Your Next Phone Call Will Be AI

It’s been a wild week in startups, AI-powered weapons, bots taking over car dealership sales calls, a journal app that knows you better than your therapist and more.

Let’s get into it.

Anduril: AI Weapons for the Pentagon 🚀
($2.5B Raised)

Founded: 2017 by Palmer Luckey
Backers: Founders Fund (lead), existing investors

Anduril just raised $2.5B to build more AI-controlled weapons, drones, surveillance systems, battlefield software and more. They also just stole Microsoft’s $22B Army contract to build AR/VR headsets for U.S. soldiers. Last year they doubled revenue to ~$1B. The Pentagon is betting big on them and Founders Fund led the round with its biggest check ever ($1B).

Why It Matters:
Military tech has always been hardware-first, but now software and AI are leading the contracts. Anduril shows how fast software-first defense is taking over the biggest budgets.

Toma: AI Phone Agents for Car Dealers 🚗
($17M Raised)

Founded: 2024 by Monik Pamecha & Anthony Krivonos
Backers: a16z, YC, Scale Angels, Yossi Levi

Car dealerships couldn’t keep up with customer calls. So Toma built AI voice agents to answer the phones, booking services, handling parts orders, answering sales questions and much more. The founders toured Southern dealerships and tuned the AI for real-world chaos. Now it’s running at 100+ dealerships and Toma just raised $17M from a16z to scale it.

Why It Matters:
AI isn’t just automating online chats, it’s now handling phone calls, one of the hardest parts of customer service. Toma shows how voice-first AI can replace entire front-desk teams in decade old industries.

🔥 MEME BREAK 🔥

Rosebud: The Journal That Reads Your Mind 🧠
($6M Raised)

Founded: 2023 by Chrys Bader & Sean Dadashi
Backers: Bessemer, 776, Initialized, Fuel, Avenir, Tim Ferriss, more

Rosebud is an AI journal that helps you reflect, find patterns, improve habits. It reads what you write and gives feedback. Users have written 500M words and logged 30M+ minutes already. The founders built it after their own therapy journeys and now it’s growing fast with a $12.99/month model.

Why It Matters:
Personal AI is shifting from chatbots to coaches. Rosebud shows that users will pay for AI that actually helps them grow. Not just talk back.

💡 Startup Idea of the Week: DMBuddy

An AI that runs Instagram/TikTok DM conversations for brands/companies, answering product questions, closing sales, upselling, etc. Fully automated. Many sales are lost because brands/companies don’t answer DMs fast enough (or at all). If you fix that problem, customers will come to you. This is such a big problem we’re confident you can easily get to $3K MRR purely organically.

Why It Works:
DMs are one of the highest-converting sales channels, but no brand can manually scale 24/7 replies. AI agents unlock missed revenue and turn DMs into a predictable, scalable sales funnel.

Verdict:
Someone builds this → brands print money in DMs → Shopify or Meta buys it fast.

Soooo… what are you waiting for?

📢 One Last Thing!

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— The FOMO Report