North Korea (KP).
— Article [11]
Different Perspectives
Supporting View
The performance comparison experiment was explicitly designed to confront 'cluster fatigue' using single-node tools on large datasets.
Sources:
[9]