ICYMI: Startup news and resources from the week that was
What you might have missed last week on Caffeine.
Welcome to Monday!
As always, on Monday we recap a few of our favorite stories or resources from the week that was then tomorrow kick back into our full newsletter from Tuesday.
Have a great start to your week,
Finn and the Caffeine team
Factor nabs $3m, eyes global expansion: Put this in the ‘made Finn absolutely nerd out during an interview’ category of Caffeine. As you all know, I never shut up about how energy is upstream of everything else we want to do in our economy and no startup, founder or even government can afford to ignore it. We don’t get to build the future we’re all so excited about if we don’t build the energy systems required to power that future. One startup doing the hard mahi of making that possible is Factor, which just secured $3 million of investment to accelerate the development of its pricing automation platform for energy companies globally.
The round was led by friends of Caffeine Icehouse Ventures and backed by other prominent New Zealand and Australian investors including Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1, Motion Capital, Black Nova, Flying Fox, Blackbird and AngelHQ, plus US-headquartered Metagrove Ventures and FUNC Ventures.
Factor is developing a suite of plug-and-play tools that automate what has traditionally been a clunky, spreadsheet-based pricing process for energy retailers, distribution networks, and other energy tech companies. The company's AI-powered solution addresses a critical gap in the energy sector, where 70% of electricity is consumed by industry with complex needs, but where pricing management remains largely manual and inefficient.
And I get it, pricing management might not sound like the sexiest area to be solving in but it’s absolutely fundamental to the future of energy. None of the sexy deep tech power solutions which we’re all so excited about will make a difference if there isn’t an infrastructure layer to price and package that power. I had an excellent chat with co-founder Jess Venning-Bryan unpacking all of the above so look forward to that in the coming weeks.
Why we built a Claude x Lumin integration
Here at Lumin, our team uses Claude for everything from brainstorming campaigns to drafting documents.
But there was always that awkward copy-paste dance between Claude’s brilliant AI-generated content and getting it into a professional, shareable document.
So here’s the magic: you’re chatting with Claude, generating exactly what you need – a contract, proposal, or report. Instead of copying and reformatting, you can now seamlessly move that content directly into Lumin for professional formatting, team collaboration, and eSignatures.
From AI to action in three steps:
Generate content with Claude
Open your document in Lumin PDF with one click
Collaborate, edit, and sign
The real impact? You can draft a complete NDA in minutes instead of hours, create technical specs with Claude then seamlessly move to Lumin for feedback and version control, or generate personalised proposals and collect approvals without ever leaving your workflow.
This integration bridges the gap between AI content generation and the polished, collaborative documents that businesses actually need.
Get the Claude x Lumin integration here.
Pod Pick: Revolution Social - Why Twitter Failed with Jack Dorsey: I think we can all agree that there are probably enough podcasts in existence at this point and the bar for actually listening to one your friend (or in this case, internet stranger) recommends to you is getting pretty god dam high. Bearing that in mind, please add one more podcast to your doubtlessly full content plate because it’s an absolute scorcher.
I think the above thumbnail probably does most of the selling for me but to spell it out, Twitter employee number one Evan ‘Rabble’ Henshaw-Plath has launched a new pod and the first guest is Jack Dorsey. They have a fascinating, revealing conversation about the past failures, present toxicity and potential hopeful future of social media. And make sure to subscribe because the upcoming guests are fairly titanic in the space future guests include, people like : Kara Swisher, Yoel Roth, Cory Doctorow, Chris Best, co-founder of Substack. Check out the full episode here.
A.I slop is drowning the internet, YouTube tries to fight back: As someone who makes a living through producing things on the internet, this story is a little close to home for me. As A.I generation take the cost of producing content to zero in time and money, the internet is drowning in an ocean of cheap, instantly produced AI slop. Some research suggests up to 90% of online content could be A.I generated by as soon as next year. I’ve sure many of you have had the surreal experience of watching a YouTube video on some niche subject only to click something is off when the voiceover mispronounces a basic word and you realise you aren’t watching a cool up and coming creator discuss something weirdly specific to your interests but a cheap AI trying to game the algorithm. Hopefully, there will be at least some push back on this now. YouTube will update its policies later to clarify monetisation categories and crack down on ‘inauthentic’ content. There is still a level of irony in a company owned by Google, who is producing leading AI models, in fighting this fight. But I will take what I can get.
Want to get in touch with a news tip, a slice of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co