Adam Crookes SEO

Higgsfield have scaled to $1BN in ARR in 18 months; that is faster than Cursor. But did you know they have over 150 people in content production alone? For every product release, funding announcement, you name it, they have built a content machine that is unmatched. The next generation of companies will have content baked into their DNA.

Nubank rumoured to acquire Monzo for ~$13b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 Investors are likely to share a huge $9.3b of profits combined, on $1.9b invested. This represents a 5.8x blended, across 11 priced rounds. 🤑 The Founders & team will share about ~$2.0b. This is a super win for a company that had to take a down round mid-2020. My takeaways below: 1) Passion Capital's absolute home run 👑 @eileentso and Passion led each of Monzo's first three rounds. They also kept following-on in almost every round after that. The Seed alone will return nearly 200x! Across the three seed rounds they led, that's ~$1.6b of proceeds on ~$18m invested. Legendary. 2) Two huge absolute $ winners: Goodwater and Thrive 🏆 Goodwater led the Series C in Nov-17, at a $330m post. It will return over 20x the money. That round will generate the most absolute $ of all rounds at ~$2.0b. 📈 Thrive led the Jul-17 Series B round at $100m post money valuation, and is now looking at a cool~50x on its investment. Two amazing good calls within a few months of each other. 3) The crowd did great 🙌 Monzo raised three crowdfunding rounds, including the famous "£1m on Crowdcube in 96 seconds" in 2016. Those customers-turned-shareholders are sitting on ~35-80x of profits! Probably the second best-performing retail investment in UK tech history, after Revolut's own crowdcube campaign (where investors are now sitting on 1,000x+ paper gains). 4) Buying the dip paid off 📈 The Jun-20 down round (Novator, Nikesh Arora) came in at a ~$1.7b post money valuation. Interestingly, this is below the 2019 price. Back then, everyone thought Monzo might not make it. That round will returns ~5.9x and about $1.6b. 5) The latest growth rounds: good, not great 😐 The Series H (ADQ, Tencent, Coatue) and Series I (CapitalG, GV, Hedosophia) make ~2.5x each. For the Series H specifically, after almost five years: respectable, not spectacular. 6) Team & Founders 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🫂 Firstly: mega congrats to @tomblomfield, TS Anil and the whole team. This would be an incredibly outcome and it is definitely one to be celebrated. The team here will do very well, despite Monzo raising eleven rounds and diluting meaningfully. I estimate that Founders & ESOP will get about 15% of the outcome, or ~$2.0bn.

Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co Our goal is to create the following: - A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with. - Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch? - Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies. - Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers? - Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides. Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business. In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly. David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do. No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing. cosign.co

Every day, we’re testing new ways to improve the Search ads experience — and many of you are quick to spot these experiments in the wild! I wanted to pull back the curtain and share a bit of context on one we’re starting this week. We’ll be running a small experiment with adding a "Strongest match" or "Strong match" label to certain Search ads. The goal is simple: to help people instantly identify the most relevant information for their query, and help advertisers connect more effectively with high-intent audiences. We work hard to ensure all the ads people see are relevant to what they’re looking for (that’s what makes them effective, after all) and this experiment uses existing ad quality and relevance signals to badge Search ads that are highly relevant. Right now, this is just an initial experiment rolling out to a small percentage of users in the US to help us assess its value. We’re always tweaking and testing things, so while I can't promise a preview for every new UI experiment, I thought it’d be fun to share the thinking behind this one before you start seeing it. Let me know what you think if you spot it out there!

We’re breaking down — in detail — what people are searching for most right now, all based on U.S. @GoogleTrends data. Here’s what to know, courtesy of our new Summergeist trends report: 📈 “fibermaxxing” searches increased by +115% in the past 90 days, with searches for “dietary fiber” hitting an all-time high in 2026 🍷 “chilled red” recently hit an all-time Search high 👖“jorts,” “bermuda shorts” and “capri pants” are all back — with capri pants reaching an all-time high in 2026

One of the casualties of the Jan 20 unconfirmed algorithm update Google launched that hit a bunch of sites with spammy AI content This one is the subfolder of a major brand everyone has heard of & where the site was using AI to scale content -800K in monthly organic traffic YOY

AI is killing All About Berlin. When you Google something, you used to get a link to my website, but now you get an AI-generated answer trained on my work. This has a devastating impact on traffic.

For ongoing tasks, like planning a wedding or managing a move, Search can code entire custom experiences with Google @Antigravity. Think: mini apps, dashboards or trackers you can come back to again and again. #GoogleIO