Harvey Hit $5B on Vertical AI—Creative Niches Are Next
Vertical AI hit $5B in legal. The $115B market is expanding at 24.5% CAGR—but creative micro-cultures remain underserved by generic tools.
Platform Extension
Startup and plugin ideas built on top of major ecosystems such as Shopify, Notion, Slack, or Chrome. Leverages existing distribution and infrastructure for rapid launch, low cost, and high visibility.
PepsiCo Paid $1.95B for Poppi. The $3B Mushroom Coffee Gap Is Wide Open.
Big Beverage is buying culture, not chemistry. Mushroom coffee incumbents still sell generic benefits—leaving identity-first positioning wide open for micro-tribe operators.
Acoustic Disease Detection: $13.7B Livestock Monitoring Market
Acoustic sensors detect livestock respiratory disease 72 hours before symptoms, at 40x lower cost than smart collars—riding precision farming's shift from hardware to intelligence.
Threads Opens Podcast API: The $2.6B Ad Revenue Infrastructure Play
Meta's Threads courts podcasters while Spotify opens comments—but nobody's unifying the fragmented conversation layer across platforms worth $8B in annual ad spend.
Pinterest-Style Commerce for the $18.5B Affiliate Market
Pinterest trained 522M users to shop by aesthetic, but creators can't monetize this behavior outside walled gardens. The embed economy awaits.
VRChat Mobile Launch: Build $12K Touch Worlds for Brands
VRChat's mobile launch opened mass distribution. Studios still design for headsets. Brands need phone-first worlds—nobody's shipping them yet.
Discord's $2B Blind Spot: 1B Users, Zero Access
Discord locked paid subscriptions to U.S. only. Telegram's 1B global users need payment optimization. The infrastructure exists. The gap is execution.
CivicVend OS: $50B Opioid Settlement Compliance Layer
Chicago's public health vending pilot revealed a massive tracking gap across thousands of machines dispensing Narcan, period products, and books nationwide.
Bob & Brad's $2.5k Amazon Play: Creator Hardware Hits Mainstream
Physical therapists with 5M YouTube subscribers launched $2,499 massage chairs on Amazon, proving creators can sell high-ticket hardware with zero customer acquisition cost.