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Liveblocks enables in-product AI assistants, PlanetScale vs Neon's CEO, and Polar's $10M seed round
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
Liveblocks, the real-time collaboration platform, launched version 3.0 with AI assistants that live inside your product. The startup explains that "AI Copilots are fully integrated collaborators inside your product—able to understand context, take action, and get things done alongside users." So, originally Liveblocks was about enabling users to collaborate with each other. This expansion is about users collaborating with agents.
What makes this launch impressive is the breadth of use cases they're targeting: in-app support copilots that can take actions for users, onboarding copilots with full context, collaborative writing copilots that work like teammates, and analytics copilots that make data conversational. This is a big leap from the first iteration of companies slapping AI chat in a sidebar and calling it a day.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert doubled down on the company's enterprise-first strategy this week, sparking a heated Twitter debate about the future of database infrastructure.
Lambert declared that "PlanetScale is built for production use cases. We are not going to optimize for vibe coding and these 'agentic' development workloads. There are severe trade offs involved and it's not possible to do both."
This was a direct shot at competitors like Neon, whose CEO Nikita Shamgunov responded by defending the "vibe coding" trend, arguing that "No one will remember this in a few years as the industry fully transitions to the new way of doing things."
But Lambert clapped back: "if i had your uptime i would not be subtweeting i can tell you that much. get back to your backlog of incident reports."
Lambert looked like a prophet, because two days later Neon experienced a service outage. Oof!
The back and forth highlights a fundamental strategic divide in the database-as-a-service market. PlanetScale is betting that reliability will win, and Neon is betting on accessibility. Lambert's enterprise-first approach is validated every time Neon has reliability issues.
Funding and Acquisitions
Polar, he payments platform, announced a $10M seed round led by Accel with impressive angel investors including Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Paul Copplestone (Supabase), and Tobi Lütke (Shopify). The company is targeting what they call "one-developer unicorns" - solo builders who need enterprise-grade billing infrastructure.
I like this framing because it means Polar will focus on building higher level abstractions than what Stripe offers. This is a trend. I'm seeing more devtools offer outcome focused solutions, while still allowing users to have access to lower level resources.
Browserbase, the browser infrastructure platform, raised a $40M Series B led by Notable Capital. The company is positioning itself as a primitive for web automation, comparing themselves to foundational companies like Twilio and Stripe.
They also launched Director.ai to make web automation accessible to non-developers. Director is to Browserbase what v0 is to Vercel and Nextjs.
I'm genuinely impressed by the new product. I asked it to get the latest posts from Stripe, and it wrote the browser automation code and delivered the results to me. I can see me using this product with Hypeburner for research.
More Developer Tool News
✨ Inngest, the workflow platform, launched Realtime in developer preview - a feature that lets you stream updates from functions to users in real-time.
What's clever about Inngest's approach is the combination of real-time streaming with their existing waitForEvent() feature to enable "Human in the Loop" patterns.
Inngest hasn't made an announcement, but I noticed they redesigned their homepage to go all-in on agentic workflows. See the before/after screenshots.
✨ Supabase, the Postgres database platform, has been producing a documentary series forcused on their customers. This is a clever reframing of doing case studies, and is more interesting for both prospects to watch and key customers to participate in.
✨ GrowthBook, the feature flagging and experimentation platform, launched SQL Explorer as part of their launch month. This is a restained product strategy. Instead of building a full BI platform, they're solving small use case while maintaining a good product experience.