Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as exciting as Google releasing Gemini 3.1 Pro (another day, another model release) 🤖
In today’s edition:
💡 Unlocking a new payments layer for the AI world
🛠 How to make 3D glass logos with AI
🔋 From $7K in savings to $100M in revenue + more
🔍 OpenAI raise, Deel's $1B ARR + more
🍻 An idea that’ll blow your mind
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 The Baked44 Challenge: We've teamed up with Base44 to give away $5K to one founder who ships their product this February. More details here. Happy building!
💳 Stripe for AI Voice Agents
Money talks
Available domain: Voxlink.com
The Problem: Voice AI agents are exploding. Businesses are deploying AI phone agents to handle bookings, customer service, sales calls, and collections - and the technology is genuinely good enough now to pass as human. But here's the gap nobody's solved: what happens when the agent needs to take a payment? Right now the agent has to awkwardly hand off to a human, redirect the caller to a website, or rely on hacky workarounds that kill the whole experience. It's like building a fully automated checkout lane and then stationing a human cashier at the end. Voice AI is ready to close deals. Payments infrastructure isn't. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A payments infrastructure layer built specifically for AI voice agents - letting them securely collect, process, and confirm payments mid-call
🛠️ Product:
Developers integrate a simple SDK into their voice AI stack, and the agent can trigger a secure payment flow at any point in the conversation - reading out amounts, confirming details, and processing cards in real time.
PCI-compliant tokenization handles the sensitive data so the AI never actually "hears" the card number - it goes straight to the payment processor while the conversation continues seamlessly.
And once you've built the rails for voice, the logical next step is obvious - expand into a universal payments layer for all AI agents, whether they're operating via chat, email, or autonomous workflows.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Check out the demo (built on Base44) | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Transaction fee model (0.3-0.5% per payment processed) on top of standard processing fees, plus a SaaS tier ($299-$999/month) for enterprise features and higher volume limits.
⭐ End Goal: Acquisition by Stripe, Twilio, or a major CCaaS provider looking to own the voice AI payments stack. 10-20x revenue multiple.
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🔐 A Founder Almost Sent a Term Sheet Over Gmail
Picture this - you're about to fire off a sensitive document over regular email and someone asks: "Wait, who else can read this?" The answer? Basically anyone between you and the recipient.
That's why founders are switching to Proton Mail:
Every email is encrypted on your device before it's sent
Password-protect emails to people outside Proton Mail
Works on web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android - syncs everywhere
If you're sharing contracts, financials, or IP over email, this one's worth the switch.
🧑🎨 How to make 3D glass logos with AI
The Context: A prompt has been doing the rounds on X that turns any brand logo into a stunning 3D glass render - think liquid chrome edges, soft lighting, and a premium minimalist finish. The best part? It takes about 30 seconds and the results look like something a design agency would charge thousands for.
Step-by-step:
Head to Gemini and change the model from “Fast” to “Pro”
Paste this prompt into Gemini and fill in the two blanks
Iterate on the colour or composition until you land on something you love.
Download and use it anywhere - social profiles, pitch decks, merch, you name it.
📈 What would you do with 7 extra hours a week?
That's what Wispr Flow users save on average. For founders, that's a full extra day every month to build, sell, or think.
The math:
4x faster than typing
Works across Mac, Windows, and iPhone
Learns your vocabulary, tone, and shortcuts over time
Time is your scarcest resource. Stop spending it on typing.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: From $7K in Savings to $100M in Revenue. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: IBM is tripling its entry-level hiring, bucking the wider trend. Is this the smart move in 2026?
💬 Prompt Drop: Microsoft Research + Salesforce just dropped a research paper on the importance of “single-turn“ prompting.
🆓 Founder Resource: Here’s a cold email format you can use for outbounding investors.
💵 Founder Deal: Startups get 90% off Intercom + 1 year of Fin free. The best customer support stack, basically free.
🔍 Founder Finds
🚀 OpenAI is finalising a $100B+ funding round at an $850B+ valuation - one of the most valuable private companies in history.
💰 David Silver, the DeepMind researcher behind AlphaGo, is raising $1B for his new AI lab Ineffable Intelligence, potentially Europe's largest ever seed round.
📹 Sam Altman just delivered an incredibly powerful (and slightly alarming) speech at the AI Impact Summit
❌ Deel co-founder Shuooo Wang breaks down all the advice they rejected to become one of the fastest growing start-ups ever
📺 This video shows YouTube’s founders complaining that they had only 40 uploads on their website. It’s almost poetic.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Cooling Robot
Ever burned your mouth on a hot drink because waiting is for cowards? What if a tiny robot could just... handle it?
Introducing BlowBot™, a palm-sized desktop robot with a little fan mouth that detects when your drink is too hot and gently blows cool air on it until it's ready to sip. No hands required.
BlowBot™ - It’ll blow you away.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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