{
  "updated": "2026-04-16T23:55:35.662Z",
  "count": 10,
  "items": [
    {
      "slug": "cursor",
      "name": "Cursor",
      "url": "https://cursor.com",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 37.7749,
      "lng": -122.4194,
      "category": "Dev Tools",
      "take": "The OKC Thunder of AI startups — vertically integrated product, obsessive taste, and a team that compounds on itself. Feels like a generational company in the making.",
      "writingUrl": "https://writing.dicefujiwara.com/p/why-cursor-is-the-okc-thunder-of",
      "tags": [
        "AI",
        "IDE",
        "agent-native"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "shizuku-ai",
      "name": "Shizuku AI",
      "url": "https://shizuku.ai",
      "city": "Tokyo",
      "country": "Japan",
      "lat": 35.6762,
      "lng": 139.6503,
      "category": "Consumer AI",
      "take": "AI VTuber companions. Therapy-and-companionship is quietly the largest GenAI use case, and Shizuku is the native format for it — a16z-backed, $15M seed, built from Tokyo.",
      "writingUrl": "https://writing.dicefujiwara.com/p/shizuku-ai",
      "tags": [
        "companionship",
        "VTuber",
        "Japan-origin"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "mercor",
      "name": "Mercor",
      "url": "https://mercor.com",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 37.7749,
      "lng": -122.4194,
      "category": "Marketplace",
      "take": "Expert-in-the-loop data marketplace for frontier labs. Interned on the Strategic Projects team — saw firsthand how unit economics of expert work are being rewritten for the model era.",
      "met": true,
      "tags": [
        "data",
        "labor marketplace",
        "RLHF"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "givefront",
      "name": "Givefront",
      "url": "https://givefront.com",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 37.7749,
      "lng": -122.4194,
      "category": "Fintech",
      "take": "Modern banking infrastructure for nonprofits (YC W24). Previously ran product and sales here. The nonprofit financial stack is 20 years behind; Givefront is dragging it into the present.",
      "met": true,
      "tags": [
        "YC W24",
        "nonprofit",
        "banking"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "sakana-ai",
      "name": "Sakana AI",
      "url": "https://sakana.ai",
      "city": "Tokyo",
      "country": "Japan",
      "lat": 35.6762,
      "lng": 139.6503,
      "category": "Japan",
      "take": "David Ha and Llion Jones building nature-inspired foundation models from Tokyo. The closest thing Japan has to a frontier lab, and the most credible signal that great model research can happen outside SF.",
      "tags": [
        "foundation models",
        "research",
        "Tokyo"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "perplexity",
      "name": "Perplexity",
      "url": "https://perplexity.ai",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 37.7749,
      "lng": -122.4194,
      "category": "Consumer AI",
      "take": "Answer engine that proved search is unbundling from Google. Distribution through taste — their product, positioning, and partnerships all read as deliberate.",
      "tags": [
        "search",
        "consumer"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "linear",
      "name": "Linear",
      "url": "https://linear.app",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 37.7749,
      "lng": -122.4194,
      "category": "Dev Tools",
      "take": "The benchmark for SaaS craft. Proof that opinionated design taste compounds into pricing power; every next-gen dev-tools company references them.",
      "tags": [
        "project management",
        "craft"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "harvey",
      "name": "Harvey",
      "url": "https://harvey.ai",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 37.7749,
      "lng": -122.4194,
      "category": "AI Infra",
      "take": "Legal-vertical foundation model layer. The most convincing example of vertical AI beating horizontal AI on an industry with deep workflow moats.",
      "tags": [
        "legal",
        "vertical AI"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "preferred-networks",
      "name": "Preferred Networks",
      "url": "https://preferred.jp",
      "city": "Tokyo",
      "country": "Japan",
      "lat": 35.6762,
      "lng": 139.6503,
      "category": "Japan",
      "take": "Japan's quiet deep-learning giant — chips, robotics, industrial AI. Shows what a patient, industrial-first AI company looks like outside the SF hype cycle.",
      "tags": [
        "chips",
        "robotics",
        "industrial"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "ramp",
      "name": "Ramp",
      "url": "https://ramp.com",
      "city": "New York",
      "country": "USA",
      "lat": 40.7128,
      "lng": -74.006,
      "category": "Fintech",
      "take": "Finance automation built around AI-native workflows from day one. The cleanest example of a pre-LLM fintech rebuilding itself on the new primitives without losing its operating discipline.",
      "tags": [
        "finance automation",
        "NYC"
      ]
    }
  ]
}