Summer Edition: Understanding the history of EBITDA, and how startups sell with AI
👋 Hi and welcome to Brighteye Bulletin - your fortnightly take on all things in Edtech, HRTech and Talent Empowerment, both from a Startup & VC perspectives.
Articles and Resources of the week
Throxy’s $1.5M ARR playbook: How to replace SDRs with AI
This week on Startup Riders, Pablo Jimenez de Parga (co-founder of Throxy) dropped one of the most grounded takes in the “AI replaces sales” hype cycle.
→ Instead of building yet another AI SDR SaaS, Throxy is a full-stack AI agency that runs outbound for clients. No UI, just real meetings. And it’s working: $1.5M in ARR.
Why it works:
Earn the right to automate: Throxy started fully manual, learned what converts, then layered automation only where it was proven to work.
Full accountability: They sell outcomes, not tools as customers don’t care how it works - they only care that it does work. So Throxy focuses on delivering meetings.
Invisible AI UX: All scraping, enrichment, targeting is backend. Clients just see booked calls and dashboards.
From cable to AI: the history & comeback of EBITDA
Origins from the cable & media industry
John Malone, CEO of TCI in the 1970s, pioneered EBITDA as a workaround to show the true cash-generating power of cable companies.
His logic: cable required heavy capex upfront, so EPS looked awful, but cash flow was strong.
By using debt + aggressive depreciation, Malone avoided taxes and sheltered income, all while growing infrastructure.
Malone promoted EBITDA to Wall Street as a cleaner view of operational performance, free from tax and accounting distortions.
From Infrastructure to SaaS & everyone else
Private equity firms loved EBITDA: it showed a business’s ability to service debt, ignoring accounting noise.
Investment bankers made it a go-to valuation shortcut (“10x EBITDA”).
Then SaaS companies jumped in, even without capital intensity, they used EBITDA to fit investor frameworks.
What’s wrong with EBITDA
Despite its ubiquity, EBITDA has three major flaws:
It’s not GAAP, and companies manipulate it (e.g., Klarna excluding credit losses).
It ignores capex, so capital-heavy strategies can hide true cash burn.
It misses working capital dynamics, meaning short-term boosts can mask financial health risks.
Result: you can grow EBITDA while damaging long-term value.
Infra’s comeback with AI
AI infra companies (think GPU farms, private data centers, custom chips) are reviving EBITDA’s purpose: justifying massive upfront investment.
Some are even borrowing against GPUs, using them as collateral to raise billions of dollars in debt.
Just like cable in the ’70s, these startups rely on EBITDA to tell a scalable, deferred-profit story, while net income stays negative.
EBITDA endures as VCs' favorite narrative metric, turning complexity into a digestible multiple, even when the underlying fundamentals demand deeper understanding and analysis.
Investment news
Germany-based Ordio, a People OS for deskless industries, has raised a €12M Series A round led by 3VC, with participation from Wecken & Cie., Capnamic, and Simon Capital. The idea is to scale its unified workforce management platform already serving 1,700+ clients across hospitality, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.
Sweden-based Kiku, an AI-powered recruitment platform purpose-built for high-volume frontline hiring, has raised a €4M seed led by Cherry Ventures, joined by Yellow and angels. Designed to improve the candidate experience while cutting time-to-hire, Kiku’s mobile-first conversational interface and multilingual AI agent “Sara” automate sourcing to reference checks.
Germany-based 36ZERO Vision, a Munich-founded industrial AI startup specializing in visual quality inspection, has raised a €3.6M pre-Series A round to scale its high-accuracy, low-data computer vision platform across Europe. The round was led by JOIN Capital, Bayern Kapital, and Vanagon Ventures, alongside backing from UnternehmerTUM and Alchemist. The company is building an AI vision OS that delivers industry-grade inspection using as few as five labeled images.
Austria-based DaphOS, an AI-powered operational decision support platform for healthcare and public sector institutions, has raised a €5M seed round led by Venture Stars. Co-investors include YZR Capital, D11Z. Ventures, and PUSH. Founded in 2022, DaphOS helps over 2,400 organizational units forecast staffing needs, prevent resource bottlenecks, and optimize care delivery using anonymized data.
Spain-based Biorce, a biotech startup accelerating clinical trials with AI, has raised a €5M funding round led by Norrsken VC, bringing total funding to €8.5M (previously backed by YZR Capital and Mustard Seed Maze). Founded in 2022, Biorce’s AI assistant Jarvis supports CROs and pharma companies in trial design, feasibility checks, and patient recruitment. Trained on data from over 500,000 studies, Jarvis reduces protocol amendments and delays while matching patients to trials efficiently.
UK-based Inntelo AI, an AI-powered concierge platforms for hotels, has raised a £500k pre-seed round led by Haatch and the British Business Bank, with participation from Look AI Ventures and angels from Trip.com and DocuSign. Founded in 2024, Inntelo AI eliminates the need for guest apps by automating communication via WhatsApp and phone. Its conversational and agentic AI handles guest inquiries, routes tasks to departments, and enhances workflow coordination.
US/UK-based Warden AI, an AI auditing platform focused on HR tech compliance, has secured £1.1M in funding. The round was led by the founders of Onfido, with backing from Playfair. Founded in 2023, Warden AI enables enterprises to certify AI systems for fairness and regulatory compliance, including the EU AI Act and NYC Local Law 144, using proprietary datasets, benchmarks, and real-time dashboards.
Jobs
La Solive is hiring an SDR in Freelancing (Paris, France).
Ornikar is hiring a Community Manager in Apprenticeship, a Head of Brand, a Fullstack Engineer - NodeJS, among others (Paris, France).
Voize is hiring a Commercial Customer Success Manager, an Enterprise Customer Success Manager, among others (Berlin, Germany).
Prior Labs is hiring a Technical PM, a Founding Data Scientist, among others (Berlin, Germany).
Enjoy your summer folks ☀️
Onward & upward!