Pear VC

College founders raise $5.1M for iMessage AI social app

Series, a social networking app built to operate entirely inside iMessage, raised a $5.1 million pre-seed round led by investors including Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon‑Ismail, Pear VC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. The startup was founded by Yale seniors Nathaneo Johnson (CEO) and Sean Hargrow and has a team of eight. Users text a Series AI phone number in iMessage to receive curated “shares” — carousels of image-based posts from people seeking similar connections — and can start private conversations without exposing phone numbers. Series says it’s active across more than 750 campuses and reports 82% Day‑30 retention among activated users. The new funding will be used to hire engineers and expand product capabilities; the company operates from an office in Chelsea, New York.

Waymo Defends Remote Assistance Amid Senate Scrutiny

TechCrunch Mobility reports on Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Peña's testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, where Peña confirmed Waymo uses remote assistance workers based in the Philippines and elsewhere to respond to system queries — not to remotely drive vehicles — and disclosed about 70 remote assistance agents are on duty worldwide at any time. Waymo wrote a blog post and sent a letter to Sen. Ed Markey’s office clarifying its remote-assistance and U.S.-based Event Response Team operations. Separately, New York Governor Kathy Hochul withdrew a proposal that would have amended state vehicle laws to legalize robotaxis outside New York City. The newsletter also covers Lucid laying off roughly 12% of staff and several funding rounds across mobility- and fuels-related startups.

Startup Transforms Customs with AI Amid Trade Turmoil

Amari AI, a startup co-founded by former Google engineer Sam Basu and former LinkedIn engineer Arushi Vashist, emerged from stealth after raising $4.5 million led by First Round Capital and Pear VC. The company provides AI agents and models to automate customs paperwork and data entry for U.S. customs brokers, a largely paper-based industry facing staffing constraints and increased demand amid shifting U.S. trade policy under President Donald Trump. Amari says it has more than 30 customers and has helped move over $15 billion in goods. The startup trains models on a dataset of more than one million shipment-related documents (with anonymization and some customer opt-outs) and currently leverages off-the-shelf models while building proprietary models.