Partiful and AI Agents

Author

Henry Head
February 06, 2025

In partnership with

Happy Thursday.

Lunar New Year kicked off last Wednesday, bringing 15 days of celebration and the arrival of the Year of the Snake. For those celebrating, hope it’s filled with food, loved ones, and joy. 🐍

Signals

  • Seed Round: Tandem, a marketplace for office space (and one of my favorite early startups), raised 6.1M in seed funding.

  • Job Cuts: Workday announced layoffs of about 1,750 employees (8.5% of their workforce). Might be a omen of what’s to come in the jobs report from the Labor Department, releasing Friday.

  • Internet Searching Outsourced: OpenAI launched Deep Research, an AI agent to do research online for you. Sounds useful (especially for newsletter writing), but it’s only available to the $200/month Pro users, so I guess I’ll stick with my 50 open tabs.

  • In Case You Missed It: Daniel Penny, who was acquitted of choking to death Jordan Neely on a New York Subway, has been hired by Andreessen Horowitz. Mr. Penny was previously an architecture student and will be working as part of the “American Dynamism” team.

Field Notes

Apple unveiled Apple Invites on Tuesday, a new app for sending digital invites, managing RSVPs, and making party planning easier. And yes, it looks an awful lot like Partiful. Partiful, as one can imagine, is less than happy. In response to the launch, Partiful tweeted Apple’s own developer guidelines, which include the line:

"Come up with your own ideas… Don’t simply copy the latest popular app."

Image from Apple

Will Apple Kill Partiful?

As with many things Apple, the biggest advantage—and disadvantage—of Apple Invites is that it works best with other Apple people. Maybe this is an attempt to lock-in users to the ecosystem, back-stepping after they finally adopted RCS messaging in 2024 to improve texting with Android users.

Invites are tied to iCloud profiles. If you don’t have one, you’ll face extra steps like verification codes and limited access to in-app photo albums….sorry Android users.

Still it’s not great news for Partiful, who raised a 20M Series A in 2022, and would be likely to raise a larger round in the near, near future. They can only hope they have built a loyal enough base of users, and that Apple Invites ends up like Freeform, another pre-installed Apple app that quietly faded into the background.

The Age of the No-Code App?

Replit launched a version of their AI coding agent last year, but now it’s available for everyone to try—and it’s pretty killer.

For anyone who's ever wanted to build an app but didn’t want to deal with endless Stack Overflow searches (or doesn’t even know what that is), this could be for you. AI is making the idea of "no-code" more real than ever.

Even though we’re not at full "AI replaces engineers" mode yet, it is clear that there is traction. Cursor (AI Developer) just raised a $100M Series B—only four months after their Series A. $100 MILLION?!!! In 4 MONTHS!!?! That would sound absurd, but their parent company, Anysphere, is reportedly at $100M ARR, so in this AI economy that almost feels like a steal of an investment, and yes – people are using these tools and finding serious value.

Below is a great thread on the different AI coding agents available today. Worth checking out.

Jobs in Venture

For Founders

  • A reminder the Spring 25 Y Combinator Application is due Feb 11th at 8PM PT. The batch will take place from April to June in San Francisco.

And a word from a sponsor:

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