I wrote a book with my friend Eric Villines about everything you need to know about getting funded. It dropped in 2020 - not an ideal time for publishing - but it’s still going strong and it’s now 50% on Audiobooks.com.

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Here’s the official description. It would be great if you told me what you thought:

From a TechCrunch founder and award-winning strategist comes the most comprehensive guide to the newest fundraising options for today's entrepreneurs.

Fundraising for startups has changed dramatically in the past decade. There was a time when VCs were rock stars and a founder with a big idea and a little drive could raise a few hundred thousand dollars to build a business. But those days are gone. In the aftermath of the Great Recession and a massive drop in tech investments, it's become harder and harder for founders to raise money. The good news? Today's entrepreneurs have more options than ever before—with greater opportunities to get the ball rolling, get investors excited, and Get Funded!

A comprehensive, cutting-edge guide from tech journalist and entrepreneur John Biggs and communication strategist Eric Villines, Get Funded! will enable you to: create a solid business plan and a powerful story that investors respond to; explore a wide range of funding options—and find the ones that are right for you; understand valuation and dilution; plan, prepare, and deliver the perfect pitch; raise money through grants, micro-loans, micro-donations, and crowdfunding; and take advantage of the latest online resources and financial tools.

On this week’s episode of the Startup Show, I sat down with Jayashree Dutta—Jaya for short—the co-founder and CEO of Atronous AI. Jaya’s background in retail tech runs deep, with previous stints leading data teams at Walmart and The RealReal. Now she’s building something designed to shake up how product catalogs get created in e-commerce.

The problem? Only a small percentage of products ever make it online. Most suppliers and retailers are stuck wrangling with bad or incomplete data. That leaves a huge opportunity—the long tail of inventory—uncaptured.

Atronous AI tackles this by using what Jaya calls “agentic orchestration.” Instead of relying on offshore catalog teams or cobbling together a patchwork of content and pricing tools, Atronous automates the entire process. Their platform pulls in data, infers complex attributes, formats everything according to the quirks of different marketplaces, and gets full listings online in hours—not months.

What stood out to me is that this isn't just a better version of an old tool. They’re stitching together a deep stack of open-source and proprietary models—from image captioning and segmentation to custom transformers—all trained on real retail data. Think frying pans, beauty products, apparel—anything that needs a solid, structured listing.

Jaya says their moat isn’t just technical. It’s in how well they plug into enterprise systems—PIMs, ERPs, CRMs—and in how they’re approaching patents, attributes, and vertical-specific logic. It's also the kind of tool that big players couldbuild internally—but rarely do.

They just wrapped their pre-seed and are kicking off their seed raise via Alchemist Accelerator. If you're in enterprise AI or retail tooling, it's worth a look.

Check them out at atronous.ai.