Startups coverage from Honey Badgers AI.
'Wrapper' became the industry's favorite insult in 2023 and a business model by 2025 — the useful question is not whether you call an API, but what happens when your supplier ships your roadmap.
The documented difference between pivots that worked and startups that died quietly is timing — the signals arrive quarters before the decision, and they are countable.
The first ten customers are not revenue — they are research funding with invoices attached, and the founders who treat them that way build repeatable sales motions by customer fifteen.
OpenAI's May 2025 all-equity acquisition of Jony Ive's hardware startup was an acqui-hire at scale — the most expensive talent purchase in tech history, by design.
Burn rate is not a spending statistic — it is a countdown clock, and the only two questions that matter are how fast it ticks and what it is buying.
Meta bought 49 percent of Scale AI in June 2025 without a majority — a structure that delivered control of the outcome while technically not buying the company.