Tech Startups with Fexingo: Founders, Funding, and Software Companies Explained

Deel started in 2019 as a way for startups to hire international contractors compliantly. By early 2026, it processes over $10 billion in annual payments and serves 30,000 clients across 150 countries. Lucas and Luna break down how Deel solved the compliance nightmare of cross-border hiring, why its employer-of-record model became essential during the remote work shift, and the key product decisio...

The Browser Company's Arc browser has reimagined what a web browser can be, moving from a simple window into tabs to a full-fledged operating system for the internet. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dive deep into Arc's design philosophy, its unique sidebar and spaces system, and how it's building a cult following among knowledge workers. They discuss the company's bet that the browser is the most...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna dive into Gitpod, the startup that automated cloud-based development environments. They explore how Gitpod lets developers spin up ready-to-code workspaces in seconds, eliminating the 'it works on my machine' problem. Lucas breaks down Gitpod's open-core business model, its $150 million Series B in 2022, and how it competes with GitHub Codespaces. Luna questions the...

Lucas and Luna unpack how Glean became the essential search layer for enterprises drowning in SaaS data. Starting with the story of a former Google engineer who realized that internal search is fundamentally harder than web search — because it requires understanding permissions, personal context, and dozens of disconnected apps. Lucas breaks down Glean's key architectural insight: building a unifi...

Lucas and Luna break down Airtable's journey from a user-friendly spreadsheet to a low-code platform powering over 500,000 organizations. They explore how the company balanced simplicity with power, the strategic decision to build an app marketplace, and why its interface-first approach won over non-technical teams. Specific numbers: 500,000+ organizations, 30 million users, $11 billion valuation...

In this episode of Tech Startups with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how Figma won the collaborative design market—a tool that went from a browser-based prototype to the backbone of product design for companies like Uber, Square, and Microsoft. They break down Figma's key insight: that design tools were stuck in the desktop era, built for individual work, while Figma bet everything on real-time m...

Episode 74 of Tech Startups with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dive into Raycast, the productivity tool that's replacing Spotlight and Alfred for 70% of developers on Mac. They unpack Raycast's origin as a side project at Facebook, its pivot from a React dev tool to a system-wide launcher, and how it built a thriving extension marketplace with 2,000+ community plugins. The hosts explore why Raycast is w...

Episode 73 of Tech Startups with Fexingo drills into Linear — the project management tool that's won over engineers at companies like Vercel, Cal.com, and Raycast. Lucas unpacks how founders Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo built an issue tracker that prioritises speed and developer experience over feature bloat. Luna questions whether Linear can stay independent as giants like Jira and Notion pile o...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how Plaid became the invisible backbone of modern fintech. Starting with a single number—$5 billion valuation at its 2018 funding round—they trace Plaid's journey from a Yale dorm room project to powering connections for over 12,000 financial institutions and apps like Venmo, Coinbase, and Betterment. Lucas breaks down the technical challenge of screen-scrap...

Episode 71 explores how Supabase has grown from a 2020 open-source side project into a $2 billion valuation company challenging Firebase on its own turf. Lucas and Luna break down Supabase's unique business model: giving away the core product for free while charging enterprises for managed hosting, compliance, and row-level security. They dig into the company's traction — 4 million registered user...

Stripe processes over a trillion dollars in payments annually and powers millions of businesses. But its real moat isn't just checkout buttons—it's the financial infrastructure layer it's building underneath. In this episode, Lucas and Luna break down how Stripe evolved from a seven-line integration to a platform handling lending, treasury, and identity verification. They discuss the company's pro...

In this episode of Tech Startups with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how Vercel built a front-end cloud platform that hundreds of thousands of developers rely on daily. They trace Vercel's origin as the company behind Next.js, the React framework that powers everything from small personal sites to major e-commerce storefronts. The conversation drills into Vercel's unique developer experience-focu...

In this episode of Tech Startups with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dive into how Anthropic built Claude to win enterprise trust—specifically in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. They break down the three architectural decisions that made Claude different: constitutional AI for safety, interpretability research for auditability, and a batch-processing API that meets compliance requiremen...

Lucas and Luna unpack how Databricks created the lakehouse architecture, blending data lake flexibility with warehouse reliability. They trace the company's rise from an Apache Spark spin-off in 2013 to a $43 billion valuation in 2024, examining key technical decisions like Delta Lake and Unity Catalog. The episode also explores how Databricks navigated competition with Snowflake, the impact of th...

Notion hit 100 million users in early 2026. This episode digs into how the company turned a deceptively simple blank canvas into a productivity powerhouse that rivals Microsoft and Google. Lucas and Luna trace Notion's early pivot from a failed developer tool to a consumer-enterprise hybrid, the growth loop that fueled its viral spread through college campuses, and the product philosophy behind it...

Episode 65 of Tech Startups with Fexingo examines Grammarly's journey from a Ukrainian startup to a 30-million-daily-user writing assistant. Lucas and Luna break down the product's freemium funnel, the decision to build proprietary NLP models instead of relying on GPT, and the company's unusual go-to-market strategy that targeted email clients and browser extensions before mobile. They also discus...

Lucas and Luna explore how Tailscale became the go-to mesh VPN for developers and startups by making networking invisible. They break down how Tailscale uses WireGuard as its foundation, why its zero-config approach won over engineers tired of OpenVPN complexity, and how the company thinks about pricing for teams versus enterprises. Specific numbers include Tailscale's 2023 Series A at a reported...

In episode 63 of Tech Startups with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dive into Mercury’s rise as the banking platform of choice for over 100,000 startups. Instead of applying for a bank charter, Mercury partnered with already-regulated banks like Evolve Bank & Trust and Choice Financial Group. Lucas explains how this 'banking-as-a-service' stack worked, the regulatory arbitrage involved, and why incumbents...

Episode 62 of Tech Startups with Fexingo dives into WorkOS, the startup that turned enterprise single sign-on from a painful integration into a plug-in API. Lucas and Luna trace WorkOS' origin story — how a former Stripe engineer noticed every B2B SaaS company was burning months building SAML and SCIM support — and walk through the product's evolution from a simple SSO endpoint into a full enterpr...

Lucas and Luna dive into Cursor, the AI-first code editor that has quietly amassed over a million paying users without the hype of its rivals. They trace how a small team from MIT and Google layered AI on top of VS Code to build something developers actually trust for production code. The conversation covers Cursor's revenue model (starts at $20 per month), its unique approach to privacy (code nev...

Lucas and Luna explore how Datadog became the dominant observability platform for cloud-native companies, with over 3,000 enterprise customers monitoring applications, infrastructure, and logs in real time. They break down the company's shift from a simple monitoring tool to a full-stack observability suite, the economics of its usage-based pricing model, and the competitive landscape against riva...

In this episode of Tech Startups with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dive into how Rippling became the operating system for HR and IT in one. They break down the company's founding insight: that employee data should be the single source of truth for provisioning access, devices, and apps. Using real numbers — like how Rippling can onboard a new hire in under 90 seconds — the hosts walk through the techni...

Episode 58 dives into Retool's rise as the visual IDE powering internal tools at over 20,000 companies. Lucas and Luna unpack how co-founder David Hsu identified the pain of rebuilding admin panels and dashboards from scratch, Retool's clever go-to-market via developers, the $1.2 billion valuation, and the tricky balance between customization and abstraction. They also explore how Retool handles c...

In this episode of Tech Startups with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dive into the story of Paddle, the London-based fintech that built a complete revenue infrastructure for SaaS companies. They explore how Paddle started as a simple checkout solution, evolved into a full revenue delivery platform handling taxes, compliance, and subscriptions, and recently became a public company. Key numbers include Pad...

Lucas and Luna explore how You.com, a search engine startup founded in 2020, is using large language models to challenge Google's dominance. They break down You.com's unique approach: offering an app-like interface where users can chat with AI for coding, writing, and research, all while keeping privacy front and center. The hosts discuss the company's $50 million Series B from 2024 and how its 'Y...