3F VC

Want to know why Dropbox’s 2007 deck worked? Ask for a slide-by-slide breakdown, then click any cited slide and the real deck opens right on it. Answers you can actually check.

Your startup is probably leaving thousands in free credits on the table. Notion, Asana, Airtable, Atlassian, Freshworks: most tools have startup perks, and nobody tells you where they are. Ask once and get every offer with a link to the program page.

Early-stage founders in India: stop digging through 20 grant portals. Ask one question and get SISFS, NIDHI-PRAYAS, TIDE 2.0 and state schemes matched to your stage. Every answer links to the official source. Something we’ve been building with the Eklavya team 👇

What goes into building a SOTA biomolecule design model? We spoke with @anindyadeeps , founder of LiteFold, about LiteMol-1, their new model for designing different classes of biomolecules. The conversation covered sequence modelling, molecular representations, data quality and compute efficiency.

✈️Airports are capital-intensive platforms that combine a regulated core service with commercial rights over a larger customer wallet. Three lessons transfer well to early-stage founders building marketplaces, tools or concession-style businesses:

A ₹1,500 XY stage resolving sub-20 nm movement. Built as one monolithic 3D print, with 210 nm repeatable movement. F²R is making nanopositioning dramatically more accessible.

Open to medical, engineering and design students/professionals, as well as entrepreneurs and independent innovators. Pre-registration closes 9th August at 8 PM. Apply: forms.gle/He2bQJAcRvJasoVX8 If someone in your network should see this, please pass it along.

If you are building in medical devices, or know someone who wants to, this might be worth sending their way. M.I.C.E. Labs is hosting MEDHA 2026 with BETiC Labs, IIT Bombay.

Young founders and operators are often told to build in public. We are often culprits of saying that too. But the harder question is rarely answered: What do you actually post when you are early, confused, still learning, and building in public for the first time?

We’re happy to share that we’ve backed NeoVes. NeoVes is a stem-cell biotech startup researching better outcomes for neuropathy and nerve damage.

The Commoditization Clock The most dangerous thing about building software in 2026 is that you can now measure exactly how much time you have before a lab ships your product as a feature. In 2020, when GitHub and OpenAI announced their partnership, it took 20 months for Copilot to reach general availability. By 2025, when Cursor acquired Graphite for over $290 million, Anthropic had native code review live in three months. The gap between a startup signaling value and a lab shipping a replacement has compressed from 20 months to one fiscal quarter. That is not a trend. That is a new law of nature for anyone building software on top of foundation models. The reason the clock accelerated has nothing to do with labs getting smarter. It is that your fundraising announcement and your acquisition disclosures are now product roadmaps. The moment Cursor paid acquisition prices for Graphite, it told Anthropic two things: code review is the next high-value workflow step, and developers will pay transaction-level pricing for it. Anthropic did not need a product discovery process. Cursor ran it for them. Every round you raise, every acqui-hire you make, every feature you ship that gets press coverage is a prioritization signal for a team with 200 engineers and infinite compute sitting one layer below you in the stack. The math at the model layer makes this worse than it looks. OpenAI earns 33% gross margins. Anthropic earns roughly 40%. Salesforce earns 75%. Adobe earns 88%. AI model companies are running on manufacturing economics, not software economics, which means every lab is under structural pressure to capture more of the application-layer margin before their own unit economics stabilize. When Anthropic observed Claude Code users repurposing the tool for non-technical workflows, they built and shipped Cowork in approximately ten days. They did not plan it. They watched their own usage data, saw a market, and shipped. Your traction is their market research. The vibe coding layer is the fastest proof of how this plays out at scale. Lovable claimed $400 million ARR in February 2026. Working backward from their own reported figures, 180,000 paying customers at a blended rate between $12.50 and $25 per month implies annualized revenue of $27 to $54 million, not $400 million. The entire category runs on three simultaneous subsidies: labs pricing API access at adoption rates to drive market share, platforms extending that subsidy through discounts and free tiers, and VC capital absorbing the difference. The growth rates are real. The profitability is deferred and contingent on enterprise conversion accelerating before consumer churn catches up, API pricing staying stable, and labs deciding the application-layer margin is not worth taking directly. That last assumption is the one that fails first, every time. The founders who come out of this are the ones who stop thinking about features and start thinking about what computer scientists call load-bearing infrastructure. Cursor's $29.3 billion valuation is a bet that VS Code familiarity and Fortune 500 procurement cycles create switching costs that outlast model commoditization. That might be right. But the developers have already moved. Claude Code sits at 46% most-loved among developers versus Cursor at 19%, and enterprises follow developers, always, just later. The only genuine protection in this environment is becoming so entangled in a specific customer's actual workflow that switching to a lab-native product feels like a regression, not an upgrade. Distribution compounds. So does commoditization. The question is which one compounds faster for your specific product. Most founders are betting on the wrong one.

Watch Rahil's full masterclass. It uses a simple example company to explain every clause clearly. Bookmark it before your next investor meeting. ▶️ youtube.com/watch?v=uHJlvTHr…

Behind every AI answer is an enormous hidden cost in water and power that almost nobody sees. Data centers are using massive amounts of both, and it's only accelerating.

Claude just made CAD feel simple. But let’s actually see how special this is. Is this a real shift in how products get built, or just a faster way to mock things up? Here’s what it means for you:

We’re launching RFS with Dr. Malpani. Every month: one idea We fund the founder best suited to build it

You have ~2.5 minutes to earn the meeting. Build your pitch deck accordingly!