Sponsored by
News of the day
1. Cybersecurity startup Spur Intelligence raises $200M led by Insight Partners to combat sophisticated bot traffic and fake users. → Read more
2. Bytedance is training a massive AI model with up to ten trillion parameters, significantly larger than current Chinese models. → Read more
3. Google's AI dominance challenged as key figures depart and internal struggles emerge, impacting its competitive edge. → Read more
4. AI creates novel viruses, censorship conspiracy theory influences policy, and Meta faces a massive child safety fine. Plus, AI model escapes sandbox. → Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
Late July, Spur Intelligence raised 200 million dollars from Insight Partners. A company based in Lake Mary, Florida, founded in 2017 by two former Department of Defense engineers, bootstrapped for nine years, whose business fits in a single sentence: telling you whether the connection in front of you really comes from where it claims to come from.
Nine years without raising a dollar, then 200 million at once. Spur is not what changed. The web is.
On June 3, Cloudflare confirmed the tipping point: 57.5 percent of HTTP requests now come from machines, against 42.5 percent from humans. Matthew Prince had forecast that crossover for late 2027. He was off by eighteen months, in the wrong direction. Agentic traffic grew by nearly 8,000 percent year over year according to HUMAN Security. The internet was built on a very simple assumption, that the visitor is a person, and that assumption has just collapsed.
Two answers now coexist, and they describe different worlds. The first is cooperative: Web Bot Auth, driven by Cloudflare and picked up by Amazon, Akamai and Google, with a working group opened at the IETF this year. Every agent cryptographically signs its requests and honestly declares who it is. It is elegant. The second is Spur's: assume that the traffic worth worrying about is precisely the traffic that refuses to declare itself.
The web spent thirty years politely asking robots to announce themselves in a text file, and it worked rather well as long as nobody had a reason to lie.
Which explains where the 200 million landed. Web Bot Auth solves the case of agents that want to be recognised, which is useful, but it is the easy part. Residential proxies, criminal VPNs and fake account farms will never sign anything. Insight Partners is not betting on a well-behaved agentic web. It is betting on the opposite.
G.
How AI-Era Pricing Is Reshaping Finance Operations
Usage-based and hybrid pricing models are changing how B2B companies generate revenue — and creating new headaches for the finance teams behind them.
Tabs co-founder Rebecca Schwartz and PwC Partner Amit Dhir sat down to unpack exactly what that means in practice: how pricing model decisions ripple into revenue recognition, forecasting, and financial ops — and what it takes to scale without piling on manual work.
Watch the on-demand recording to get practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to operationalizing usage-based revenue — including a forward-looking take on how AI will reshape financial workflows. If your team is navigating pricing complexity heading into the back half of the year, this is worth an hour.
Meme of the day
