Zette & Maestro AI

Hi everyone 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 14th edition of Open Scout. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter if you haven't already.

Let's dive in!

Startups of the week:

1.

Startup name: Zette (2020)*

Geography: US

Description: Zette aspires to become the go-to platform for news, like Spotify is for music. With a single subscription, readers can access premium digital news content that is usually hidden behind paywalls. This not only provides a convenient experience for readers, but also helps publishers monetize their content effectively.

Traction: ~10,000 users on waitlist

Founder(s) background: Yehong Zhu (CEO, prev. Product Manager @ Twitter, Forbes Journalist)

Backed by (public source): Raised $1.7mn pre-seed from Afore Capital, Halogen Ventures, Hyphen Capital, The Community Fund, MGV Capital Group

*Currently raising $6mn seed round on $36mn post-money SAFE, $1.5mn committed

...

2.

Startup name: Maestro AI (2022)

Geography: US

Description: Maestro uses large language models to create delightful, AI-generated summaries of everything going on in your team pulled from Slack, email, tickets, documents, and more.

Think of Maestro AI as a detective who's always on the case, piecing together all the important information and presenting it in a concise and easy-to-understand format.

Founder(s) background: William Cheng (CEO, prev. Head of Product @ Headliner, Engineer @ Mobilisafe—acquired by Rapid7, Microsoft); Justin Cranshaw (CPO, prev. Research @ Microsoft)

Backed by (public source): NA

Thanks for reading,

Kenneth

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