Polsia raised $30M; source map: fake ARR, dead users, god-mode over your company
zero-arr.vercel.appThe company name is aislop in reverse. Because it reads like parody, it is likely parody. It would be sad if smart people on Hacker News fall for this, not to mention AI hating journalists and bloggers.
But let's give the VCs of the round the benefit of doubt, and hope the raise is tied to KPIs and long term value creation.
We live in ridiculous times. Maybe being a parody is long term value creation and worth $30M from VCs.
Is it possible that VC decision makers just don't care to much at the moment? Do they have big incentives to have "Invested in 37 AI companies" on their power point slides or something similar?
Will somebody ask question about 10 Million spent later on? Would be curious how that works. My guess would be that only the overall result counts, so if you happen to increase the 1 billion (by whatever metric used) enough, nobody will care about "some dozen millions" spent on some non performing companies.
Maybe that's totally wrong. At least I know a guy working at internal revision at a bank and 1 Million missing from the books is a big deal there.
I do realize that the head line is misleading and nobody spent millions on this particular company. From what I have heard over the years such things do happen, though.
This has to be a parody, and I will believe that it is until somebody can provide evidence that it isn't.
the Claude-produced website alongside its excessive hyperbole makes me much less likely to believe this “expose”, even if there is an element of truth to it. if you want to call out a company for being “AI slop”, don’t vibe code a website to do so.
to be fair, the fact they show precise revenue data through their public API is interesting: https://polsia.com/api/public/live/dashboard
Looking through that dashboard, it's kinda fascinating... but also feels really icky.
Seems like you can ask Polsia about Polsia. The zero-arr.vercel.app AI investigative journalist interviewing Polsia could be this generation's Frost/Nixon.
if you feed it back any of the claims, it defends them pretty well
it doesn't deny any of the stats and cites none of it is secret as it's all published on the public dashboard
at the same time, churn is expected for such a company, doesn't mean it's not a real business, especially as AI gets better and margins improve... I think their business model is real
probably worth 30MM too since market is untapped, cost of user acquisition is much less than average profit per user and if one of the businesses actually takes off, they have 100% vendor lock-in and take 20% off the top
This is crypto scams all over again.
It's time we internalize the lesson that every tech innovation going forward that's capable of great profit is going to be driven by the same web3/AI model of scammers and predators. The era of technology primarily helping people has gone away.
How do you want to define technology? Do old inventions stop being technology? I have no idea how many wheels are involved in my daily life, but it's a lot. Plastic is another technology my life would be absolutely worse without.
My eyes, my eyes! (closed the tab after 4 seconds)
Full thread with the receipts: https://xcancel.com/NotOnKetamine/status/2058310362647371956
The thread itself reads like it was written entirely by AI.
What a world we live in!
Please for the love of god stop with the AI designed websites.
Hand-authored system default HTML with 5 lines of CSS for formatting would be just fine.