VC React Podcast (Episode #46)

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This week on VC React, we break down Meta’s eye-watering billion-dollar overtures to Mira Murati’s newborn Thinking Machines Lab, taste-test Calo’s $64 million war-chest for its AI “private-chef” push, tune in to Sawt’s Arabic voice-bot gambit, and decode the UAE’s brand-new open-finance rails.

Meta is dangling a 10-figure package at a single engineer inside Murati’s six-month-old startup—visionary move, naked panic, or the new normal in the post-GPT talent arms race? We ask whether super-salaries really trump mission, how VCs underwrite a company whose whole team could vanish by Monday, and why regulators are stuck hiring with couch-cushion budgets while Big Tech buys nuclear plants for GPUs.

Riyadh-headquarted Calo tacks another $39 million onto its Series B, pushing the round to $64 million to fuel European expansion and AI-powered meal personalisation. Is an “AI private chef” a sticky subscription wedge, and we consider how startups with similar models have performed in a LATAM context.

Saudi upstart Sawt pockets a $1 million pre-seed from STV’s new $100 million AI fund and telco giant T2. Can an Arabic-native voice agent out-manoeuvre call-centre incumbents – dialect hurdles, ticket creation and all?

Finally, Lean Technologies secures the UAE’s first Open-Finance licence. Will Plaid-style rails finally unlock mass consumer credit, KYC-less remittances and embedded sharia fintech, or does a flood of reg-tech contenders now scramble to layer K-scores, AML and tokenised payments on top?

This week’s guests