I'm investing in AI devtools

bundling productivity is the new game

Jul 03, 2025

I write a newsletter about startups and investing—for ai builders of all levels.

I record mini-tutorials, review tools I’m testing, share my insights from an exited founder turned investor.

Hey folks,

Quick house-keeping;

Ben’s Bites Fund II is now live! I’ll be sharing the deck, link, etc either tomorrow or early next week. If you’re interested in potentially investing in the fund, pop your details here. (my previous 2 funds are top-decile performing and I’m focusing on AI developer tools and infra) - Bridging devs to non-devs and giving technical founders distribution.

If you’re thinking about what to do next (start a co, join an early team etc), fill in this 1-min form - 87% of folks already want to meet similar people, 61% want to start a company and 62% want to join a founding team. There’s lots of talented, ambitious builders in this group and I’ll announce more on this soon…

Comments under free newsletter posts are now open to everyone - email replies get threaded and hard to respond to! If you want to talk about anything feel free to comment or join the chat.

If you want to sponsor this email and get a bunch of users, get in touch.

I attended a16z’s London Speedrun meetup last night and met some awesome folks, many of which read this email - hey dave, martin, and others! It was pretty much just a social mixer with the awkward dance of do I stand on my own or be the approacher, scary stuff. Speedrun is interesting because in a year they’ve amassed almost the same number of applications as YC.

Cursor has hired two leaders from the Claude Code team (CC). Boris Cherny, CC’s maker, will join Anysphere (Cursor’s parent company) as head of engineering and Cat Wu, CC’s PM, will join as head of product at Cursor. Cursor and Claude Code are both great products and desperately need the features of each other.

Cursor is going to look a lot different in the coming months - I frequently ask Claude Code to spawn multiple parallel agents so I assume thats already on the way, but also task management is great in CC (although less visual).

Grammarly acquired Superhuman. I guess me refusing to pay for Grammarly means nothing now I give them (via Superhuman) $40/mo.

Restive Ventures is now accepting applications from startups using AI to reinvent financial services. They will invest $500k+ at market terms and open up their extensive network of founders, regulators, and industry leaders. Apply now to partner with one of fintech's leading early-stage funds!*

SF Compute is partnering with Modular to offer fast compute at market prices. Its new Large Scale Inference (LSI) service is OpenAI compatible and can be used for off-the-shelf open models and custom models. If you’re a growing startup, reach out to them.